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      Barr and Durham Made a Mockery of the Rules I Wrote

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      The recent revelations about Special Counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the Special Counsel Regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done.I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately.According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation took almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against Mr. Trump.Furthermore, the reporting suggests that the Durham inquiry suffered from internal dissent and ethical disputes as it lurched from one unsuccessful path to another, even as Americans heard a misleading narrative of its progress.But now Merrick Garland, not Mr. Barr, is the attorney general, and the regulations give him the power to require Mr. Durham to explain himself — and to discipline and fire Mr. Durham if the explanation is not adequate. Right now, there are a plethora of investigations in Washington — in addition to Mr. Durham’s, two special counsels are looking into presidential handling of classified documents, the new Republican House of Representatives has created a “weaponization” of government committee and the new House Oversight Committee is ramping up as well.At this moment, it is critical for Mr. Garland to use the supervisory powers under the Special Counsel Regulations that govern Mr. Durham to remind Americans of what actual justice, and independent investigations and decision making, look like.The special counsel regulations say that a special counsel must have “a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” and that, once appointed, the counsel “shall not be subject to the day-to-day supervision” of the attorney general or any other Justice Department official.The point of the regulations was to create a strong degree of independence, especially in highly fraught political investigations where the attorney general’s status as a presidential appointee might cause the public to question the appearance of partiality. The appointment of Robert Hur, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, to examine President Biden’s handling of classified documents is a perfect illustration. The special counsel is supposed to be someone who cannot be reasonably accused of laundering an attorney general’s dirty work.In light of the new reporting, it is hard to view Mr. Durham as anything else. Indeed, no one involved in developing these regulations thought that a prosecutor who has regular scotch-sipping sessions with the attorney general would ever be remotely fit for the job. Yet that was the relationship reportedly developed by Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr, who jetted off to Italy as a team, where they learned of a lead about President Trump and potential criminal acts. Mr. Barr gave that investigation, too, to Mr. Durham, where it appears to have died.The regulations were set up to avoid a headless fourth branch of government, and so gave the attorney general the power to discipline or fire a special counsel. The Justice Department inspector general, too, should immediately begin an investigation, as members of Congress have recently requested.The regulations also require Mr. Durham to write a final report outlining his actions. Mr. Garland should call for that report immediately, and if Mr. Durham claims he has some ongoing work to do, he should be told to submit an interim report for Mr. Garland.That report should go into detail about the Italy-focused investigation of Mr. Trump and what the investigators found. And Mr. Garland should scrutinize that report closely, because it certainly appears that we can’t trust Mr. Durham’s prosecutorial judgment. Mr. Barr has said that the Italian tip “was not directly about Trump” and that it “turned out to be a complete nonissue,” but given his and Mr. Durham’s many failures and obfuscations, there is a need for more than Mr. Barr’s word.Remember, Mr. Durham tried to prosecute Michael Sussmann, a former lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but the jury acquitted him. He then tried to prosecute Igor Danchenko about the Steele Dossier, but that prosecution led to an acquittal, too.As many lawyers will tell you, a federal prosecutor almost has to go out of his way to be 0-2 in federal jury trials. Mr. Durham managed to do it. (His only measly conviction was a minor plea for a low-level F.B.I. lawyer.) Still, Mr. Durham’s failures in court do not show a violation of the special counsel regulations. They just show bad judgment.Attorney General William Barr with Donald Trump in front of the Capitol building in 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Garland knows all this, so he should demand a report — though this would not be the sort of report that should be automatically made public. It may very well be that the investigation into Mr. Trump off the Italian lead fizzled because there was nothing to the allegations. If so, Mr. Garland can say that he is refusing to make the report public, but that he has looked into the matter and is satisfied by Mr. Durham’s resolution of it.That, too, is something the special counsel regulations contemplated — they were drafted after the Starr Report and its gratuitous tarnishing of individuals, and so they made clear the special counsel’s report need not be public. (More recently, James Comey tarnished Hillary Clinton in a similar way, underscoring the need for the Justice Department to speak through indictments, not public attacks.)Unfortunately, Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr allowed a misleading narrative to gain traction in public. When news organizations began to report in October 2019 that Mr. Durham’s investigation had morphed from an administrative inquiry into a criminal investigation, creating the misimpression that there might have been criminal wrongdoing by those involved in the Russia investigation, neither man corrected the narrative, even though the real investigation involved Mr. Trump.The Trump administration dealt an awful blow to the notion of a fair investigation. Mr. Trump’s playbook was to relentlessly attack the investigators. Yet foundational to our government is the notion that no one is above the law.Assuming the reporting is accurate, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham behaved in a way that betrayed this bedrock principle. The question of who guards the guardians has plagued democracies since Juvenal. If Mr. Durham were not acting with the independence required for the position, it corrodes the rule of law and opens the door to the perception, if not the reality, of special treatment for the politically powerful.Mr. Garland has the power now to examine the accuracy of the reporting and to take the corrective action necessary to ensure that no adverse precedent is set for future investigations into high-level wrongdoing.Neal K. Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a co-author, with Sam Koppelman, of “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.” He was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration.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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      Joe Biden Is Ready to Go

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      WASHINGTON — Everyone is frantically hunting for clues about whether Joe Biden will run again.His State of the Union speech was dissected for intimations. When he kept using the phrase “finish the job,” was that a hint?Where is Daniel Craig’s “Knives Out” detective when we need him?Asked about his decision in a Telemundo interview on Thursday, the 80-year-old president replied, “I’m just not ready to make it.”When my colleagues Frank Bruni and Michelle Goldberg, and I write “Hey, Joe, Don’t Give It a Go” columns suggesting that he bow out on top, is the president listening and pondering what we say?Nah. Guess what, political sleuths? It’s not really a Scooby-Doo mystery. No need to consult a soothsayer and tremble on the edge of your seats.Joe Biden is running. And that’s no malarkey.He has no intention of following Lear’s lead, “to shake all cares and business from our age/Conferring them on younger strengths, while we/Unburdened crawl toward death.”In his vertiginous career, Biden has felt the sensation of power slipping away, and he didn’t like it. Let Lear howl at the moon; Joe wants to strut in the sun (with his shades).I’ve spent my career studying Biden and other pols who are grasping for power, clinging to power, brandishing power and squandering power. And I can tell you this: Nobody likes to give up power. Donald Trump is the grotesque example: trying to overturn the government to keep his grip on it.Congress and the Supreme Court are replete with candidates for early-bird dinners. Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a huge mistake by staying on the court until the end, bequeathing us Amy Coney Barrett and a reversal of Roe. Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley, both 89, are still in the Senate.Biden thought he could be president from the moment he hit town as a new senator in 1973. People debate now whether he’s too old to be president; but back then, he was too young to be a senator. He was 29 when he was elected, turning 30 and reaching eligibility shortly after the election.The handsome young senator told Washingtonian magazine in 1974 that he understood why he was “a hot commodity”: his youth and his “tragic fate” — his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash shortly after his election. The magazine compared him to “Robert Redford’s Great Gatsby in natty pinstriped suits.”“I know I can be a good president,” he said, adding, “My family still expects me to be there one of these days.”The neophyte was very self-confident, while blithely conceding his flaws. “I’m not the kind of guy everyone likes,” he said. “My personality either grabs you or it doesn’t.”His quest was a bumpy one. I wrote the stories about cribbing from Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy that helped knock Biden out of the 1988 race. I also wrote about his well-meaning but ham-handed performance during the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings.But just when it seemed as though Biden’s best days were behind him, Barack Obama chose him for a running mate, seeking foreign policy experience. And in a well-meaning but clumsy move that actually turned out to be brilliant, Vice President Biden managed to bring President Obama and most of the country along to the idea of embracing gay marriage.Obama shoved Biden aside for Hillary, which turned out to be a huge mistake that resulted in the execrable Trump. After being treated dismissively by the Obama team, Biden, Rocky-like, finally won the presidency, nearly half a century after he first talked about it.After that slog, he’s not about to kiss it away because some polls and pundits fret about his age.He thinks he’s doing great. There’s a spring in his step because he feels that he has outwitted the dimwitted Republicans. On Tuesday night, he made them look rude — with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fur flying — and put them on the defensive. Republicans spent the whole week trying to get out from under his criticism that they always want to cut Social Security. But it’s a hard criticism to rebut because Republicans always want to cut Social Security.Biden has gone bigger than Obama, who was supposed to be the transformational one. The president has pushed big job-creating bills and gone after Big Pharma and big corporations. (He has also gone smaller with some crowd-pleasers, like promising to get rid of junk fees on hotel bills.) Unlike Obama, who had an aversion to selling his policies, this guy loves a good groundbreaking.In the State of the Union, the president began trying to reconnect his party to its blue-collar roots. Hillary thought she could win in 2016 with the new Democratic coalition of minorities, the elite and students. She refused to give a speech at Notre Dame and never bothered to go to Wisconsin.Wisconsin was Biden’s first stop Wednesday in his post-State of the Union blitz. He remains unapologetically Scranton Joe.So, we know, Joe. You’re in the race.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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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Return to Center Stage. Their Own.

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      After going dark during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative is back.After a six-year hiatus, the Clinton Global Initiative returned to New York City this week, bringing together leaders from the worlds of nonprofit, government and business, with a few celebrities sprinkled in for good measure. It has been an eventful few years since they last gathered in 2016.“The challenges we face are steep, but they pretty much have been steep for a long time now,” former President Bill Clinton said in his opening remarks at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan on Monday. “And CGI is always and has always been about what we can do and not what we can’t do.”The Clinton Global Initiative began in 2005 and quickly became something akin to a Davos-on-the-Hudson event, but one with a greater focus on philanthropy, nonprofits and corporate do-gooding. The way it differed from most conferences is that it required participants to make commitments, sometimes in dollars, other times in targets — such as for creating jobs or delivering clean water.Up to the hiatus in 2016, attendees announced more than 3,700 commitments, which by the organization’s own tally had helped more than 435 million people in over 180 countries.In many ways the early days were the high-water mark of the philanthrocapitalism era, when trust in the wealthy and celebrities to save the world ran high. In turn, many significant organizations modeled themselves after the Clintons’ endeavor.Then in 2016, in the heat of the general election campaign fight between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, with reporters asking a lot of questions about the foundation and its donors, Mr. Clinton announced that the 2016 meeting would be the final version of the initiative.Now, as world leaders gathered in New York for the first fully in-person United Nations General Assembly in three years, the goal is to recapture that old Clinton magic, and to see if there is still room in a field of thought-leading, pledge-making symposia crowding the city this week.Advisers to Mr. Clinton said that in the years since, he had longed to restart the event. “He would tell me regularly when we were just talking before a board meeting, ‘I was just out last night and someone was saying when are you going to start CGI again?’” said Robert Harrison, former chief executive of the Clinton Global Initiative, from 2007 to 2016, and a board member of the Clinton Foundation.“A year ago, 10 months ago, we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s try,’” Mr. Harrison recalled.The Clintons’ return to the world stage was heralded in March with a letter from Mr. Clinton that doubled as a call to arms. With the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the challenges to democracy at home and abroad, the world needed CGI back, according to Mr. Clinton.Judging from the names at the event, many old friends and allies answered the call, including the philanthropists Laurene Powell Jobs and Melinda French Gates, Secretary Xavier Becerra of the Department of Health and Human Services, state governors, corporate chief executives, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the director-general of the World Health Organization.This year the initiative tallied 144 commitments, which will result in more than 1.6 million jobs and the reduction of 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.Commitments ranged from a program to build soccer fields in underserved communities to one making bricks out of volcanic ash. Nine members committed to providing humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Mr. Clinton interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine via videoconference on Tuesday, with Mr. Zelensky in his trademark form-fitting T-shirt.From left, the CNN host Fareed Zakaria with Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados; the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; and the chef José Andrés at the Clinton Global Initiative event on Monday.Julia Nikhinson/Associated PressMilling in the halls at the event, Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and longtime denizen of Clinton world, brushed past, smartphone pressed to his face. Petra Nemcova, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model who survived the deadly 2004 tsunami in Thailand and now works in philanthropy, chatted with a Ukrainian official by the coffee urns, where the milk was all plant-based — soy, oat, almond — in a nod to Mr. Clinton’s veganism as well as the climate impact of cows. The meals were all plant-based, too.The mood between sessions was like that at a college reunion, with people embracing after years apart and speaking warmly and with nostalgia — convivial but not, perhaps, the most forward looking.“Why did they leave in the first place?” said Paloma Raggo, a philanthropy expert and professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa. “It wasn’t the right political climate for them to be at the forefront of things.”The Clintons shut down the initiative because of scrutiny during the campaign. And they kept it on ice for six years for a variety of reasons. First there was the recovery from Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in the presidential election. Then the #MeToo movement brought a harsh spotlight on past Clinton ties to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Later, people close to Bill and Hillary say, Covid protocols kept them away from large crowds.Still, to critical observers, the timing does not seem clear. “Is it because now there are issues that make it necessary, them coming here, or is it because at this point the political consequences or bad juju has dissolved a bit and they reappeared?” Ms. Raggo asked.Some former advisers say the Clinton Global Initiative’s moment has passed and the event should not be revived. Memberships, which cost $15,000 and $20,000 in past years, were just $5,000 for this year’s event, according to Mr. Harrison, the former chief executive. In addition to Mr. Clinton’s desire to return to the spotlight, some see the former first daughter as a motivating force.Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Clinton this month debuted a documentary series on AppleTV+ called “Gutsy,” in which mother and daughter talk to famous women and activists. Mrs. Clinton, who has also written or co-written four books, two with Chelsea, since the 2016 election, took the stage Monday afternoon to a standing ovation.“I don’t know about you, but when people ask me how I am these days, I often say: ‘Well, personally I’m great. I’m just worried about everything,’” Mrs. Clinton told the crowd.Shortly thereafter, on the same stage, Ms. French Gates announced a $50 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund scholarships at a health sciences university in Rwanda in the name of Dr. Paul Farmer, who died unexpectedly in February.“Someone else has stepped up who also appreciates, respects and understands the value of this work,” Mrs. Clinton then said. “One of Paul’s friend’s here in our CGI community has just told us about making a gift of $10 million more dollars.”The foundation started in 1997 as the charitable vehicle to pay for the design and construction of Mr. Clinton’s presidential library. It had its share of controversy pretty quickly, with the Marc Rich pardon and donations an issue as he left the White House. In 2002, the Clintons started the Clinton H.I.V./AIDS Initiative, with the goal of saving the lives of millions of people around the world living with the disease. Today it continues as the Clinton Health Access Initiative, though it spun off from the foundation in 2010.When the Clinton Global Initiative debuted in 2005, George W. Bush was president. Hillary Clinton was a New York senator and a likely presidential contender herself. Bill Clinton was a recent two-term president. Chelsea seemed poised to follow in her parents’ footsteps.Chelsea Clinton with her parents at the conference.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe first version of the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2005, was timed to the 60th anniversary of the United Nations. The currency of the initiative was the “commitment.” Attendees were encouraged to make commitments that were then tallied at $2.5 billion in pledges from 300 people, to a variety of causes including global poverty, conflict resolution and climate change.The September traffic jam of motorcades zipping between events during the United Nations General Assembly were the moment to extract these pledges.“I think CGI was the rocket fuel on all of this,” said John Prendergast, co-founder of the Sentry, who has appeared on several panels with heads of state there over the years. “He has this real nose for pulling these various communities together,” he said of Mr. Clinton.Now there are numerous other events competing for attention and attendance, including the Concordia Summit and the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers event.Donna Shalala, the former health and human services secretary and former president of the Clinton Foundation, said in an interview that they had ended the Clinton Global Initiative to avoid any potential conflict of interest with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.“It was painful,” she said. “Let me assure you the president loves CGI and the rest of us did. And the foundation was defined by CGI, it’s what everyone knew us for.”When the election ended and Mrs. Clinton lost, it was not a simple matter of cranking up the annual meeting again.“This is not just hitting pause on a song; it’s like shutting down a nuclear reactor, you don’t just keep flipping the switch on and off,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “Once you turn it off, there’s an energy and a ramp-up that’s involved and time consuming.”Even after a dormant period for the initiative, the foundation’s signature event, tax filings show that the foundation had net assets of over $300 million as of the 2020 tax year, the most recent available.For nonprofits, CGI can be a powerful place to raise funds and make connections.Gary White, the chief executive and a co-founder of Water.org, said he had met some of his most important donors at CGI, including the PepsiCo Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation and the Ikea Foundation.“Where the rubber meets the road is at CGI, where they are there to make commitments not just as a side show,” Mr. White said.He also met the actor Matt Damon at CGI, in 2008, when his organization was called Water Partners. Mr. Damon had his own group, known as H2O Africa. The next year they announced that they had merged their groups. This year, they made a commitment to deliver clean water and sanitation to 100 million people in need, a goal the group says it is nearly halfway to meeting.Mr. Clinton’s opening remarks at the conference came out a little quiet, a hint raspier than usual, a tiny bit slow.He made a reference to “someone who had no dog in the hunt,” and then quipped, “You must forgive me if I sometimes slip off into my colloquial past.” The audience laughed, relief palpable, as the old charm emerged.Toward the end of his first panel, Mr. Clinton told the participants, “I wish I could keep you here the rest of the day.”After that panel, Mr. Clinton leaned down from the stage to grasp hands, smile, pose for photographs and talk to the crowd. He beamed, campaign-trail muscle memory seeming to kick in. As the Secret Service tried to move him along, one had the distinct impression that the former president never wanted to leave the stage. More

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      Britain 3, America 0

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      Perhaps you didn’t notice, but back in November, Kamala Harris made history by becoming the first woman to hold presidential power.OK, it was only for an hour and a half. But still.Joe Biden temporarily — very temporarily — transferred executive power to his vice president when he was preparing for a colonoscopy. That involved being under anesthesia, and you do not want the country being run by a guy whose brain is asleep, even if we experienced four years of that in the very recent past.But really, people. This should at least be a reminder of how far we haven’t come. Our country is 246 years old, and that translates into something like 2,160,000 hours. One and a half of which have been under a woman’s direction.It’s a little embarrassing when we hear the news from London that Liz Truss just became the new prime minister. She’s the third woman chosen to run the government in Britain. In the United States the number is:A. One — Hillary really won! Really, she won!B. Two — I am counting that day with Kamala Harris, plus I think we could throw in that time in Salem when the head witches took over.C. Gee, guess we’re still waiting.The country doesn’t even seem all that comfortable with women governors. Right now, only nine of our states are headed by a female executive, and four of the women first stepped into the job after the guy who was elected resigned, for reasons ranging from an ambassadorship to, well, Andrew Cuomo.We’re not doing terrific on the legislative side, either: A quarter of our senators are women, and about 28 percent of the members of the House are. After the midterms that could get worse. “It looks like under most likely scenarios we’ll have fewer women in the House and Senate next year,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who’s been a hurricane of fund-raising action for Democratic candidates, told me.Still, American voters find it much easier to imagine a female member of Congress than a female chief executive. “The stereotypes about women’s leadership are more in line with legislatures,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women in Politics. The problem, Walsh suggested, is that women are seen as good at getting along with other people but not necessarily at running things.In Britain, where the prime minister is typically the leader of the majority party, the getting-along part is perhaps more valued. The two previous women in the job, like Truss, were Tories: Margaret Thatcher for 11 years, beginning in 1979, and Theresa May, who led the government from 2016 to 2019.Thatcher was known as “the Iron Lady” and remembered, among other things, for the conflict in the Falkland Islands, a lesson to all other heads of state that the best possible way to win a war is in less than 10 weeks.We do not dwell on May’s regime much, but it did include a campaign against illegal immigrants with ads warning them to “go home or face arrest” and an image of handcuffs.She also once wore a T-shirt that read, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Hmmm.Of course, nobody wants to see just any woman running the United States. But there are plenty of female politicians with just as much leadership potential as any man. And the fight for equality has to go on until they have an equal shot at the presidency.Breathe deep and let’s see what’s happened in our history so far. And ignore the fact that there are chapters in even the most stirring story that aren’t inspiring. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas was one of the first American women to be elected governor — in 1924 after her husband was impeached. She went on to make her mark by pardoning an average of 100 criminals a month during her first term, in what appeared to be a freedom-for-a-fee system.OK, back to the plus side: How about Margaret Chase Smith, who valiantly stood up to the crazed red-baiting of Joe McCarthy in the Senate when all her colleagues were quivering under their desks? In 1964 Smith held the very reasonable opinion that she’d make a better president than the likely Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. She also thought it was time to “break the barrier against women being seriously considered for the presidency.”Yeah, that was 58 years ago. Still waiting.Smith’s battle wasn’t a real test of how well a woman candidate could do, unless you presume said candidate could overcome minimal campaign funds, along with an unfortunate tendency to stress her recipe for blueberry muffins. But she’s definitely someone you’d like to think of as leading the way.And Hillary Clinton, who got the most votes in 2016, but was thwarted by our, um, unique Electoral College system, which presumes that every 193,000 people in Wyoming deserve the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.Gillibrand, who once made a brief try for the presidential nomination herself, is confident she’s going to see a woman in the White House during her lifetime. “There’d better be — I’m hoping in the next 10 years.”Me, too.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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      2016 Campaign Looms Large as Justice Dept. Pursues Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      Top officials at the department and the F.B.I. appear intent on avoiding any errors that could taint the current investigation or provide ammunition for a backlash.As the Justice Department investigation into the attack on the Capitol grinds ever closer to former President Donald J. Trump, it has prompted persistent — and cautionary — reminders of the backlash caused by inquiries into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is intent on avoiding even the slightest errors, which could taint the current investigation, provide Mr. Trump’s defenders with reasons to claim the inquiry was driven by animus, or undo his effort to rehabilitate the department’s reputation after the political warfare of the Trump years.Mr. Garland never seriously considered focusing on Mr. Trump from the outset, as investigators had done earlier with Mr. Trump and with Mrs. Clinton during her email investigation, people close to him say.As a result, his investigators have taken a more methodical approach, carefully climbing up the chain of personnel behind the 2020 plan to name fake slates of Trump electors in battleground states that had been won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.That has now led them to Mr. Trump and his innermost circle: Justice Department lawyers are questioning witnesses directly about the actions of Mr. Trump and top advisers like his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, appears to be proceeding with caution in hopes of armoring the bureau against future attacks by making sure his agents operate by the book. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAs prosecutors delve deeper into Mr. Trump’s orbit, the former president and his allies in Congress will almost certainly accuse the Justice Department and F.B.I. of a politically motivated witch hunt.The template for those attacks, as Mr. Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, well know, was “Crossfire Hurricane,” the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which Mr. Trump continues to dismiss as a partisan hoax.The mistakes and decisions from that period, in part, led to increased layers of oversight, including a major policy change at the Justice Department. If a decision were made to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump after he announced his intention to run in the 2024 election, as he suggests he might do, the department’s leaders would have to sign off on any inquiry under an internal rule established by Attorney General William P. Barr and endorsed by Mr. Garland.“Attorney General Garland and those investigating the high-level efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are acutely aware of how any misstep, whether by the F.B.I. or prosecutors, will be amplified and used for political purposes,” said Mary B. McCord, a top Justice Department official during the Obama administration. “I expect there are added layers of review and scrutiny of every investigative step.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Ginni Thomas Has a Lot of Explaining to Do

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      Again and again, during the years that Donald Trump was in the White House, liberals would ask themselves a single question: “Can you imagine if Barack Obama had done this?”“This,” of course, was any one of the antics or misdeeds that marked Trump’s time in office: the lies, the insults, the cruelty and the criminality. Imagine if Obama had gone out of his way to excuse the equivalent of a white supremacist mob; imagine if Obama had gone to the site of a natural disaster and tossed out paper towels like so many footballs; imagine if he had railed against “shithole countries” or tried to pressure a foreign leader into turning over information to undermine his political opponents.Imagine what would have happened if Barack Obama had plotted to subvert and overturn a presidential election that he had lost.Republicans would have lost their minds. Having whipped themselves into a lather over fake scandals and manufactured controversies during the actual Obama administration, they would have exploded into paroxysms of partisan rage over any one of these misdeeds. The Benghazi hearings would have looked like a sober-minded investigation compared with what Republicans would have unleashed if the shoe had been on the other foot.The point of this mental exercise, for liberals, was to highlight the hypocrisy of the Republican Party under Trump. Tucked into this attempt to condemn Republican behavior, however, is an important observation about the value of political theater. All this conservative hysteria did not defeat Barack Obama at the ballot box, but it may have helped to put his party at a disadvantage.The main effect of these years of Republican scandal mongering was to produce a cloud of suspicion and mistrust that helped to undermine Obama’s preferred successor as president, as well as to shield Trump, as the 2016 Republican nominee, from the kind of scrutiny that might have made him more vulnerable.Democrats do not need to mimic Republican behavior in all of its deranged glory, but they would do well to heed the lesson that for many voters, where there is smoke, there must be fire.It is with this knowledge in mind that Democrats in Washington should do something about Ginni Thomas, who has just been asked to testify before the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. The reason is straightforward. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, worked with allies of Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Thomas quickly let it be known that she was looking “forward to talking to” the committee and couldn’t wait “to clear up misconceptions.”)Earlier this year, we learned that Thomas exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in the weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. We also learned, last month, that she urged Arizona Republicans to discard the results of the election and choose a “clean slate of Electors” for Trump.And we’ve learned this week from the Jan. 6 committee that Thomas also sent messages directly to John Eastman, the conservative lawyer (and former law clerk for Justice Thomas) who essentially devised the plan to try to overturn the 2020 presidential results.Eastman spoke at the “stop the steal” rally before the attack and even requested a pardon by way of Rudy Giuliani for his activities leading up to the insurrection: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”“Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known,” The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Eastman, for his part, claimed to have known of a “heated” dispute among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the 2020 election. “So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” he is said to have written in an email to another lawyer. (On Thursday, Eastman posted a rebuttal on Substack asserting that he’d heard about the “heated fight” from news reports and that he could “categorically confirm that at no time did I discuss with Mrs. Thomas or Justice Thomas any matters pending or likely to come before the Court.”)But if the first revelation, of Thomas’s correspondence with Meadows, was shocking, then these revelations of Thomas’s contact with Eastman are explosive. And it raises key questions, not just about what Ginni Thomas knew, but about what Clarence Thomas knew as well. How, exactly, did Eastman know of tensions on the court? And why did he predict to Greg Jacobs, chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, that the Supreme Court would rule 7-2 in support of his legal theory about the Electoral College certification process before conceding that in fact that might not be the case?So while the committee is rightly seeking testimony from Ginni Thomas, Democrats should say something too. They shouldn’t just say something, they should scream something.Not only did Ginni Thomas try to make herself a part of the effort to overthrow the government, but Justice Thomas was the only member of the court to vote in favor of Donald Trump’s attempt to shield his communications from congressional investigators, communications that would have included the messages between Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas.There is something suspect happening with the Supreme Court, and other constitutional officers have every right to criticize it. Democratic leaders in Congress should begin an investigation into Ginni Thomas’s activities and announce that they intend to speak to her husband as well. President Biden should tell the press that he supports that investigation and hopes to see answers. Rank-and-file Democrats should make a stink about potential corruption on the court whenever they have the opportunity. Impeachment should be on the table.This probably won’t win votes. It could, however, capture the attention of the media and even put Republicans on the defensive. It is true that politics are unpredictable and that there’s no way to say exactly how a given choice will play out in the real world. But if the much maligned (and politically successful) investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails are any indication, real pressure might turn additional revelations into genuine liabilities for the Republican Party.The easiest thing for Democrats to do, of course, is nothing — to steer away from open conflict and leave the controversy (and the questions) to the select committee. But if Democrats choose instead to act like a political party should, they would do well to remember that if the tables were turned, their opponents would not hesitate to use every argument, and every tool, at their disposal.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