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    New Questions on How a Key Agency Shared Inflation Data

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    A government economist had regular contact with “super users” in finance, records show, at a time when such information keenly interests investors.The Bureau of Labor Statistics shared more information about inflation with Wall Street “super users” than previously disclosed, emails from the agency show. The revelation is likely to prompt further scrutiny of the way the government shares economic data at a time when such information keenly interests investors.An economist at the agency set off a firestorm in February when he sent an email to a group of data users explaining how a methodological tweak could have contributed to an unexpected jump in housing costs in the Consumer Price Index the previous month. The email, addressed to “Super Users,” circulated rapidly around Wall Street, where every detail of inflation data can affect the bond market.At the time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the email had been an isolated “mistake” and denied that it maintained a list of users who received special access to information.But emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that the agency — or at least the economist who sent the original email, a longtime but relatively low-ranking employee — was in regular communication with data users in the finance industry, apparently including analysts at major hedge funds. And they suggest that there was a list of super users, contrary to the agency’s denials.“Would it be possible to be on the super user email list?” one user asked in mid-February.“Yes I can add you to the list,” the employee replied minutes later.A reporter’s efforts to reach the employee, whose identity the bureau confirmed, were unsuccessful.Emily Liddel, an associate commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that the agency did not maintain an official list of super users and that the employee appeared to have created the list on his own.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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      Hillary Clinton’s Emails: A Nation Struggles to Unsubscribe

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      As Donald Trump made history by becoming the first former president to face federal charges, many Republicans tried to change the subject by renewing an eight-year-old controversy.It is the topic the nation just can’t delete from its political conversation: Hillary Clinton’s emails.In the days since Donald J. Trump became the first former U.S. president to face federal charges, Republicans across the ideological spectrum — including not only Mr. Trump and his allies, but also his critics and those who see prosecutors’ evidence as damaging — have insistently brought up the eight-year-old controversy.They have peppered speeches, social media posts and television appearances with fiery condemnations of the fact that Mrs. Clinton, a figure who continues to evoke visceral reactions among the Republican base, was never charged.The two episodes are vastly different legal matters, and Mrs. Clinton was never found to have systematically or deliberately mishandled classified information. Still, Republicans have returned to the well with striking speed, mindful that little more than the word “emails” can muddy the waters, broadcast their loyalties and rile up their base.“Lock her up,” chanted a woman at last weekend’s Georgia Republican Party state convention, where Mr. Trump sought to revive the issue of Mrs. Clinton’s email use. “Hillary wasn’t indicted,” he said in a speech at the event. “She should have been. But she wasn’t indicted.”Campaigning in North Carolina, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida bashed Mrs. Clinton’s email practices while being far more circumspect in alluding to Mr. Trump, his top rival for the Republican nomination.Even former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has made criticizing Mr. Trump a central theme of his presidential campaign, said on CNN recently that the Justice Department “is at fault for not charging Hillary Clinton,” while casting the facts laid out against Mr. Trump as “damning.”“The perception is that she was treated differently,” Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor, a 2024 presidential candidate and Trump critic, said in an interview on Monday. “Perception can become a reality very quickly.”Mr. Hutchinson, once a chief Clinton antagonist from former President Bill Clinton’s home state — he helped guide impeachment proceedings against Mr. Clinton — said he saw distinctions between Mrs. Clinton’s email episode and the charges Trump faced. But, he added, “If the voters say it’s relevant, it becomes relevant politically.”Taken together, the moment offers a vivid reminder of the ways the ghosts of the 2016 campaign continue to shape and scar American politics.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, campaigning in North Carolina, criticized Mrs. Clinton’s email practices.Kate Medley for The New York Times“There are few politicians on the Democratic side of the aisle that raise the ire of Republicans more than Hillary Clinton,” said Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster.Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, of course, have not forgotten the email saga. After Mr. Trump’s indictment, the episode to many of them serves as a symbol of a political system and a mainstream news media often focused on the superficial at the expense of the substantive.Clinton backers now make light of what they view as comparatively flimsy and unproven accusations she faced about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. And some relish the fact that the man who crowed about “Crooked Hillary” finds himself facing a range of serious charges and the prospect of prison if he is convicted.Speaking on Monday with the hosts of the “Pod Save America” podcast at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Mrs. Clinton laughed when a host noted the tendency of some Republicans to make parallels to her emails.“When in doubt, right?” she said. “I do think it’s odd, let’s just say, to the point of being absurd, how that is their only response. You know, they refuse to read the indictment, they refuse to engage with the facts.”On Friday, Mrs. Clinton posted an edited photo of herself on Instagram wearing a black baseball hat that reads, in pink letters, “BUT HER EMAILS.” That three-word phrase has become something of a shorthand among Democrats for frustration at the grief she received for how she handled classified correspondence compared with the blowback Mr. Trump confronted for all the legal and ethical norms he busted while in office.She included a link to buy the hat for $32 on the website of her political group. (Asked about that decision, Nick Merrill, who served as a longtime spokesman for Mrs. Clinton and remains an adviser, replied, “We’re seven years past what was widely viewed as, at worst, a stupid mistake. And reminding people that a piece of merchandise exists in order to raise money to preserve our democracy is something I’m very comfortable with.”)Substantively, there are many clear differences between the episodes.A yearslong inquiry by the State Department into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server found that while it increased the risk of compromising classified information, “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”The indictment against Mr. Trump, by contrast, accuses him of not only mishandling sensitive national security documents found at his Mar-a-Lago club, but also willfully obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. He has been charged with 37 criminal counts related to issues including withholding national defense information and concealing possession of classified documents.Robert K. Kelner, a Republican lawyer and Trump critic who is a partner in the white-collar defense and investigations practice group at Covington & Burling, said Mr. Trump most likely would not have been indicted had he cooperated with the government’s requests to return classified documents he took from the White House.“There were lots of things to criticize about the way the Hillary Clinton investigation was handled — none of which, however, in any way to my mind, suggests that the case against Donald Trump is unfounded,” Mr. Kelner said.Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump, seemed to anticipate efforts to bring up Mrs. Clinton’s emails. The indictment cited five statements Mr. Trump made during his 2016 campaign about the importance of protecting classified information.“Hillary wasn’t indicted,” Donald J. Trump said in a speech in Georgia. “She should have been. But she wasn’t indicted.”Jon Cherry for The New York TimesFor veterans of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, the Republican attempt to resurface their old boss’s email server to defend Mr. Trump’s storage of boxes of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and other places would be comical had their 2016 defeat not been so painful.“The best evidence that Trump’s actions are completely indefensible is the Republican Party’s non-attempt to defend it and instead rehash seven-year-old debunked attacks on somebody who is no longer even in politics,” said Josh Schwerin, a former Clinton campaign spokesman who for years after the 2016 election had a recording of Mr. Trump saying his name as his voice mail greeting.Mr. Merrill said that if there was a single word for “particularly acute hypocrisy,” it would apply to Republicans now.For Republicans, “whether you believe she was cavalier, or you believe that she should be tried for treason for the risky position she put Americans in by sending correspondence about yoga or whatever,” he said, “Donald Trump has done the most severe possible thing. It’s not a close call with him.”Trump acolytes are now delighting at the prospect of reviving one of their favorite boogeywomen.“Republicans believe there’s been an unequal application of justice,” said former Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who as chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigated myriad Clinton episodes leading up to the 2016 election. He added, “What is it that Donald Trump did that was worse than Hillary Clinton? Nothing, nothing, nothing.”Timothy Parlatore, a criminal defense lawyer who quit the Trump legal team last month, said he did not believe that Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump or President Biden — who has cooperated with a special counsel’s investigation into his own handling of classified documents after his tenure as vice president — should have been charged for their handling of classified information.Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had four years to prosecute Mrs. Clinton and did not. Mr. Parlatore said that Mr. Trump no longer saw her as a threat — and instead called for an investigation into Mr. Biden and his son.“Here is a big difference,” Mr. Parlatore said. “The Trump administration wasn’t looking at Hillary as being a presidential candidate. The Biden administration is looking at Trump in a different way.”In Boston, Rebecca Kaiser, a political consultant, has worn her “BUT HER EMAILS” hat regularly since she received it as a gift.Sophie Park for The New York TimesFor now, the most devoted Clinton supporters are following her lead and wearing “BUT HER EMAILS” hats as a badge of honor. They appeared in recent days at dog parks, soccer tournaments and Pride events as a sort of celebration of Mr. Trump’s comeuppance.In Boston, Rebecca Kaiser, a political consultant, has worn her “BUT HER EMAILS” hat regularly since she received it as a gift the day before Mr. Trump was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in Manhattan in April.Since then, at Little League and soccer games, the supermarket, the beach and during dates with her wife, Ms. Kaiser has sported the black hat with pink letters, which she said served as a conversation starter about an election that many other Democrats would rather forget.“There are definitely people who notice the hat and very quickly avert their eyes,” Ms. Kaiser said. “There are other people who look at the hat and just roll their eyes. And honestly, I think there are a good amount of people who have no idea what it’s referencing.”Anjali Huynh More

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      Do You Think Your Newfound Popularity Has Something to Do With Politics?

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      We’re getting Senate serious, people. And it’s all about you. The candidates need you, even if your home state doesn’t have a real nail-biter. (Chuck Schumer is going to be re-elected in New York. You heard it here first.)No matter where you’ve been over the summer, I bet you spent some of your time plowing through emails from Senate hopefuls asking you for money.It can get a tad … dispiriting. You wake up and take a look at your inbox. When you see there are over 50 new messages waiting, you have to assume that a few are actually from people you know.Nah. The one titled “Dinner Plans” isn’t about date night. Catherine Cortez Masto, the senator from Nevada, wants you to know that she and her husband just finished eating, and that while he’s doing the dishes, she’s got time to share a quick fund-raising request.(Let’s at least rejoice that no male Democratic senator will dare write you saying he’s reaching out while his wife cleans up the kitchen.)Last weekend, John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, was so engrossed in the meaning of Labor Day that he announced he’d decided to celebrate by not emailing anybody on Monday. (“… and that means we need today’s fund-raising to make up the difference.”)And when Labor Day did arrive, Fetterman …A. Took the day off and spent it watching “Sopranos” reruns.B. Challenged his staff to a Wordle competition.C. Wrote “I know I said I wasn’t going to email you today, but I want to share some thoughts.”Yeah, I know you know it’s “I know….”Val Demings, who’s running for Senate in Florida, sent me way more letters in August than anyone in my family did, all about her desperate need for funds to win what sounded like a very, very, very hard-fought primary — which, it turned out, she won with 84 percent of the vote. Demings piled up more than $47 million, some of which she still has on hand for her race against Marco Rubio.This is not a bad thing. I’ll bet her primary donors won’t mind having their money used to knock off Senator Rubio, a raving foe of abortion rights who recently called the Mar-a-Lago document scandal a “storage” issue.Of course, despite her big haul, Demings is right back blowing the emergency whistle. “I’m sorry to crowd your inbox, friend,” she wrote on Wednesday, warning that her campaign was “still short of our upcoming midnight fund-raising goal.”Cynics might presume that no candidate has ever, in history, actually reached a fund-raising goal. Really, do you ever remember getting a note saying: “Thanks, guys! We’ve got all the money we need now! Give to your pet shelter.”You do have to feel some sympathy — Senate campaigns are wicked expensive. The question is whether you should respond to this barrage of email requests for donations. The downside, as you probably suspect, is that it will make you an even more popular target.But do you want to tell all these candidates that if they need money, they’d better go to the PACs and corporate sponsors? Come on.“This is right now a kind of necessary evil,” Daniel Weiner of the Brennan Center said.“It’s the choice between a couple of wealthy donors or grass-roots fund-raising.”So if you’re reading all the stories about the critical Senate races in places like Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it’s hard to tell yourself they’re none of your business. We’re talking about who controls the Senate — not to mention whether the nation will be spending another two years obsessing over the mind and mood of Joe Manchin.But it’s also hard to make a donation and keep your name from being given to — or purchased by — other campaigns. As it stands, this information is just another commodity. Sure, the Federal Election Commission could limit the sale of email lists. “But that’s going to be a bit of an uphill battle,” said Weiner, who spends a large part of his parental visits cleaning out his mother’s backed-up inbox.You can get yourself off any individual candidate’s list — there should be an “unsubscribe” option somewhere at the bottom of every plea. Or, if you’re not obsessive about keeping your inbox tidy, you can just ignore the emails and let them stack up — my husband is closing in on 85,000.I’m a deleter but also a kind of collector. Some of these campaigns do have particular … personalities.For instance, Tim Ryan, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Ohio, is a mega-mailer who appears to be in a serious funk. “This is BAD,” began one of his recent missives, along with another announcing “A HUGE setback.” And, perhaps most distressing from the readers’ side, one that promised, “This is the longest email I’ll ever send you.”Don’t over-worry, Ryan fans — he’s doing better than expected in a state that’s become very tough for his party. And remember, this is the season when candidates try to sound as desperate as possible.Anyhow, it’s a good week for getting involved. We’re coming to the big finale. Look around and see who you’d like to help. Doesn’t have to be the Senate. Although, unless you have a deep personal connection, it’s probably OK to ignore all those requests from candidates for lieutenant governor.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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      Donald Trump Wants Your Money

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      Welcome to February! Any notable January accomplishments to report, people? Well, I received 266 email messages from Donald Trump, asking for money. Gotta be a lifetime achievement award in there somewhere.“HAPPY NEW YEAR, Friend,” began one of his missives. (In this one-way correspondence, Trump always calls me Friend. The last time I saw him in person, he complained, “You’ve never been nice to me.” But apparently in fund-raisingville, we’re best pals.)“You’ve always been one of my BIGGEST supporters,” he added with grace and stupendous inaccuracy, “which is why I want YOU to be our VERY FIRST DONOR of 2022.” I got this particular message on Jan. 26, which makes it highly unlikely that the first spot was still open, although one can hope.About 60 of my Trump fund-raising emails were signed by one of his sons. Busy boy, Don Jr. He also just co-founded his own publishing imprint, which reportedly gave Dad a multimillion-dollar advance for “Our Journey Together,” a photo book for which, Junior said, our former president “wrote all the captions, including some by hand.”The profits from the book could presumably go to help defray the costs of defending Trump in the multitudinous lawsuits filed against him for everything from misusing inauguration funds to inciting the Jan. 6 riot in Washington. Of course, he’s already sitting on a cushion of about $122 million in political donations, so an immediate fall into pauperism seems unlikely.And if all else fails they’ve got Melania’s hat, which was available to a fan of historical fashion for a mere $250,000.Now some of you may have managed to avoid the Trump email list but are still being barraged by tons of requests for donations from candidates for the Senate, House, governor and so on. Feel free to read them.You’re going to want to support good people who are actually running for office. Find someone you like and send a contribution. Otherwise the folks who get elected are going to be sworn into their new jobs believing that all their success is due to the generosity of extremely rich people and lobbyists.According to my deeply unscientific research, Beto O’Rourke, the Texas gubernatorial hopeful, is one of the emailing champs on this front. And I’m sure a lot of you have heard from Nancy Pelosi, who’s collecting cash for the House Democratic team and gets points for her talent at raising alarm about fund-raising successes on the other side. (“My heart is racing, Gail. …”)This week’s award for creative nagging for money is still pending, but my current favorite is John Fetterman, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, who’s running for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey.“Gail, Today the world’s most famous groundhog and Pennsylvania hero, Punxsutawney Phil, predicted six more weeks of winter. No matter to me (I’m just gonna keep wearing shorts) but I figured you could use some good news,” he wrote.You will notice Fetterman’s team has gotten my name. And at least on my email list, he was the first to clock in with a Groundhog Day connection. I guess he wanted to remind everybody that he wore shorts when he greeted President Biden at the site of that collapsed Pennsylvania bridge. Also, of course, to tack on a tiny note suggesting a $5 donation.I got 35 emails from Fetterman in January. Points for perseverance or penalties for pestiness?Daniel Weiner of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program told me last year that he’d spent Thanksgiving listening to his relatives complain about the deluge of fund-raising emails they were getting. Now he reports that in preparing to welcome in a new year, he spent three hours in the kitchen with his mother, trying to clear out the flood of pleas she’s getting by text.(Did you know that you can donate to political campaigns via text these days? Authorized, Weiner said, by the Federal Election Commission “in one of its rare acts of doing something.”)Weiner didn’t have time to also tackle his mother’s email deluge on his visit. “But I’m sure I’ll spend Passover bent over her phone,” he sighed.By the way, all requests for money are supposed to be accompanied by a little spot you can click to discontinue the correspondence. But experts say your tormentors will just get your address back from another mailing list.“Once politicians have your name, they’re going to sell it,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who keeps track of these things.Oh well. Nobody ever said democracy came cheap.One of my favorite parts of the Trump letters is his soulful assurance that he gets up every day hoping he’ll finally be hearing from his great friend Friend, only to have his heart broken once again.“This will be the trip of a lifetime, Friend, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have there with me,” Trump wrote on Tuesday, promising a visit to Mar-a-Lago to the winner of a special donor contest. “I’ve asked to see the next list of entries TOMORROW, and I don’t want to get another list without Friend on it.”Gee, it sounds like he’s been dwelling on this day and night. Amazing he can find the time to run around the country claiming the election was stolen.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      This Election Season, Look Out for Virginia

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      We’re heading around the bend, people! Elections are just a couple of weeks away and the two biggest races in the nation are …You have no idea, right?OK, most of the voting is going to be about local government — mayors and council members and holders of even smaller offices. But there are a couple of contests for governor, in Virginia and New Jersey.It’s Virginia that’s obsessing the world. Or at least the world that’s already terrified about what’s going to happen in 2022 (Dems lose Congress?) or 2024 (Trump? Trump? Trummmpp?).The candidates are the Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor who left office after one term because Virginia is the only state in the union that makes governors do that. Versus Glenn Youngkin, a former business tycoon who’s chipped in at least $16 million of his own money.McAuliffe isn’t exactly a pauper — Virginia’s very loose filing rules show he’s worth at least $6.9 million. But he’s always been a star at raising money. He once recalled a political event he was involved in when he was 7: “Nobody got in that door unless I got 50 dollars from them. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, 35 years later I’m still making sure that they pay.″OK, not all that inspiring, but everybody knows how important money is in these off-year elections. Virginia has evolved into a Democratic state, but what if McAuliffe loses — or just squeaks in? What if the turnout is puny? Will the nation read this as a prelude to disaster for congressional candidates next year?Democrats can’t think of anything else, and if you’ve wound up on any party mailing lists — truly, it can happen to anyone — you may have been getting more letters about Terry McAuliffe than you got greetings on your last birthday. Certainly bigger presents are involved.“I’m flabbergasted, Gail … ” reads one of the many, many missives I received from him recently. “We’ve been sending you email after email about just how important this race is, but it’s October, and it’s looking like a tossup right now.”Given my profession, I have never made a contribution to a political campaign in my life, but this doesn’t seem to have any impact on McAuliffe’s expectations.One of my all-time favorite donor requests came from Ellie Warner, McAuliffe’s finance director:“Gail, I’m freaking out right now! I meant to send this email earlier … but I forgot to press send, and now, we’re even more behind on our fund-raising goal than we were before.”That is so 2021. If, God forbid, McAuliffe somehow loses the election, “I forgot to press send” is going down in modern political history.New Jersey’s race has also had its moments. Republicans are trying to beat Gov. Phil Murphy over the head with his 2019 remark that if you’re a person whose only concern is tax rates, New Jersey is “probably not your state.”Now really, this is pretty obvious. Anybody who sits down with the family in, say, Montana, and announces, “Well, we’re going to relocate in the East, and the only thing we care about is taxes,” is not under any circumstances going to discuss real estate opportunities in the Trenton area.New Jersey is diverting but Murphy is expected to win handily. And the political world won’t be all that impressed. It’s Virginia that’s mobilized a national get-out-the-money campaign.“Gail, we don’t have much time, so I’ll make this quick,” wrote the political consultant James Carville in a mass email about a “critical fund-raising deadline.”Carville, who recently referred to himself as “an email-signing slut,” has reportedly sent out over 40 pleas for donations to various campaigns in the last three months, one darkly demanding to know if the recipient wants “Democrats to lose every election from here to eternity.”Meanwhile, Donald Trump is, of course, online constantly (“Did you see my RALLY in IOWA? It was INCREDIBLE”). He is supporting Youngkin, but not with nearly the enthusiasm he’s dedicating to raising money for his own political action fund.“President Trump specifically told us he wants this one-of-a-kind HAND-SIGNED football to go to YOU, Friend,” says one missive, looking for a contribution for a chance to be in a drawing for said memento.In the Virginia race, Youngkin, whose nickname is reportedly “Yunk,” is delicately dancing around the Trump issue. It’s tricky — if you want to be a winning Republican, you have to keep his fans happy while assuring the suburban moderates that you know Joe Biden was actually elected president.McAuliffe’s job is to make voters turn out, and one main strategy is to terrify them into action. (“I thought folks would be fired up to get out the vote, but at this point, it seems like enthusiasm is at an all-time low.”)Same thing goes for money. (“You can imagine how confused I am about why people aren’t stepping up and donating. We’re blowing this one, Gail.”)Everybody’s jumping in. John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania who’s planning to run for the U.S. Senate next year, wrote suggesting that I split an early bird $10 donation between his campaign and McAuliffe’s. There’s quite a lot of this going on, but Fetterman’s campaign website is notable for including the picture of a dog on the bottom, saying: “Hi, I’m Levi Fetterman. Boop my nose to donate $1.”Indeed, if you poked Levi’s nose, a special donation box did pop up. Like I said, they’re everywhere.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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      Trump Wants Your Money. Again.

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      Donald Trump just can’t stop writing me.“Friend, Did you see my email from a few days ago?” he asked on Tuesday. It was, I believe, the sixth message I’d gotten from him since Labor Day — a.k.a. Monday. All addressed to “Friend.” Now, if Trump was really your friend, don’t you think he’d call you by your … name?Anyhow, all of these letters involve fund-raising. And great deals! Contribute any amount to Trump’s joint fund-raising committee, Save America, and “your gift will be INCREASED by 500%.”Extremely unclear where that extra cash will be coming from. Maybe a rich person who agrees to match donations, the way some do during the very, very, very much more modest fund-raising drives for places like public radio stations? Maybe a miraculous money tree?“We have a CRITICAL End-of-Month fundraising deadline coming up, and each day when I ask my team who has stepped up, they NEVER mention YOUR NAME. Why is that, Friend?” the wounded former president demanded.Once again we will note that it’d be pretty strange for your name to come up when nobody seems to really know what it is. I like to picture someone in a meeting asking, “Hey, what about Friend?”To be fair, Trump is almost an internet monk now, compared with the way he communicated during his last presidential campaign. In the months before the 2020 election, his supporters were reportedly getting an average of about 14 emails a day from his organization.Trump hasn’t said whether he’ll be running again in 2024. He’s plenty busy with other stuff, like holding rallies, playing golf and spending the anniversary of 9/11 providing commentary for a boxing match at a Florida casino.And he’s hardly the only major political name out beating the bushes for donations. Nancy Pelosi was in my inbox Wednesday with a letter decrying the new Texas anti-abortion law and with a petition at the very end of which we learn that Nancy “needs $981 more in the door before midnight to hit her goal.”Kind of hard to believe she couldn’t just pick up the phone and nail down that $981. But on the plus side, Pelosi indicated she’d be very happy with just $20. And she did get in my actual first name.Pelosi’s correspondence isn’t nearly as … energetic as you-know-who’s. “Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY and your gift will be INCREASED by 500%,” writes “Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States.” Just in case you’d forgotten.Any amount? Sextupled by magic? “There’s no way to know what they mean by that,” said Robert Kelner, a Washington lawyer who’s an expert in campaign finance issues.Well, it’s certainly impressive how urgent Trump makes it all sound. During the Labor Day barrage he announced that “your 400% impact offer has been extended” and that if you just “CONTRIBUTE NOW,” a $250 contribution will count as … $1,250!If you’re interested, please make sure it happens only once. As Shane Goldmacher reported in The Times this spring, a 63-year-old cancer patient in hospice donated what was just about his last $500, and then discovered $3,000 had been withdrawn by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days, leaving his account empty and frozen. The campaign, you see, had set up a default system that siphoned new money every week from donors who didn’t realize they had to make a special effort to opt out.Very tricky business, that. Another Trump letter includes boxes — prechecked for your convenience — with rousing statements like: “President Trump, I need you right now. This is where we step up and show the left-wing MOB that REAL Americans are REJECTING JOE BIDEN’S corrupt agenda.” Said box quietly ends, “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”Campaign finance is, by any measure, a wicked complicated matter. Mistakes do happen. In the last two and a half months of 2020, the Biden campaign made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million. Which sounds like a hell of a lot until you consider that for the same period, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee had to issue more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million.Many of the Trump emails suggest he needs money to challenge those evil, wrongheaded, “Biden won!” election results. Doesn’t seem like all that great a legal investment. Although probably better than those lawsuits Rudy Giuliani announced in a parking lot next to a porn store in Philadelphia.Some of the money that goes to Trump’s PAC is used to underwrite his travel around the country and — if he happened to be in the mood — could be used to pay salaries for his family members or pricey events at, say, a Trump hotel.No small matter, that. Think about Trump Tower. On the one hand, it’s in even worse shape than most Manhattan real estate, carrying a name not all that useful as a New York brand. On the other, his PAC has reportedly been shelling out more than $37,000 a month for office space in Trump Tower. Not at all clear what said space is needed for, politics-wise, but if Trump ever decides to reboot “The Apprentice” with a pandemic flair, he’s got the set ready.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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      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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      U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs

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      A push by prosecutors to secretly seize data about four Times reporters’ emails began in the Trump administration and continued under Biden.WASHINGTON — In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.The disclosure came two days after the Biden Justice Department notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017. That notification followed similar disclosures in recent weeks about seizing communications records of reporters at The Washington Post and CNN.Mr. Baquet condemned both the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, portraying the effort as an assault on the First Amendment.“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Mr. Baquet said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”There was no precedent, Mr. McCraw said, for the government to impose a gag order on New York Times personnel as part of a leak investigation. He also said there was no precedent for the government to seize the Times’s phone records without advance notification of the effort.A Google spokeswoman said that while it does not comment on specific cases, the company is “firmly committed to protecting our customers’ data and we have a long history of pushing to notify our customers about any legal requests.”Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”He added: “The department strongly values a free and independent press, and is committed to upholding the First Amendment.”Last month, Mr. Biden said he would not permit the Justice Department during his administration to seize communications logs that could reveal reporters’ sources, calling the practice “simply, simply wrong.” (Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department had gone after such data in several leak investigations.)The letter this week disclosing the seizure of phone records involving the Times reporters — Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt — had hinted at the existence of the separate fight over data that would show whom they had been in contact with over email.The letters said the government had also acquired a court order to seize logs of their emails, but “no records were obtained,” providing no further details. But with the lifting of the gag order, Mr. McCraw said he had been freed to explain what had happened.Prosecutors in the office of the United States attorney in Washington had obtained a sealed court order from a magistrate judge on Jan. 5 requiring Google to secretly turn over the information. But Google resisted, apparently demanding that the Times be told, as its contract with the company requires.The Justice Department continued to press the request after the Biden administration took over, but in early March prosecutors relented and asked a judge to permit telling Mr. McCraw. But the disclosure to him came with a nondisclosure order preventing him from talking about it to other people.Mr. McCraw said it was “stunning” to receive an email from Google telling him what was going on. At first, he said, he did not know who the prosecutor was, and because the matter was sealed, there were no court documents he could access about it.The next day, Mr. McCraw said, he was told the name of the prosecutor — a career assistant United States attorney in Washington, Tejpal Chawla — and opened negotiations with him. Eventually, Mr. Chawla agreed to ask the judge to modify the gag order so Mr. McCraw could discuss the matter with the Times’s general counsel and the company’s outside lawyers, and then with two senior Times executives: A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, and Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive.“We made clear that we intended to go to court to challenge the order if it was not withdrawn,” Mr. McCraw said. Then, on June 2, he said, the Justice Department told him it would ask the court to quash the order to Google at the same time that it disclosed the earlier phone records seizure, which he had not known about.He described the position he was in as “untenable,” especially when it came to talking with Times reporters about chatter involving some kind of fight involving Google and a leak investigation related to The Times.The Justice Department has not said what leak it was investigating, but the identity of the four reporters who were targeted and the date range of the communications sought strongly suggested that it centered on classified information in an April 2017 article about how James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential campaign.The article included discussion of an email or memo by a Democratic operative that Russian hackers had stolen, but that was not among the tranche that intelligence officials say Russia provided to WikiLeaks for public disclosure as part of its hack-and-dump operation to manipulate the election.The American government found out about the memo, which was said to express confidence that the attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch, would not let an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server go too far. Mr. Comey was said to worry that if Ms. Lynch made and announced the decision not to charge Ms. Clinton, Russia would put out the memo to make it seem illegitimate, leading to his unorthodox decision to announce that the F.B.I. was recommending against charges in the matter.The Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump, who fired Mr. Comey and considered him an enemy, sought for years to see whether it could find evidence sufficient to charge him with the crime of making unauthorized disclosures of classified information — a push that eventually came to focus on whether he had anything to do with The Times learning about the existence of the document Russian hackers had stolen.The long-running leak investigation into Mr. Comey was seen inside of the Justice Department as one of the most politicized and contentious, even by the standards of a department that had been prevailed upon in several instances to use leak investigations and other policies concerning book publication to attack former officials who criticized Mr. Trump.Throughout last year, prosecutors talked about whether or not to close the leak investigation into Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the case, in part because there seemed to be little evidence to show that the former FBI director had shared classified information with the press.Last fall, department officials discussed whether the investigation had run its course and prosecutors should draft a declination memo that would explain why Mr. Comey would not be prosecuted, one of the people said. But the F.B.I. and the career prosecutors working on the case wanted to keep the investigation open, the people said, and in January prosecutors obtained a special court order to require Google to turn over data on the reporters’ emails.With Mr. Trump soon to be out of office, the order was controversial among some inside of the department, according to two people with knowledge of the case. It was seen as unusually aggressive for a case that would likely end in no charges. During the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo that the case should be closed, according to a person familiar with the transition.In the court filings seeking to compel Google to turn over logs of who was communicating with the four reporters who wrote that story, the Justice Department persuaded the judge that the secrecy was justified because, as the judge wrote on Jan. 5, “there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of this order will seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation, including by giving targets an opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence.”The Jan. 5 document does not acknowledge that the existence of the leak investigation into Mr. Comey and its subject matter was by then already known, because The Times had reported on it almost a year earlier. It is not clear whether the Justice Department told the judge about that article, or instead suggested that the inquiry was still a well-kept secret. More