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      Texas sheriff files criminal case over DeSantis flights to Martha’s Vineyard

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      A Texas sheriff’s office has recommended criminal charges over flights that the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, arranged to deport 49 South American migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, last year.In a statement on Monday, the Bexar county sheriff’s office said it had filed a criminal case with the local district attorney over the flight. The Bexar county sheriff, Javier Salazar, has previously said the migrants were “lured under false pretenses” into traveling to Martha’s Vineyard, a wealthy liberal town.The recommendation comes after the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, threatened DeSantis with kidnapping charges on Monday, after Florida flew a group of people seeking asylum to Sacramento. It was the second time in four days Florida had used taxpayer money to fly asylum seekers to California.“The charge filed is unlawful restraint and several accounts were filed, both misdemeanor and felony,” the Bexar county sheriff’s office said in a statement provided to KSAT News.“At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public.”DeSantis arranged for two planes to carry migrants, including women and children, to Martha’s Vineyard in September 2022.The groups were told they would have jobs and housing if they boarded the planes, but in reality officials in Martha’s Vineyard had been given no advance notice of the arrival of the 49 people, most of whom had traveled from Venezuela.DeSantis created an “urgent humanitarian situation” in deporting the migrants, officials said. The far-right Floridian, who announced he was running for president in May, was widely criticized for what was seen as a political stunt.On Monday, Newsom called DeSantis a “small, pathetic man” after Florida chartered a private jet and flew 16 South American people to Sacramento before abandoning them outside a church.California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the people may have been duped into boarding flights to the state. On Twitter, Newsom suggested the Florida governor could be subject to “kidnapping charges”.DeSantis has made immigration one of the central issues of his political career.In May, he signed a heavily criticized law which invalidated out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to undocumented immigrants and required companies with more than 25 members of staff to check employees’ immigration status.The law also provides a specific fund to deport undocumented immigrants to other states.After the law was signed by DeSantis the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino advocacy group, issued a travel advisory urging people not to travel to Florida. More

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      Florida taxpayers pick up bill for Ron DeSantis’s culture war lawsuits

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      Since Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, took office in 2019 and embarked on his culture wars, lawsuits from various communities whose rights have been violated have been stacking up against the far-right Republican.As DeSantis fights the lawsuits with what critics have described as a blank check from the state’s supermajority Republican legislature, the mounting legal costs have come heavily at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.In recent years, DeSantis’s ultra-conservative legislative agenda has drawn ire from a slew of marginalized communities as well as major corporations including Disney. The so-called “don’t say gay” bill, abortion bans and prohibition of African American studies are just a few of DeSantis’s many extremist policies that have been met with costly lawsuits in a state where residents are already struggling with costs of living.“The list of legal challenges precipitating from DeSantis’s unconstitutional laws is endless,” the Democratic state senator Lori Berman said.“We’ve seen Floridians rightly sue many if not all of the governor’s legislative priorities, including laws that restrict drag shows for kids, prohibit Chinese citizens from owning homes and land in Florida, suppress young and Black and brown voters, ban gender-affirming care and threaten supportive parents with state custody of their children, and of course, all the retaliatory legislation waged against Disney for coming out in support of the LGBTQ+ community,” she said.As a result of the mounting lawsuits against DeSantis, the governor’s legal costs, which the Miami Herald reported last December to cost at least $16.7m, have been soaring.In DeSantis’s legal fight against Disney following the corporation’s condemnation of his anti-LGBTQ+ laws, it is going to cost the governor and his handpicked board nearly $1,300 per hour in legal fees as they look into how the corporation discovered a loophole in DeSantis’s plan to acquire governing rights over Disney World, Insider reports.“Disney is a perfect example. It doesn’t hurt any Floridians. There is nothing. It’s creating a legal issue out of nowhere and now Disney sued so they have to respond and that is going to cost taxpayers’ money. The whole Disney case is just because of DeSantis’s ego and his hurt feelings,” the Democratic state senator Tina Polsky said.“Taxpayers are paying to foot the bills to pass unconstitutional bills and to keep up with his petty vengeance,” she said, adding: “I don’t think they’re aware at all … They’re too brainwashed at this point that they wouldn’t even care.”Meanwhile, in another case covered by the Orlando Sentinel, DeSantis’s administration has turned to the elite conservative Washington DC-based law firm Cooper & Kirk to defend the governor against his slew of “anti-woke” laws. The firm’s lawyers charge $725 hourly, according to contracts reviewed by Orlando Sentinel. As of June 2022, the state authorized nearly $2.8m for legal services from just Cooper & Kirk alone, the outlet reports.With mounting taxpayer-funded legal costs against DeSantis’s legislative agenda, critics ranging from civil rights organizations to the state’s Democratic lawmakers have lambasted DeSantis’s policies as unconstitutional and mere political stunts designed to propel him to the frontlines of the GOP primary.“DeSantis went to Harvard for his [law degree]. This is someone who should understand the constraints placed on him and the state by the United States constitution and the Florida constitution. He knows those constraints, but he doesn’t care. His goal is to intentionally pass unconstitutional laws and set up legal challenges in order for the conservative supreme court to overturn long-held protections,” Berman said.Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, echoed similar sentiments, comparing DeSantis to his main competition and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, both of whom he said are cut “from the same cloth”.“Ron DeSantis is a Harvard law school graduate. He is a lawyer. Whereas Donald Trump at least could make the argument, ‘I’m just the layperson, I don’t know’ if … something is deemed illegal or unconstitutional … DeSantis does not have that defense,” Jarvis said.Nevertheless, DeSantis appears unfazed.“DeSantis knows very well that … what he is doing is unconstitutional and illegal … Lawyers by training are very cautious so this is quite remarkable to have a lawyer-politician who not only knows better, but does not care,” said Jarvis.To DeSantis, it does not matter whether he wins or loses the legal battles as he knows he “ultimately controls the Florida supreme court”, according to Jarvis.“He is playing a ‘heads, I win, tails, you lose’ game. If he gets one of these crazy policies passed and they’re challenged and the court upholds him … he can say to the press and to the public, ‘I was right and the proof is in the pudding because the courts agreed with me,’” he explained.“But even better for DeSantis when they rule against him … DeSantis is able to stand up and say, ‘These crazy judges want our children to watch drag shows, they want our children to be taught to be gay, they want Disney to be this terrible company. That’s why you need a strong governor and why you will benefit from having me as president because I will make sure to get rid of these judges and replace them with judges that have traditional American morals,’” Jarvis added.As DeSantis continues to fight his costly legal battles, the state’s supermajority Republican legislature appears to encourage him wholly.“We’re in a litigious society,” the state senate president, Kathleen Passidomo, told the Tallahassee Democrat while the senate budget chair, Doug Broxson, told the outlet: “We want the governor to be in a comfortable position to speak his mind.”With Republicans rushing to DeSantis’s defense, perhaps the most glaring example of the legislature’s endorsement of his legal wars is the $16m incorporated into the state’s $117bn budget to be used exclusively for his litigation expenses.Speaking to the Guardian, the state’s Democratic house leader, Fentrice Driskell, called the budget a “carte blanche” from Republicans and the result of zero accountability.“The legislature is supposed to be a check on executive power. By giving him a carte blanche to go and fight these wars in court, it’s basically just saying that there are no checks and balances when it comes to the state government in Florida,” said Driskell.“It’s a waste … They are just allowing this single person to impose his will on the state of Florida and they’re willing to waste taxpayer dollars to do it,” she said, adding: “Most Floridians can’t afford their rent and property insurance rates are through the roof. We could have redirected that money towards affordable housing.”Driskell went on to describe Medicaid iBudget Florida, a waiver that provides disabled Floridians with access to certain services and which currently has a waitlist of more than 22,000 residents.“It’s very difficult for them to get off that waitlist because the Republicans underfund Medicaid. We could put that money towards funding the waitlist and getting people off of it. I think there’s only $2m that was put in the budget for that this year. If we added the $16m that was added for these culture wars, my goodness, that’s $18m. Presumably we could help get nine times more people off of the waitlist,” said Driskell.As DeSantis remains embroiled in his legal woes at the expense of Florida taxpayers, there is perhaps a single group of people that have benefited the most out of all the legal drama, Jarvis told the Guardian.“The lawyers who got that $16.7m, that’s money from heaven. That’s money that fell into their laps … Anytime there’s a loser, and the loser here is the Florida taxpayer, there is a winner. The winners here are the lawyers who are collecting those enormous fees. The more that plaintiffs file lawsuits and the more they fight these crazy policies, you know that’s just money in the bank for these lawyers,” Jarvis said.“DeSantis has been God’s gift to lawyers,” he added. More

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      Ron DeSantis Avoids Talking About Florida’s Abortion Ban in New Hampshire

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      As he traversed socially conservative Iowa this week, the 2024 contender highlighted his state’s six-week ban. But now, in more moderate New Hampshire, he is shying from the subject.At a stop on his first trip to New Hampshire as a presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis mentioned his efforts to provide tax relief for Florida families. He mentioned defunding diversity programs at public colleges. He mentioned his fight with Disney.But what he did not mention was the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida this year.The ban — which Mr. DeSantis chose to highlight in his speeches to audiences in socially conservative Iowa this week — is a potential lightning rod for voters in more moderate New Hampshire.One New Hampshire Republican, Bob Kroepel, approached Mr. DeSantis after his speech in Rochester as the governor signed baseballs and took selfies with the crowd.“Would you support an abortion policy that would allow choice to a certain point?” Mr. Kroepel, who lost Republican primaries for governor in New Hampshire in 1998 and 2002, asked through the din of the crowd and speakers blaring country music.Mr. DeSantis dodged the thrust of the question, talking instead about his efforts to help parents after they have children, including through health coverage and universal school choice.“So my wife has a fatherhood initiative,” he replied. “We’ve also done a lot of stuff to help new mothers, like we now have a year of postpartum health coverage for poor mothers. Obviously, we have the educational choice and a bunch of stuff that we’ve done.”“So we absolutely have a responsibility to help mothers, that’s without question, one hundred percent,” Mr. DeSantis said before moving on to the next voter.Abortion is likely to be one of the most complicated issues for Mr. DeSantis to discuss, especially if he wins the Republican nomination.Moderates and independents tend to be less supportive of bans as early as six weeks, when many women do not know they are pregnant, and Mr. DeSantis has sometimes avoided talking about abortion even in front of friendly audiences. So far, he has skirted questions about a federal abortion ban, suggesting that the matter should be left largely to the states.Casey DeSantis speaking at a lectern that has a DeSantis campaign sign. Mr. DeSantis is standing behind her.David Degner for The New York Times“I think at the end of the day, fighting for life and protecting life really is a bottom-up movement,” he said in a Fox News interview last week. “I think we’ve been able to have great successes at the local level.”His main rival, former President Donald J. Trump, has also not committed to supporting a federal abortion ban. Mr. DeSantis has used abortion to criticize Mr. Trump, after the former president suggested that Florida’s ban was “too harsh.”Republican leaders in New Hampshire say a six-week ban is too extreme for voters in their state, which has a 24-week limit.Jason Osborne, the state’s House majority leader, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview that he hoped the governor would state at some point in the campaign that he would not try “to make Florida’s abortion policy countrywide.”A national six-week abortion ban “would go over like a lead balloon” with New Hampshire voters, Mr. Osborne said after Mr. DeSantis’s Rochester event.“People don’t want it,” he added. If Mr. DeSantis were to propose such a ban, he said, “I think you’d see a lot of people jump ship. I would lose a lot of faith in him.”Mr. Osborne said he agreed with the governor’s strategy of not taking a louder stance on abortion.“I think abortion is one of those issues that should not be talked about in a presidential campaign,” he said. Abortion rights supporters protesting outside Mr. DeSantis’s event on Thursday in Manchester, N.H.David Degner for The New York TimesWhile Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech typically varies little from stop to stop, he does appear to be calibrating his message on abortion. In Iowa on Wednesday, he talked about Florida’s six-week ban, known as the Heartbeat Protection Act, during a lengthy recounting of his record as governor. “We have enacted the heartbeat bill,” he told a crowd in Cedar Rapids before being drowned out by cheers and applause.But he did not mention the bill at several stops in New Hampshire on Thursday.Even New Hampshire voters who said they support a six-week ban said they understood why Mr. DeSantis was unlikely to talk much about the issue.“I mean, my gosh, there’s so much blowback, right?” said Jennifer Hilton, 56, an independent who is open to supporting Mr. DeSantis and heard him speak in Rochester. “And it’s so taken out of context, and such an emotional issue, that people can’t hear you.”Sue Collins, an attendee at a DeSantis event in Salem, N.H., said, “I’ll be honest, I’m not strict pro-life, but I was not happy to see the six-week ban.” She added, “I wish it wasn’t that strict, but it would not prevent me from voting for him.”Mr. Kroepel, the Republican who approached Mr. DeSantis, said that “on balance,” he was not satisfied with how the governor had answered his question. Even so, he acknowledged the difficulties of the discussion.“I understand how delicate this whole situation is,” Mr. Kroepel said. “So I give him credit for at least listening to me.”Ann Klein More

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      Trump and Cuomo Agree That DeSantis Mishandled Covid

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      The two combative men from Queens have often been antagonists, but now they both see an opening to attack the Florida governor over his pandemic leadership.For years they overlapped in New York politics, two brash sons of Queens rising through the worlds of real estate and government, as Donald J. Trump donated to Andrew M. Cuomo’s campaigns and made a virtual appearance at his bachelor party.Then they were antagonists, with Mr. Cuomo, a powerful Democratic governor of New York, embracing chances to serve as a foil to the divisive Republican president.Now out of power after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and Mr. Cuomo resigned in disgrace, they have found themselves in a moment of alignment, each lacing into Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.“Even Cuomo did better,” Mr. Trump said in a recent video.“Donald Trump tells the truth, finally,” Mr. Cuomo declared on Twitter on Tuesday, though he distanced himself from the former president’s faint accolades on a new podcast.Assessing the success or failure of each state’s handling of the pandemic is a complex task.New York and Florida, two large and populous states, both had higher death rates per 100,000 people than many other states.According to a New York Times tracker, Florida had a slightly lower death rate than New York did from the beginning of the pandemic to March of this year. Florida had a slightly higher number of total deaths than New York did, about 87,000 versus 80,000 in the same period, though New York was known early on as the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the pandemic.As he campaigns in Iowa and other early nominating states, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has made his handling of the pandemic central to his presidential bid.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBoth governors faced plenty of scrutiny and criticism over their stewardship of the pandemic, with Mr. Cuomo sustaining particular heat over his administration’s handling of nursing home deaths in the pandemic.For his part, Mr. DeSantis, who has emerged as Mr. Trump’s chief Republican rival, has made his pandemic record — including his decision to reopen his state’s economy relatively early, even in the face of coronavirus surges and rising hospitalizations — a focal point of his campaign.He has used the issue as a way to draw his own contrasts with Mr. Trump, who, he suggests, went too far in empowering Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert during the pandemic.“Do you want Cuomo or do you want free Florida?” Mr. DeSantis said in Iowa this week. “If we just decided the caucuses on that, I would be happy with that verdict by Iowa voters.”And in an interview on “Good Morning New Hampshire” on Thursday, Mr. DeSantis defended his record again, saying that “people fled Cuomo’s lockdowns to come to Florida.”“He’s attacking me, siding with Andrew Cuomo in New York, over me,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I think that’s a huge mistake.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.In New York, former Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, said the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuomo had at times been less rancorous than those between Mr. Trump and many other Democrats.“The acrimony that existed between the president and others was far greater than what theirs was,” said Mr. Paterson, who mentioned that he had recently dined with Mr. Cuomo.“The positive interaction now is, it’s a tricky path,” he said, even as he noted that he did not expect it to be a “prelude to a partnership.”In his podcast, Mr. Cuomo made plain that he did not intend to bear-hug Mr. Trump, noting that the former president had been highly critical of Democratic governors at the height of the pandemic, but seemed to be changing his tune — making a “total 180” — as he focused on a primary rival.“Now the politics has shifted for Mr. Trump, who is running against Mr. DeSantis, and now Mr. Trump says, ‘Cuomo did a better job than DeSantis,’” Mr. Cuomo said. “I’m very proud of the way New York handled it.” More

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      Months of distrust inside Trump legal team led to top lawyer’s departure

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      Donald Trump’s legal team for months has weathered deep distrust and interpersonal conflict that could undermine its defense of the former president as the criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago nears its conclusion.The turmoil inside the legal team only exploded into public view when one of the top lawyers, Tim Parlatore, abruptly resigned two weeks’ ago from the representation citing irreconcilable differences with Trump’s senior adviser and in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn.But the departure of Parlatore was the culmination of months of simmering tensions that continue to threaten the effectiveness of the legal team at a crucial time – as federal prosecutors weigh criminal charges – in part because the interpersonal conflicts remain largely unresolved.It also comes as multiple Trump lawyers are embroiled in numerous criminal investigations targeting the former president: Epshteyn was recently interviewed by the special counsel, while Parlatore and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran testified to the grand jury in the classified documents inquiry.The turmoil has revolved around hostility among the lawyers on the legal team who have come to distrust each other as well as their hostility directed at Epshteyn, over what they regard as his oversight of the legal work and gatekeeping direct access to the former president.In one instance, the clashes became so acute that some of the lawyers agreed to a so-called “murder-suicide” pact where if one got fired, others would resign in solidarity. And as some of the lawyers tried to exclude Epshteyn, they withheld information from co-counsel who they suspected might brief him.The infighting eventually reached the point at which some of the lawyers started to believe the biggest impediment to defending Trump might just be the distrust and interpersonal conflict, rather than someone like Parlatore deciding to cooperate with prosecutors.In fact, the legal team is said to be confident that Parlatore will not flip on Trump after he told the grand jury hearing evidence in the case last year that Trump gave him free rein to search for any remaining documents at his properties last year, according to a transcript of his testimony.But an eventual attempt to remove Epshteyn from the case ended in failure, and Epshteyn remains a trusted member of Trump’s inner circle. The months of worsening relations that led to that moment were described to the Guardian by six people familiar with the situation.In a statement, a Trump spokesperson said: “This is completely false and is rooted in pure fantasy. The real story is the illegal weaponization of the Justice Department and their witch-hunts targeted to influence an election in order to try and prevent President Trump from returning to the White House.”The lawyers named in this story either declined to comment or did not respond to calls for comment.West Palm Beach dinner foreshadows divisivenessThe animosity inside the Trump legal team started almost immediately after the FBI seized 101 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago last August, when Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to appoint a special master to review the materials for any privilege protections.The legal team, at the time, was composed of former federal prosecutors Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran – whose search for classified documents in response to a subpoena later proved incomplete – former Florida solicitor general Chris Kise and lawyer Lindsey Halligan.The lawyers presented a united front as they argued to US district court judge Aileen Cannon that she should grant a special master, which she did – a strategic win for Trump that enabled him to delay the criminal investigation and prosecutors’ ability to review the documents.But Trusty, who played a leading role in the special master litigation, was already frustrated with how things were going.Trusty’s private frame of mind emerged over dinner with Halligan and Corcoran at the five-star Breakers hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, hours after the special master court hearing. The conversation was overheard by this Guardian reporter who happened to be sitting at the table next to them.Trusty’s main irritation with Epshteyn, as he recounted, was having to run his legal decisions by him even though he did not consider him a trial lawyer and objected to how, in his eyes, he gave more priority to Trump’s perceived PR problems than to genuine legal problems.He criticised Epshteyn for trying to “troubleshoot” those problems before they could reach Trump, instead of allowing him to straightforwardly brief the former president himself. The entire situation meant the lawyers were having to play “a game of thrones nonsense” that he found distracting.Trusty then discussed legal strategy, suggesting Kise was “too apologetic” in opening remarks to the judge and questioned the validity of the FBI warrant for Mar-a-Lago. He also said he had no interest in talking to reporters from the publication Lawfare or the New York Times on account of their coverage.Lawyers split over further searchesTrusty’s annoyance with Epshteyn for inserting himself into legal deliberations came to be shared by Parlatore several weeks later, when the justice department told the Trump legal team in October that it believed the former president still possessed classified documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deliberations over how to respond to the department’s accusations split the legal team. Epshteyn and Kise were not in favor of doing voluntary searches of the Trump properties, while Parlatore and Trusty suggested a more proactive approach that involved new searches.Epshteyn and Kise for weeks were unconvinced. But Parlatore and Trusty reasoned that if they did find more classified documents but immediately returned them to the justice department, it would make it harder for prosecutors to say that Trump wilfully retained classified material.New searches of Trump’s properties did take place, though in Parlatore’s retelling of the deliberations to CNN last week, Epshteyn was reluctant to allow a search of Trump’s Bedminster golf club. Later, Trump lawyer Alina Habba was booked on CNN to dispute Parlatore’s account.But the episode also precipitated new distrust among the lawyers themselves, not just with Epshteyn. When the news about the justice department’s suspicions were reported, Parlatore and Trusty were surprised to see Kise portrayed as having always sought a cooperative approach with prosecutors.To Parlatore and Trusty, while Kise ultimately supported further searches, he was hardly the leading voice. And when Kise pulled out of arguing before the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit to keep the special master with 24 hours’ notice, they had him exiled to the civil litigation team.Lawyers stage Mar-a-Lago interventionWith Kise gone from the team defending Trump in special counsel matters, Parlatore and Trusty’s interpersonal conflicts with Epshteyn reached new levels as they grew increasingly annoyed at what they considered their inability to directly consult Trump without having to go through Epshteyn.The pair chafed that when they spoke to Trump on the phone, Epshteyn was typically also on the line. At other times, they sniped that Epshteyn would give overly rosy outlooks to Trump and, in March, travelled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump’s permission to exclude him from future deliberations.It was not clear whether the issue was actually resolved. Parlatore came away from the meeting content that he no longer needed to speak to Epshteyn. However, Epshteyn remained Trump’s in-house counsel and the legal team’s liaison with the Trump 2024 campaign.Around that time, Parlatore and Trusty also started withholding information from Corcoran because they worried that Corcoran was too close to Epshteyn and was briefing him behind their backs.That meant that as the special counsel intensified the documents investigation, after prosecutors convinced a US appeals court to force Corcoran to turn over his notes to a grand jury, at least two members of the legal team had little to no visibility into what the other two lawyers were doing unless they found out another way.Personal conflicts explode publiclyAround that time, Trump advisers and lawyers started to hear murmurs about whether Parlatore and Trusty should continue in their roles. When the pair heard about his inquiries, they resolved that if one of them actually got fired, the other should also resign.The animosity had also been increasing as the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, prepared to charge Trump in the hush money case and Parlatore insisted to Epshteyn that celebrity lawyer Joe Tacopina – whom he detested related to a prior case – should not be on the team defending the former president.Epshteyn suggested it was not in his control because Tacopina was recommended by others in Trump’s orbit, including Kimberly Guilfoyle – which Parlatore interpreted as a snub.Parlatore also had a misstep when he and Trusty last month urged Congress in a letter to tell the justice department to “stand down” its criminal investigation in the documents matter, laying out a detailed defence that claimed in part that responsibility lay with aides instead of Trump himself.The 10-page letter was sent to Trump and they believed it had the former president’s approval. But Trump was furious days later when he saw that the language in the letter cast doubt on his previous public statements about how White House and classified documents ended up at Mar-a-Lago.Parlatore had also decided against giving Epshteyn advance warning about the letter, which some on the Trump campaign used as an example of why the legal team needed his supervision.But the proximate cause of Parlatore’s departure was a row over discussing the letter on CNN. Parlatore had made a point of appearing on the network because he figured the attorney general, Merrick Garland, was more likely to watch CNN than a conservative network like Newsmax.Exactly who ordered Parlatore’s appearance to be cancelled remains unclear, though the Trump 2024 campaign later told the lawyers it was because he criticized Tacopina the last time he was on CNN. As the special counsel investigation neared its end, Parlatore told Trump he had enough and quit. More

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      Ron DeSantis says he will ‘destroy leftism’ in US if elected president

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      Predicting two terms in the White House should he defeat Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination next year, Ron DeSantis said he would go on to “destroy leftism in this country”.“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history,” the Florida governor told Fox News.DeSantis declared his long-expected run last week, in a glitch-filled appearance on Twitter with its owner, Elon Musk.The widely panned launch followed a long phony war period in which DeSantis toured early voting states and launched a campaign-oriented book but nonetheless fell further and further behind the former president in primary polling.Trump faces unprecedented legal jeopardy, including criminal charges over a hush money payment to a porn star; being found liable for sexual assault and defamation; and facing indictment for his election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress and for his retention of classified records.Nonetheless, Trump maintains big leads over the rest of the field. Most polling averages put Trump more than 30 points ahead of his nearest challenger: DeSantis.Undaunted, the governor told Fox & Friends on Monday: “At the end of the day, I’ve shown in Florida an ability to win huge swaths of voters that Republicans typically can’t win – while also delivering the boldest agenda anywhere in the country.”Democrats and many political observers suggest that hardline record, including attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, moves to control teaching in public schools, loosened gun control laws and a six-week abortion ban, will cost DeSantis in a general election.The governor’s high-profile fight with Disney, a major employer in his state, over its opposition to his so-called “don’t say gay” law prohibiting discussion of sexuality and gender identity in public classrooms, has also cost him support among some major donors.Speaking to Fox News, DeSantis said the fight with Disney was about “standing for parents … standing for children. And I think a multibillion-dollar company that sexualises children is not consistent with the values of Florida or the values of a place like Iowa”, which will hold the first Republican contest next year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeSantis, 44, has amassed a significant campaign war chest and remains the clear strongest challenger to Trump, ahead of candidates including the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas.Polling concerning a hypothetical general election between DeSantis and Joe Biden puts the governor and the president neck-and-neck.Speaking to Fox News, DeSantis said: “I think there’s a reason why the legacy media is attacking me more than they’re attacking anybody else, because I think they realise that if I’m successful in winning the Republican nomination, we’re going to bring it home in the general election.“And I pledge to Republican voters if you nominate me, I will be taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025, on the west side of the Capitol. No more excuses about why we can’t get it done. We need to get it done, and I will get it done.” More

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      How the Internet Shrank Musk and DeSantis

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      If you had told me several months ago, immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter and Ron DeSantis celebrated a thumping re-election victory, that DeSantis would launch his presidential campaign in conversation with Musk, I would have thought, intriguing: The rightward-trending billionaire whose rockets and cars stand out in an economy dominated by apps and financial instruments meets the Republican politician whose real-world victories contrast with the virtual populism of Donald Trump.The actual launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign, in a “Twitter Spaces” event that crashed repeatedly and played to a smaller audience than he would have claimed just by showing up on Fox, instead offered the political version of the lesson that we’ve been taught repeatedly by Musk’s stewardship of Twitter: The internet can be a trap.For the Tesla and SpaceX mogul, the trap was sprung because Musk wanted to attack the groupthink of liberal institutions, and seeing that groupthink manifest on his favorite social media site, he imagined that owning Twitter was the key to transforming public discourse.But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, other internet platforms. Twitter is real life, but only through its relationship to other realities; it doesn’t have the capacity to be a hub of discourse, news gathering or entertainment on its own. And many of Musk’s difficulties as the Twitter C.E.O. have reflected a simple overestimation of social media’s inherent authority and influence.Thus he’s tried to sell the privilege of verification, the famous “blue checks,” without recognizing that they were valued because of their connection to real-world institutions and lose value if they reflect a Twitter hierarchy alone. Or he’s encouraged his favored journalists to publish their scoops and essays on his site when it isn’t yet built out for that kind of publication. Or he’s encouraged media figures like Tucker Carlson and now politicians like DeSantis to run shows or do interviews on his platform, without having the infrastructure in place to make all that work.It’s entirely possible that Musk can build out that infrastructure eventually, and make Twitter more capacious than it is today. But there isn’t some immediate social-media shortcut to the influence he’s seeking. If you want Twitter to be the world’s news hub, you probably need a Twitter newsroom. If you want Twitter to host presidential candidates, you probably need a Twitter channel that feels like a professional newscast. And while you’re trying to build those things, you need to be careful that the nature of social media doesn’t diminish you to the kind of caricatured role — troll instead of tycoon — that tempts everyone on Twitter.That kind of diminishment is what the Twitter event handed to DeSantis, whose choppy launch may be forgotten but who would be wise to learn from what went wrong. There’s an emerging critique of the Florida governor that suggests that his whole persona is too online — that his talk about wokeness, wokeness, wokeness is pitched to a narrow and internet-based faction within the G.O.P., that he’s setting himself to be like Elizabeth Warren in 2020, whose promise of plans, plans, plans thrilled the wonk faction but fell flat with normal Democratic voters.I think this critique is overdrawn. If you look at polling of Republican primary voters, the culture war appears to be a general concern rather than an elite fixation, and there’s a plausible argument that the conflict with the new progressivism is the main thing binding the G.O.P. coalition together.But it does seem true that the conflict with progressivism in the context of social media is a more boutique taste, and that lots of anti-woke conservatives aren’t particularly invested in whether the previous Twitter regime was throttling such-and-such right-wing influencer or taking orders from such-and-such “disinformation” specialist. And it’s also true that DeSantis is running against a candidate who, at any moment, can return to Twitter and bestride its feeds like a colossus, no matter whatever Republican alternative the Chief Twit might prefer.So introducing himself in that online space made DeSantis look unnecessarily small — smaller than Musk’s presence and Trump’s absence, shrunk down to the scale of debates about shadowbanning and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The Florida governor’s best self-advertisement in a primary should be his promise to be more active in reality than Trump, with his claim to be better at actual governance made manifest through his advantage in flesh-pressing, campaign-trail-hitting energy.The good news for DeSantis is that he doesn’t have billions invested in a social media company, so having endured a diminishing introduction he can slip the trap and walk away — toward the crowds, klieg lights and the grass.For Musk, though, escape requires either the admission of defeat in this particular arena or else a long campaign of innovation that eventually makes Twitter as big as he wrongly imagined it to be.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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      in Elections

      DeSantis Steps Up Attacks on Trump, Hitting Him on Crime and Covid

      by

      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed to repeal the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice law, if elected president. He called it “basically a jailbreak bill.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of “moving left” on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the party’s base in 2015 and 2016.He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner — and instantly regretted — as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trump’s hard-core base.But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”(Mr. DeSantis’s allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trump’s recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former president’s adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trump’s policies had undermined law and order.Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaign’s internal strategy is coming to light.At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, “We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.”The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)A staff member offered one possible answer.“Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida,” he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “It has not been banned,” he added. “It is limited.”In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal government’s pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.“He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.”He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.“I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump’s last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci’s lockdowns,” Mr. DeSantis said.A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Florida’s response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trump’s claim as “very bizarre,” and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic. More