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      Hunter Biden Sought State Department Help for Burisma

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      After President Biden dropped his re-election bid, his administration released records showing that while he was vice president, his son solicited U.S. government assistance.Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.Embassy officials appear to have been uneasy with the request from the son of the sitting vice president on behalf of a foreign company.“I want to be careful about promising too much,” wrote a Commerce Department official based in the U.S. Embassy in Rome who was tasked with responding.“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,” the official wrote. Those acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Biden, said his client “asked various people,” including the U.S. ambassador to Italy at the time, John R. Phillips, whether they could arrange an introduction between Burisma and the president of the Tuscany region of Italy, where Burisma was pursuing a geothermal project.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Pro-Trump County Clerk Is Found Guilty of Tampering With Voting Machines

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      Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was convicted on Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.After nearly five hours of deliberations, a jury in Grand Junction found Ms. Peters guilty of seven criminal charges connected to her efforts to breach a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The jury determined that Ms. Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Mr. Trump’s defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Ms. Peters is set to be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face multiple years in prison.The conviction of Ms. Peters, who has become a celebrity in the world of those who have denied that Mr. Trump lost the last presidential election, is the first time that prosecutors have managed to hold a local election official accountable for a security breach of a voting machine used in 2020. It also suggests the extent to which allies of Mr. Trump, including those in public office, went to discredit his loss.After 2020, pro-Trump activists in cities across the country sought to gain access to Dominion voting machines, hoping to prove that they had been used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. All of those efforts failed, and local officials have in many cases opened investigations.More recently, concerns have been raised that officials loyal to Mr. Trump could seek to tamper with the results of the 2024 election. Other allies of the former president have sought to give local election officials discretionary power over the certification of elections, raising fears that partisan officials could short-circuit the certification process.Almost from the start, the tale of Ms. Peters, 68, read like a political thriller, with allegations that she had secretly hatched plans to employ computer hackers to obtain data from voting machines, and had used disguises and false identities in an effort that allowed election deniers to infiltrate the office in Mesa County that was responsible for tallying official vote counts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Says He Dropped Out to Avoid Becoming a ‘Distraction’ for Democrats

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      President Biden said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he had abandoned his bid for a second term because he did not want to create “a real distraction” for Democrats, but he expressed no second thoughts about whether he could still do the job, despite concerns about his age and capacity.In his first interview since ending his re-election campaign on July 21, Mr. Biden said that he had “no serious problem” with his health, but added that the highest priority had to be defeating former President Donald J. Trump. “We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he told Robert Costa on “CBS Sunday Morning.”The president attributed his decision to step aside to pressure from his own party but did not offer new details about the dramatic days leading up to his stunning announcement. “A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races,” he said. “And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing me about, Why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”He said that he initially intended to be a bridge to the next generation in running for president in 2020. “When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” he said. “I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”Even though he would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won again, Mr. Biden suggested that he had originally resolved to seek re-election because he saw Mr. Trump as a singular threat who had to be stopped. He cited the former president’s support from white supremacists and referred to the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that he has said inspired him to run in 2020.“Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved, they wore hoods so they’re not identified,” Mr. Biden said. “Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Made Trump Bigger. Harris Makes Him Smaller.

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      Kamala Harris has a very different theory of this election than Joe Biden did.In 2020, and then again in 2024, Biden ceded the battle for attention to Donald Trump. Whether as a matter of strategy or as a result of Biden’s own limitations, Biden adopted a low-key campaigning style, letting Trump dominate news cycle after news cycle. Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump, and Joe Biden wanted the election to be about Donald Trump. On that much, they agreed.In 2020, when Trump was the unpopular incumbent, that strategy worked for Biden. In 2024, when Biden was the unpopular incumbent, it was failing him. It was failing in part because Biden no longer had the communication skills to foreground Trump’s sins and malignancies. It was failing in part because some voters had grown nostalgic for the Trump-era economy. It was failing in part because Biden’s age and stumbles kept turning attention back to Biden and his fitness for office, rather than keeping it on Trump and Trump’s fitness for office.Then came the debate, and Biden’s decision to step aside, and Harris’s ascent as the Democratic nominee. Harris has been able to do what Biden could or would not: fight — and win — the battle for attention. She had help, to be sure. Online meme-makers who found viral gold in an anecdote about coconuts. Charli XCX’s “kamala IS brat.”But much of it is strategy and talent. Harris holds the camera like no politician since Barack Obama. And while Harris’s campaign is largely composed of Biden’s staffers, the tenor has changed. Gone is the grave, stentorian tone of Biden’s news releases. Harris’s communications are playful, mocking, confident, even mean. Trump is “old” and “feeble”; JD Vance is “creepy.” Her campaign wants to be talked about and knows how to get people talking. It is trying to do something Democrats have treated as beneath them for years: win news cycles.Biden’s communications strategy was designed to make Trump bigger. Harris’s strategy is to make him smaller. “These guys are just weird,” Tim Walz said on “Morning Joe,” and it stuck. Walz inverted the way Democrats talked about Trump. Don’t make a strongman look stronger. Make him look weaker. Biden’s argument was that Trump might end American democracy. Walz’s argument is that Trump might ruin Thanksgiving.There are many reasons Walz was chosen as Harris’s running mate, not least the chemistry between the candidates. But he was on the shortlist in the first place because he proved himself able to do what Harris wanted done: Get people talking about the thing he wanted them talking about.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      There Is Still a Biden Scandal

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      One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is, when there was a push to force an aging president toward the exits: Then and only then we got a drip-drip-drip of fascinating inside information.For instance, we learned that Biden hadn’t held a full cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peak between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and diminish outside that six-hour window. We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors and some journalists all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate. We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.We even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence — as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.These are all interesting and pertinent facts about the man who officially leads the United States in a time of global danger — and they have not ceased to be pertinent because that president is no longer running for re-election.For a few weeks the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for re-election and practiced deception amid his obvious decline.The potential scale of that scandal has diminished now that the country is no longer being asked to entrust the Oval Office to Biden for another four years. And concerns about the capacities of Donald Trump, the aging candidate actually running for the White House, are naturally going to claim more attention now that they’re contrasted with a younger rival.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Launches Another Offensive in Gaza’s South Amid Push for Truce

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      The United States, Egypt and Qatar are trying to restart peace talks between Hamas and Israel, while Israel carries on its operation in Gaza and braces for attacks by Iran and Hezbollah.An Israeli ground assault in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday forced tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes and shelters, many for a third time or more, even as the United States and some Arab allies pressed both Israel and Hamas to restart peace talks.Between 60,000 and 70,000 people had fled by Thursday evening after the Israeli military ordered people in the city of Khan Younis to leave, according to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. More continued to flee into the night and into Friday.The Israeli military said its troops were “engaged in combat both above and below-ground” in the Khan Younis area, in an attack involving ground troops, fighter jets, helicopter gunships and paratroopers, and that the air force had struck more than 30 targets. The assault, the military said, was “part of the effort to degrade” Hamas’ capabilities “as they attempt to regroup.”Under a blazing sun, women carrying babies and blankets, men pushing carts and wheelchairs over sandy roads and young children carrying suitcases and backpacks have walked away from homes and shelters and toward unknown destinations. Some were in tears.“People are sleeping in the streets. Children and women are on the ground without mattresses,” Yafa Abu Aker, a resident of Khan Younis and an independent journalist, told The New York Times in a text message.“Death is better,” an older woman said on Thursday, in video from the Reuters news agency. “We’re fed up. We’ve already died. We’re dead.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Has a Big Campaign Launch — and Big Tests Ahead

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      Fresh challenges in the offing could determine how long the vice president’s honeymoon will last.If you are Vice President Kamala Harris, another Democrat or any other person who happens to want Harris to become president, the last two weeks and five days have probably felt like a dream.There is a tougher reality for Harris, though, belied by the euphoric haze.The contest between Harris and former President Donald Trump remains remarkably close, and she is tied with him in must-win states like Wisconsin and Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling averages. Trump’s allies are sharpening their attacks. And in a candidacy measured in days not months, she has yet to face the scrutiny of an interview or release a detailed vision for her potential presidency.Every presidential campaign is a series of tests. Can you excite voters? Can you raise money? For Harris, the answer to both of those questions so far is yes. Her party coalesced around her instantly. She has smashed fund-raising records and held overflowing rallies, and she seems to be tugging key swing states her way.But as Harris wraps up a battleground campaign tour with her brand-new running mate this weekend and turns her attention toward the Democratic National Convention this month, fresh challenges are in the offing. And the short campaign leaves a candidate who is still introducing herself to voters with little time for do-overs.“She will be tested,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, said. “She’ll be tested by the Trump campaign. She’ll be tested by the press, and just by everyday events.”That may be why Harris has been careful to sound a note of caution to supporters who might prefer to luxuriate in the optimism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Trump no puede superar que Biden ya no es su rival

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      En una conferencia de prensa en Florida, Trump dijo que “la presidencia le fue arrebatada a Joe Biden” por un grupo de demócratas que incluye a Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi y Kamala Harris.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Por lo que cuenta el expresidente Donald Trump, acaba de quedar con el corazón roto por todo lo que le ha pasado al pobre presidente Joe Biden estas últimas semanas.“Le quitaron la presidencia a Joe Biden”, dijo Trump en una conferencia de prensa en Mar-a-Lago, su club privado y residencia en Palm Beach, Florida, el jueves por la tarde. “No soy su fan, como probablemente se habrán dado cuenta. Tuvo un debate duro. Pero eso no significa que se le haga a un lado así como así”.Han pasado 18 días desde que el 46º presidente fue apartado por su propio partido, y el 45º aún no lo ha superado. Trump se angustió por Biden, contando una historia de traición perpetrada contra este por el expresidente Barack Obama, la expresidenta de la Cámara de Representantes Nancy Pelosi y, sobre todo, la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris.Recordó cómo Harris había atacado a Biden en un debate de las primarias demócratas en 2019: “Ella fue despreciable al llamarlo racista y el bus escolar y todas esas distintas cosas”. Trump dijo que Biden había cometido un grave error al elegirla como su compañera de fórmula.“Por alguna razón, y sé que él lo lamenta —ustedes también—, la eligió a ella”, dijo Trump. “Y ella también se puso en contra de él. Ella estaba trabajando con la gente que lo quería fuera”. (Tras 27 minutos de abandonar la carrera, Biden apoyó la candidatura de Harris a la presidencia).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More