Frauds and Swindling

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      How Deceptive Campaign Fund-Raising Ensnares Older People

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      Older Americans, a critical source of political donations, often fall victim to aggressive and misleading digital practices. A broad Times analysis points to the scope of the problem.William W. Vaughan Jr. was a senior atmospheric scientist at NASA during the space race and later an accomplished academic, but as with so many aging Americans, time and technology had sapped him of some of his savvy, especially online.Computers made him feel “like a duck out of water,” his son Steve Vaughan said. So when Steve was sorting through the elder Mr. Vaughan’s papers after his death at 90 in December, he was unsettled by what he found on his father’s final credit card bill.The first item was familiar: $11.82 at the local Chick-fil-A in Huntsville, Ala. But every other charge on the first page, and there were dozens of them, was to the firm that processes online Republican campaign contributions, WinRed. Over four months last year, Mr. Vaughan had made 400 donations totaling nearly $11,500 — to Donald J. Trump, Mitch McConnell, Tim Scott, Steve Scalise and many others.The sum was far beyond the realm of his financial ability, his son said, and sure enough, he soon discovered handwritten notes outlining what appeared to be his father’s call disputing the charges with his credit card company. He is still seething at the avalanche of charges and “what they did to a 90-year-old” just before his death.“If it happened to him,” he said, “I have to figure it happened to other people.”It has.Mr. Vaughan died in December at age 90.The dirty little secret of online political fund-raising is that the most aggressive and pernicious practices that campaigns use to raise money are especially likely to ensnare unsuspecting older people, according to interviews with digital strategists and an examination of federal donation and refund data.Older Americans are critical campaign contributors, both online and offline. More than half of all the online contributions processed by WinRed in the last cycle, 56 percent, came from people who listed their occupation as “retired,” federal records show.Digital operatives in both parties deploy an array of manipulative tactics that can deceive donors of all age groups: faux bill notices and official-looking correspondence; bogus offers to match donations and hidden links to unsubscribe; and prechecked boxes that automatically repeat donations, which are widely seen as the most egregious scheme.But some groups appear to specifically target older internet users, blasting out messages with subject lines like “Social Security” that have particular resonance for older people, and spending disproportionately on ads for an older audience. In many cases, the most unscrupulous tactics of direct mail have simply been rebooted for the digital age — with ruthless new precision.“Everybody knows what they’re doing: They’re scamming seniors to line their own pockets and to raise money for campaigns,” said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist who is critical of deceptive practices.“You are targeting people who are less savvy online, who are more likely to believe what’s put in front of them,” Mr. Nellis said, lamenting tactics that “erase people’s humanity.”It is impossible to tell just how many older Americans are deceived by such methods, because age is not reported on federal filings. One useful measuring stick, digital experts say, is the number of donations that are refunded — which often occurs when contributors feel unsatisfied or duped.The New York Times analyzed refund data from 2020, working with the political information firm Political Data Inc., which matched refunded donors to the voter rolls. The results provide a rare window into just how disproportionately old the universe of donors who receive refunds is.Donation refunds skewed heavily to older peopleRepublican campaigns issued refunds at far higher rates (7.4 percent of WinRed contributions) than Democratic ones (2.3 percent on ActBlue) in the 2020 election. But the age distribution for both parties among California refunds was very similar.

      Note: Donations without an age listed were excluded.Source: Federal Election Commission and Political Data, Inc.Taylor JohnstonThe findings, which looked at refunds in one large and diverse state, California, showed that the average age of donors who received refunds was almost 66 on WinRed and nearly 65 on ActBlue, the equivalent Democratic processing site.Even more revealing: More than four times as much money was refunded to donors who are 70 and older than to adults under the age of 50 — for both Republicans and Democrats.More than 65,000 unique donors, who were refunded a roughly $25 million combined last election, were matched by name and ZIP code in California. The ages of donors being refunded in both parties were very similar, even as Republican campaigns issued online refunds at more than triple the overall rate of Democrats, records show.A Times investigation earlier this year revealed how the Trump operation had made donations automatically recur weekly, and had obscured that fact with extraneous text, causing a multimillion-dollar cascade of refunds and a surge of fraud complaints.Multiple banking officials said the flood of complaints against Mr. Trump’s operation came heavily from older donors. One fraud investigator recalled the case of an 88-year-old who worried that her family would presume she was developing dementia because the repeat charges had blown past her credit card limit.Exploiting the diminishing capacity of older people for cash extends far beyond politics. There is an entire initiative at the Justice Department devoted to elder abuse, and the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported nearly $1 billion in losses for those 60 and older in 2020.Most political tactics are legal, though the Justice Department recently called out nonexistent promises to match donations as an example of “material misrepresentations.”“You leverage data, technology, emotion and digital tactics to take advantage of a population,” said Cyrus Krohn, who oversaw digital strategy at the Republican National Committee more than a decade ago and now regrets some of his earlier work. “It’s like a kid in a candy store.”A rally for former President Donald J. Trump at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, in October.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWhy older people are ‘the perfect target’Daniel Marson, a clinical neuropsychologist who has studied financial decision-making among aging Americans, said older people face a double whammy online when combining their generational lack of familiarity with technology and age-related cognitive declines.The brain itself starts to shift with age, Dr. Marson and other neurological experts said. Processing typically begins to slow. Keeping track of multiple things is harder. Evaluating trustworthiness becomes more of a struggle.“They just don’t have the same digital literacy or capacity to engage in an internet world,” said Dr. Marson, the former director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.Certainly, millions of aging Americans are still adroit with technology and some don’t decline cognitively until a very advanced age.But even the kinds of silly deceptions that millennials and digital natives might roll their eyes at — like stress-inducing donation countdown clocks — can more easily distract or confuse many retirees who adopted computers later in life.Some campaigns use subject lines like “Final Notice #33716980” — which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently deployed — that can make it appear as if actual bills are at risk of defaulting. Some use breathless exaggerations, like a recent text from the House Republican campaign arm, which warned it would “lose the House for good!” if everyone did not contribute $9 by midnight.A fund-raising email from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Personal information has been redacted.Many older people interpret personalized messages literally.Tatenda Musapatike, a Democratic digital strategist, recalled having to explain to some older family members that Joe Biden was not in fact the person sending them an email asking for money.“It’s not naïve or foolish,” she said. “It’s from people being less online.”The daughter of one 69-year-old donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to safeguard her father’s wishes to remain private, described a call from her mother last year asking her to intervene in his excessive online contributions. “Mom came to me and said, ‘Dad donated $25,000,’” the woman said. Records show he made hundreds of donations via WinRed to a variety of Republican campaigns.“He’s taking what they say as truth,” she said, adding that he has begun exhibiting early symptoms of mental decline and insists he has not donated as much as he actually has.While she has unsubscribed him from as many email and text lists as she can, she remains worried. “I can’t watch him 24 hours a day,” she said.Text messages sent from the National Republican Congressional Committee urged people to donate with false deadlines and promises of matching contributions.David Laibson, a behavioral economics professor at Harvard who has studied the impact of aging on financial decision-making, said studies showed that half of people in their 80s or older have either some cognitive impairment short of dementia or actual dementia.“Who’s the perfect target?” he said. “They’re in their early 80s, they have a very substantial likelihood of cognitive impairment, and they probably still haven’t depleted their retirement nest egg.”In fact, the records show that more money was refunded to donors who were 80 and older than to adults under 50, on both ActBlue and WinRed, according to the examination of California refund data.ActBlue and WinRed both said they work with customers to solve any problems they encounter, but declined to comment further.Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections administration, noted that many older Americans were particularly isolated during the coronavirus pandemic, and were simultaneously forced to be online more to connect with family and friends. “They had no choice,” she said, “so it is really easy to target them.”Ms. Klobuchar, a Democrat, recently introduced legislation to ban prechecked boxes that repeat donations after the Federal Election Commission unanimously recommended outlawing the practice in the wake of the Times investigation.“Politicians are always courting the votes of seniors,” she said. “Then, behind their backs, they’re scamming them for money. It’s pretty bad.”Some younger donors who are less internet-savvy also donated more than they intended.Daisy DeSimone, left, and her mother, Marian, at their home in New Jersey.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMarian DeSimone, the mother of Daisy DeSimone, who has a developmental disability, said her 30-year-old daughter was entrapped in a Republican recurring donation vortex last year that involved hundreds of small contributions totaling $2,700, about 85 percent of which went to two Trump committees.In a joint interview with her mother, Daisy said she contributed more than she intended, “by a lot,” and felt “frustrated” by her experience. She was most impassioned about the overwhelming volume of solicitations: “They would keep coming back to me, they would keep emailing me and texting me.”When her mother logged into her account to try to delete her from various lists, she discovered that the “unsubscribe” link from the Republican National Committee was in plain text. Unlike every other link, it was neither bold nor blue nor underlined. You had to hover above to see that it was a link at all.“Shameful!” she thought. At first, she had blamed her daughter for the deluge of donations. Now she sees her as a victim.Mothership Strategies, a Washington-based digital consulting firm, is known for its aggressive tactics in Democratic politics.Matt McClain/The Washington Post, via Getty Images‘A systemic campaign finance abuse issue’Overall, Republican campaigns issued refunds at far higher rates (7.4 percent of WinRed contributions) than Democratic ones (2.3 percent on ActBlue) in the 2020 election, a gap driven chiefly by Mr. Trump’s prechecked boxes scheme.But some Democratic donors did feel victimized.Susan Kraus is an 81-year-old New Yorker who, federal records show, made around 175 separate donations last year via ActBlue, totaling about $4,500.“That’s impossible,” Ms. Kraus said in an interview. “Never. I don’t know how that happened. But it wasn’t me doing it.” Both she and her son, Brett Graham, said she experiences short-term memory loss.“It’s almost like they were duplicating it,” she said. “Like there were tricks.” She recalls making donations with her phone but nothing at that scale, nor to the range of groups that records show she contributed to.“There isn’t a nice way to spin it,” said Mr. Graham, who helps manage his mother’s financial affairs. “This is a systemic campaign finance abuse issue.” He added that the overlapping pattern of giving was “not what a human being would do.” He was able to receive refunds for roughly $2,500 from two credit cards.The largest share of Ms. Kraus’s donations went to two interconnected groups, Stop Republicans and the Progressive Turnout Project, that she said she had never heard of. Both organizations share a Washington-based digital consulting firm, Mothership Strategies, that Democratic critics have singled out for its aggressive tactics.Of the top 10 Democratic groups with the oldest average age for refunded donors in California during the last election that refunded at least $75,000, all were Mothership clients.Those groups had an average age range of 74 to 78, the analysis of refund data shows. (WinRed does not itemize which campaigns provide refunds to particular donors, so an equivalent examination is not possible.)More than 40 percent of Facebook ads from Stop Republicans and the Progressive Turnout Project reached users over 65, according to a public database compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic digital consultancy. In comparison, the Biden campaign devoted 18.5 percent of its Facebook ads to that demographic.Mothership said that it does not target people by age. Instead, it said, it screens based on interests and likelihood to donate — and that older people are simply more reliable donors.“We’re proud to raise the funds that allow our clients to outcompete Republican super PACs and elect progressive and diverse Democrats across the country,” Maya Garcia, a principal at Mothership, said in a statement. She added that the leaders of the firm “never want anyone to make an accidental contribution,” that it displays its organizations’ names prominently and that it works “to ensure all refund requests are handled quickly.”The company declined to say if it receives a commission on money it raises online. The Washington Post reported in 2019 that its commission was as high as 15 percent.A debate among Democrats on tacticsToday, most leading Republican groups deploy prechecked recurring boxes and other aggressive tactics, but in Democratic circles a debate is raging about the ethics of online solicitations. There are two clear camps: those who rose through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House fund-raising arm, and its highly aggressive program, including Mothership Strategies, and those more aligned with the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders.The D.C.C.C.’s operation is one of the few Democratic groups that continue to use the prechecked boxes. It has also experimented with another processing platform while ActBlue moves to block the practice entirely. In June, one fund-raising pitch came from a sender listed as “SOCIAL SECURITY UPDATE (via DCCC)” — though on platforms like Gmail, the D.C.C.C. part was cut off unless people clicked through.Murshed Zaheed, a veteran Democratic digital consultant, is among those pushing for what he calls “ethical email,” which he defined as not deceiving supporters.“I cannot tell you how much I hate the words ‘email list,’” he said. He said the phrase “dehumanizes” people and treats them “as A.T.M. machines.”For Mr. Vaughan, the former NASA scientist, his final credit card bill was a maze of repeating charges to the same campaigns, sometimes on the same day.The note his son discovered had the words “WinRed charges to be refunded” written clearly. It was dated Nov. 25 — the same day that federal records show $1,144 was refunded.It was only about 10 percent of his total giving. His son has been unable to recoup the rest.Rachel Shorey contributed research. More

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      Prosecutors Investigating Whether Ukrainians Meddled in 2020 Election

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      The Brooklyn federal inquiry has examined whether former and current Ukrainian officials tried to interfere in the election, including funneling misleading information through Rudolph W. Giuliani.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials helped orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Biden and tilt the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor, according to people with knowledge of the matter. More

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      Former Mayor of Fall River, Mass. Is Convicted of Corruption

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      Jasiel F. Correia II, who at 24 was the Massachusetts city’s youngest mayor, was convicted of charges related to extorting marijuana vendors and defrauding investors.The former mayor of Fall River, Mass., who was elected at 23 after pitching himself as an ambitious entrepreneur and product of the city, was convicted by a federal jury on Friday of defrauding investors of more than $200,000 and extorting marijuana vendors.The former mayor, Jasiel F. Correia II, 29, used investor money from his tech start-up to pay for lavish goods, trips and clothing, according to an indictment. After becoming mayor of Fall River, which is about 50 miles south of Boston, in 2016, Mr. Correia used his position to gain bribes from marijuana vendors looking to establish their businesses in the city.When he was in college, Mr. Correia founded an app called SnoOwl, which was designed to help local businesses connect with a network of customers. Seven people invested about $360,000 in the app, of which Mr. Correia spent about $230,000 on designer clothing, jewelry, travel, “adult entertainment,” and a Mercedes, according to the indictment.Mr. Correia also used about $10,000 of investor money to pay down his student debt and to fund his political campaign.To conceal the theft, Mr. Correia denied investors access to financial records, lied to them with false updates and also lied to his then-girlfriend, on whom he spent thousands of dollars, telling her that he made his money from the sale of a different app, according to the indictment.After Mr. Correia became Fall River’s mayor, he took bribes from marijuana vendors in exchange for nonopposition letters, which are required in Massachusetts to obtain a license to operate a marijuana business in the state.Bribes from four vendors ranged from more than $75,000 to $250,000 in cash, campaign contributions and other payments, according to court documents.Mr. Correia was convicted on charges of wire fraud, falsifying tax returns and related counts of extortion. Mr. Correia, who is set to be sentenced in September, could face up to 20 years in prison for the wire fraud charges and up to 20 years for the extortion charges.The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Nathaniel R. Mendell, told reporters on Friday that the verdict was “a fitting end to this saga.”“He sold his office, and he sold out the people of Fall River,” Mr. Mendell said.Mr. Correia told reporters that he would appeal.“Eventually, the real truth will come out,” Mr. Correia said. “I will be vindicated, and my future will be very long and great.”Mr. Correia’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, who did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday, told reporters outside the courthouse on Friday that an appeal would most likely come after the sentencing, the television station WPRI reported.“We respect the jury’s verdict, but that’s what we have appeals courts for,” he said.Mr. Correia was indicted in October 2018 for wire fraud and falsifying tax returns, and then again in September 2019 in a superseding indictment for extortion conspiracy and extortion, in addition to other crimes.Mr. Correia, who was 23 when he was elected in 2015, became the city’s youngest mayor and promised to revitalize Fall River, a city that was once home to a booming textile industry but declined as manufacturing went overseas.Mr. Correia, the son of Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants, was born and raised in Fall River and impressed voters with his ambition, confidence and loyalty to the city. In 2008, Fall River named him “Youth of the Year” for his work with teenagers addicted to drugs.By 22, Correia was a self-described entrepreneur with his app SnoOwl, which was released in 2015. He returned to Fall River after college, determined to expand the business there and run for local office.“I’m a product of Fall River,” Mr. Correia told The Herald News in Fall River in 2014. “I’m young, I’m ambitious and I’m a hard worker. I want to see myself and Fall River succeed.”In a special election in March 2019, Mr. Correia was voted out of office but then voted back in on the same ballot. In a general election in November 2019, he ran for re-election and lost.Maria Cramer contributed reporting. More

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      A True Story About Election Fraud

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      A True Story About Election FraudThe Serial Team��Reporting from Bladen County, N.C.Where Is the Evidence?The reporter Zoe Chace asked this question in episode two.0:20When we went to North Carolina to investigate, we were told there was a powerful group tampering with elections, bullying voters and stealing votes — the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black advocacy group.These allegations have never been substantiated. So why do they persist? More

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      How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

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      Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in February. Katie Currid for The New York TimesMarketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious ramifications.“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the “deceptive design” genre.“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.How Refunds to Trump Donors Soared in 2020Refunds are shown as the percentage of money received by each operation to date via WinRed and ActBlue. More

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      How a Sham Candidate Helped Flip a Florida Election

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      The candidate and the man who prosecutors say recruited him to play spoiler in a Florida Senate race last year were both arrested this week.MIAMI — The recruitment of the sham candidate began with a Facebook message at around 4 a.m. on May 15, 2020. “Call me,” a Florida legislator turned lobbyist wrote to an old friend. “I have a question for you.”Later that day, former State Senator Frank Artiles, a Republican, asked Alexis Pedro Rodriguez by phone whether he still owned a home in the suburban Miami village of Palmetto Bay. Because in that case, Mr. Artiles wanted something else: to put his friend’s property and last name to use in the upcoming election.The incumbent Democrat, State Senator José Javier Rodríguez, was on the ballot. And Mr. Artiles, a crafty political operator with a dubious reputation, had a plan: to plant his friend as a candidate and siphon off votes that could defeat Senator Rodríguez.The plan worked, setting off one of Florida’s most brazen electoral scandals in years — even by the heady standards of a state that has long been fertile ground for political scammers. What is still uncertain is how broad the scandal is, whether it had touched other races and whether it was part of an organized effort by Republicans or an interest group to sway legislative races.Mr. Rodriguez, a machine-parts dealer who had been struggling financially, agreed to help Mr. Artiles, who promised him $50,000 in return. He switched from Republican to no party affiliation and qualified for the ballot as Alex Rodriguez. He did not disclose that he actually lived far from the district, in Boca Raton, or that the money for his candidacy came from Mr. Artiles.In November, Senator Rodríguez, an effective legislator who had crusaded for Florida to face the climate change crisis, lost to the Republican challenger, Ileana Garcia, by a mere 32 votes out of more than 215,000 that had been cast. Alex Rodriguez had received 6,382 votes and played the spoiler.It was a devastating loss for Florida Democrats in a year of Republican successes in the state. It was also the result of criminal behavior, prosecutors say.On Thursday, Mr. Artiles, 47, and Mr. Rodriguez, 55, turned themselves in for arrest. They were each charged with three third-degree felony charges related to violating campaign finance law, including for conspiracy to make campaign contributions in excess of legal limits, making those excess contributions and false swearing in connection to an election.Mr. Artiles declined to comment to a scrum of reporters who chased him out of jail on Thursday once he posted a $5,000 bond. “This will be decided in the courts, thank you,” he said.His lawyer, Greg Chonillo, said in a statement on Friday that his client, whose home was raided by investigators on Wednesday, had been cooperative with prosecutors “throughout the course of this investigation.”“We will be investigating this matter fully and zealously, representing our client in court against these charges,” Mr. Chonillo said.Mr. Artiles planned to use Alex Rodriguez as a candidate that would siphon votes away from State Senator José Javier Rodríguez, causing him to lose.Steve Cannon/Associated PressThe story of how Mr. Artiles plotted the scheme, according to the arrest documents, is a classic South Florida racket complete with the sale of a nonexistent Range Rover and wads of cash stored in a home safe.But it leaves unanswered the questions of where the money for the scheme came from — the Republican Senate president said the party had nothing to do with it — and whether the funds were tied to secretive dark money that oozed through two other State Senate races last year. Republicans have controlled the state government for more than two decades.On Friday, Democrats called for campaign finance reform — and for the resignation of Ms. Garcia so that a new election could be held. “Her victory is clearly tainted,” said Manny Diaz, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party.Prosecutors said they had found no ties between her and the scheme by Mr. Artiles and Mr. Rodriguez. On Friday, State Senator Wilton Simpson, the state’s Senate president, issued a joint statement with Ms. Garcia saying that they “support the ongoing efforts of law enforcement.”“Senator Garcia has the full support of President Simpson as she continues to serve her constituents,” the statement said.South Florida has an ignominious history of political and electoral shenanigans, both high profile — fraud that was so rampant in a Miami mayoral election in 1997 that a judge threw out the results — and low rent, such as small-time brokers getting caught unlawfully harvesting absentee ballots.In 2012, former Representative David Rivera, a Republican, was involved in a shadow campaign to try to hurt the electoral chances of his Democratic rival, Joe Garcia. The recruited candidate and Mr. Rivera’s ex-girlfriend, who acted as a go-between, wound up in jail. Mr. Rivera, who was never charged, last month was ordered to pay the Federal Election Commission a $456,000 fine.On Thursday, Katherine Fernández Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, a Democrat, noted that recruiting a sham candidate to deliberately influence an election was not illegal, unless the candidate was also secretly financed.“Is it an attack on our democracy? Is it a dirty political trick?” she said. “Absolutely.”At the center of the latest scandal is Mr. Artiles (pronounced are-TEE-less), who before his arrest this week was perhaps best known in Tallahassee, the state’s capital, for resigning from the Senate in 2017, after he cursed at and used a racist slur before a group of Black lawmakers. His political committee had spent money on “consultants” who were models from Hooters and Playboy without any campaign experience. He once denied punching a college student at a bar near the Capitol.His involvement in recruiting the sham candidate for the Senate District 37 race last year became public in December, when The Miami Herald reported that Mr. Artiles had boasted about planting Mr. Rodriguez on the ballot to a crowd at an election night party held at an Irish pub in Seminole County. “That is me, that was all me,” The Herald quoted Mr. Artiles as saying, citing an anonymous source who was present.Employees and campaign observers working on a manual recount for Florida’s Senate District 37 election between Ileana Garcia and José Javier Rodríguez, at the Miami-Dade Elections Department in November.David Santiago/Miami Herald, via Associated PressThe furor around Mr. Rodriguez’s suspicious candidacy had begun after Election Day, when the results separating Senator Rodríguez and Ms. Garcia, a founder of the group Latinas for Trump, were so tight that they led to a manual recount.Local reporters in Tallahassee, Orlando and Miami found that Mr. Rodriguez along with two mysterious under-the-radar candidates in two other Senate races, one in the Miami area and one in Seminole County, were all likely plants. (Results in the other races were not close.)Politico Florida tied the three candidates to dark money from two political committees that had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of attack fliers to voters during the campaign. The only donor reported was an entity that listed a UPS box in Atlanta as its mailing address. The committees amended their financial reports after Election Day, changing the source of the money to a different donor, this time in Colorado.Investigators with Miami-Dade County’s public corruption investigations unit began sniffing around on Nov. 11, eight days after the election.“It was suspicious that Rodriguez did not appear to have actively campaigned,” Detective Eutimio Cepero of the Miami Police Department wrote in one of the arrest documents. “Additionally, it was learned that political committees were spending money in support of Rodriguez’s candidacy, even though Rodriguez did not actively campaign.”Investigators found that Mr. Artiles ultimately paid $44,708 to Mr. Rodriguez in violation of the state’s $1,000 campaign contribution limit for legislative races. The payments came in various forms, including payments of $3,000 and then $5,000 that Mr. Artiles had stored in his home safe and recorded in a ledger on his desk as well as $2,400 that Mr. Artiles had wired to Mr. Rodriguez’s landlord.There was much distrust between Mr. Artiles and Mr. Rodriguez, who told investigators he thought Mr. Artiles would not come through with the money he had promised him. At one point, when Mr. Artiles was looking for a used Range Rover to buy his daughter, Mr. Rodriguez concocted a story about finding one in Jacksonville for $10,900. Mr. Artiles paid Mr. Rodriguez for the car, even though it did not exist. (That money was not considered by prosecutors as part of Mr. Artiles’s payments to Mr. Rodriguez for his candidacy.)But where Mr. Artiles got so much cash is still unknown.“Frank Artiles is not a lone wolf,” said William R. Barzee, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez. “Over half a million dollars was spent by political operatives working in the shadows to prop up ghost candidates in three separate Senate races, all in one cycle. This was a well-thought-out, calculated and coordinated plan to steal Senate seats throughout Florida.”The “greatest beneficiary of these actions,” Mr. Barzee added, “is the Republican Party of Florida.”Mr. Simpson, the Senate president who ran the Republican Senate campaigns in 2020, has said that he had nothing to do with the effort. “I think we don’t have all the facts,” he told reporters in Tallahassee on Thursday. “We’re learning what you’re learning as you report it.”“I hope this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said former State Representative Juan-Carlos Planas, known as J.C., who was Senator Rodríguez’s lawyer during the recount and who himself once fought a candidate who had been planted against him: his second cousin, who appeared on the Republican primary ballot as Juan E. “J.P.” Planas.Senator Rodríguez, 42, lamented that weak enforcement mechanisms continue to allow questionable candidates to make it on the ballot.“It’s a shame that it has to reach this level of criminality for there to be any kind of consequence, because this is not the first time these types of schemes have been put together,” he said. “But this is the Wild West here in Florida.” More

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      Watchdog to Examine Whether Justice Dept. Helped Trump Effort to Overturn Election

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWatchdog to Examine Whether Justice Dept. Helped Trump Effort to Overturn ElectionThe inquiry was announced after revelations about a plot between Donald Trump and a top former department official to promote false claims of voter fraud by replacing the acting attorney general.Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said he would investigate whether officials aided President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesJan. 25, 2021, 7:28 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department watchdog announced Monday that he had opened an investigation into whether any of the department’s officials tried to undo the results of the presidential election, as scrutiny of former President Donald J. Trump and his associates builds ahead of his impeachment trial.The investigation by the department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, followed efforts by Mr. Trump and a top federal law enforcement official, Jeffrey Clark, to push other Justice Department leaders to falsely assert that continuing fraud investigations cast doubt on the election results. As detailed by The New York Times in recent days, Mr. Trump was said to have considered installing Mr. Clark as acting attorney general to carry out the scheme.“The inspector general is initiating an investigation into whether any former or current D.O.J. official engaged in an improper attempt to have D.O.J. seek to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Horowitz said in a statement, adding that he was announcing the inquiry to reassure the public that the matter was being examined.The inquiry adds to the increasing scrutiny on Mr. Trump’s attempts to wield the power of the Justice Department to advance his false claims about the election in the final weeks of his presidency. It follows another inspector general investigation into whether a federal prosecutor in Georgia was improperly pushed to help and a broader Democratic-led Senate inquiry into pressure on the department to aid Mr. Trump’s cause.Mr. Trump sought repeatedly to compel the Justice Department to back his baseless claims of election irregularities, ultimately prompting the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to publicly state early last month that the department had found no voting fraud on a scale that would affect the election results. Mr. Barr fell out of favor with Mr. Trump over the issue and left his post within weeks.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.The investigation underscores fears among Senate Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, that if they do not distance themselves from Mr. Trump and undo his grip on the party, a steady drip of negative revelations paired with his own erratic behavior could damage their political fortunes.“If Trump loses credibility because it appears he’s acted in a way that no one can justify, the leverage that he might have over the Republican Party could be diffused,” said William Marshall, a professor at the University of North Carolina who teaches and writes on presidential power. “The more that indicates he behaved improperly makes it less easy to defend him and less easy to stand by him.”Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, had urged Mr. Horowitz over the weekend to open an investigation, saying that it was “unconscionable that a Trump Justice Department leader would conspire to subvert the people’s will.”The inspector general also noted that his inquiry would be limited to the Justice Department because other agencies did not fall within his purview, a nod to the array of people who sought during Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office to find a way to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.This month, Mr. Horowitz opened an investigation into whether Trump administration officials pressured Byung J. Pak, at the time the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who abruptly resigned after it became clear to Mr. Trump that he would not take actions to cast doubt on or undo the results of the election, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.Separately, the Senate Judiciary Committee said this weekend that it had initiated its own oversight inquiry into officials including Mr. Clark, who was the head of the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division and the acting head of its civil division.Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to the Justice Department saying that he would investigate efforts by Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark to use the agency “to further Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.”Jeffrey Clark pushed Justice Department leaders to falsely assert that continuing voter fraud investigations cast doubt on the election results.Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressMr. Durbin asked the acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, to preserve documents, emails and messages related to meetings between top Justice Department officials under Mr. Trump, the White House and Mr. Trump, as well as any communications related to Mr. Pak’s resignation.Mr. Biden’s win was deemed valid after recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia declared him the victor and after the Trump campaign team was unable to prove widespread fraud in court cases in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Dozens of F.B.I. investigations uncovered no voter fraud on a scale that would have changed the results of the election, according to Justice Department officials briefed on the cases.Dozens of Republicans in Congress were among those who backed Mr. Trump’s false claims, including Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania. On Monday, he confirmed a Times report that he had introduced Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark, giving the president access to the sole top Justice Department official willing to entertain the idea that Mr. Biden had not won the election.Mr. Perry, a member of the pro-Trump, hard-line Freedom Caucus, said in a statement to a Pennsylvania public radio affiliate that he spoke with Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark about election fraud claims.“Throughout the past four years, I worked with Assistant Attorney General Clark on various legislative matters,” Mr. Perry said. “When President Trump asked if I would make an introduction, I obliged.”Allies of Mr. Clark have characterized the conversations as simply laying out the legal options available to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Clark’s former colleagues have said there were no more legal remedies that Mr. Trump could have pursued through the department.Still, their assessment did not stop Mr. Trump from pressuring the Justice Department to fight harder to find a way to help him. When Mr. Barr declined to appoint special counsels to examine voting irregularities or take other measures that would have helped to throw the election results into doubt, he and Mr. Trump agreed that he should leave the department, according to three people familiar with their conversation. Mr. Barr stipulated that the deputy attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, replace him, the people said.Mr. Trump began to push Mr. Rosen to promote baseless suspicions about voting fraud the day after announcing that Mr. Barr would leave and kept up the pressure through the last weeks of December, pushing him to open investigations and to challenge Mr. Biden’s win before the Supreme Court.But as the department’s top officials pushed back, Mr. Trump separately opened a line of communication with Mr. Clark, who seemed more amenable to his theory that he had won the election, according to five people familiar with the matter, asking him to publicize inquiries that could cast doubt on the election.Mr. Trump’s deliberations over whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark also set off a crisis among other senior Justice Department officials, who pledged to quit should Mr. Rosen be fired. The vow was said to have helped persuade Mr. Trump not to act.Mr. Clark has said that this account is inaccurate without specifying further and has said that all of his conduct was legal.While the machinations between Mr. Trump, Mr. Clark and Mr. Perry will not be the focus of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial — which accuses him of inciting the riot at the Capitol — Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, suggested the matter would be presented to senators.“This is powerful motive evidence,” Mr. Swalwell said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More