Frauds and Swindling

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      Trump Prepares to Surrender in New York as Police Brace for Protests

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      Donald J. Trump prepared on Friday to surrender to prosecutors in Manhattan next week as the New York police braced for protests and sharply partisan responses from Democrats and Republicans ushered in a tumultuous time for a deeply polarized nation.A day after a grand jury indicted Mr. Trump and made him the first former president to face criminal charges, metal barricades were up around the criminal courthouse on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Trump is expected to enter the often grimy and ill-lit building with his Secret Service protection to answer charges before a state judge on Tuesday.Dozens of reporters and camera crews camped out across the street on Friday, while 20 court officers stood at the courthouse entrances, monitoring activity on the street.Mr. Trump intends to travel to New York on Monday and stay the night at Trump Tower, people familiar with his preparations said. He has no plans to hold a news conference or address the public while he is in New York, the people said.Mr. Trump remained largely quiet on Friday at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Florida, where he spent the day talking on the telephone with advisers. One of his lawyers, Joe Tacopina, said in a television interview that the former president would not take a plea deal and was prepared to go to trial, a typically defiant stance that is likely to endear him to his supporters, who see the prosecution as a politically motivated vendetta by Democrats.Late on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump burst out on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded, writing in all capital letters that Democrats were “INDICTING A TOTALLY INNOCENT MAN IN AN ACT OF OBSTRUCTION AND BLATANT ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” He concluded that it was all happening “WHILE OUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL!”The former president is expected to be arraigned in Manhattan criminal court on charges related to payments made just before the 2016 presidential election to buy the silence of a porn star who said she had an extramarital affair with him. The former president, who has denied the affair, has been charged with more than two dozen counts in a sealed indictment, according to two people familiar with the matter, although the exact charges remain unknown.Conservative Republicans continued to criticize the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, whose office rebuked House Republicans for attempting to interfere in the case.The case, which could drag on for months and whose outcome is far from clear, is likely to test the country’s institutions and the rule of law. It will also have deep repercussions for the 2024 campaign for the White House, a race in which Mr. Trump remains the Republican front-runner.Mr. Trump has sought to capitalize on the criminal charges to energize his core supporters. On Thursday, he called Mr. Bragg “a disgrace” and denounced the indictment as “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.”His message was repeated across the conservative media sphere on Friday by Republican politicians and pundits.Mr. Trump was roundly defended on Fox News, including by hosts who had reviled him in private. Although the host Tucker Carson said of Mr. Trump in early 2021, “I hate him passionately,” according to a text released as part of a defamation suit against Fox, on Thursday Mr. Carlson called the indictment “one in a long line of unprecedented steps that permanent Washington has taken to stop Donald Trump from holding office in a democracy.” He also said: “Probably not the best time to give up your AR-15.”Supporters of Mr. Trump gathered outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday after the indictment was reported.Josh Ritchie for The New York TimesEven many of Mr. Trump’s potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination snapped into line behind him in the hours after news of the indictment broke, looking more like allies than competitors. All passed on the opportunity to criticize the former president — and some rushed to his defense — in a sign of just how reluctant 2024 contenders are to directly confront him and antagonize his many millions of supporters in the party.Mike Pence — the former vice president whose life was put at risk when Jan. 6 rioters sought him out after Mr. Trump blamed him for allowing Congress to ratify the results of the 2020 election — denounced the indictment for what he called “a campaign finance issue” as an “outrage” and a “political prosecution.”Speaking at the National Review Institute in Washington, Mr. Pence said that Mr. Bragg’s prosecution “should be offensive to every American left, right and center,” and that he believed that “the American people will see this for what it is.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a potential presidential candidate who has clashed with Mr. Trump, also rushed to his defense, posting on Twitter that the indictment was “un-American” and amounted to “the weaponization of the legal system.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.A few in the G.O.P. remained silent, among them Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and Senator John Thune, the second-ranking Senate Republican. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who is also flirting with a presidential run, appeared to be keeping mum, as well. So too was Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and one-time Trump ally who is considering a 2024 run for president and who recently vowed that he would never again support the former president.The indictment in Manhattan concerns hush money payments made in the final days of the 2016 campaign to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film star who had threatened to go public with her claim that she had a short affair with Mr. Trump a decade earlier.Ms. Daniels was paid $130,000 not to speak publicly about her claims, and the payments were channeled through Mr. Trump’s fixer and personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, who has said Mr. Trump approved the scheme.The Manhattan case is likely to hinge on the way Mr. Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, handled reimbursing Mr. Cohen. Internal Trump Organization records falsely classified the reimbursements as legal expenses, helping conceal the purpose of the payments, according to Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump’s lawyers deny this.In New York, falsifying business records can be a felony if it is done to cover up another crime, and in this case prosecutors are expected to argue that the underlying crime was a violation of campaign finance law. The exact charges, however, will not be unsealed until Tuesday when Mr. Trump is brought before Justice Juan M. Merchan, a New York County jurist with 16 years on the bench, who has been assigned to handle the case.Justice Merchan also oversaw the criminal tax fraud trial of Mr. Trump’s family real estate firm late last year.On Friday, Mr. Trump took aim at Justice Merchan on Truth Social, claiming that the judge hated him and that he had “railroaded” Allen H. Weisselberg, a former executive of the Trump Organization who has pleaded guilty to tax fraud charges.The indictment in Manhattan concerns hush money payments made in the final days of 2016 to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film star.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesMr. Trump is also under investigation in Georgia, where prosecutors in Fulton County are expected to make a decision soon on whether to seek an indictment against him and his allies over their efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.Mr. Trump famously made a call to the state secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to “find 11,780 votes,” which would have given him a victory in the state.A special grand jury has heard evidence in the Georgia case and produced a final report, though its recommendations on charges remain under seal.In Washington, a Justice Department special counsel is leading two separate investigations, into Mr. Trump’s broader actions to cling to power after his 2020 electoral defeat and into his hoarding of documents marked as classified after leaving office.If the other criminal investigations result in charges, there is no guarantee that the New York case will be the first to go to trial.“The fact that New York is first to indict does not mean it will be the first to try,” said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor. “A federal indictment will be swifter if it comes.”Mr. Gillers noted that New York is more receptive to pretrial appeals than federal courts, meaning there will be many opportunities for Mr. Trump’s lawyers to delay a trial in the state by filing motions seeking, for instance, a change of venue or to remove a judge.The Manhattan district attorney’s office is also under pressure from House Republicans, who have used their investigative power to demand the district attorney turn over documents and testimony related to the Trump investigation, an extraordinary attempt by members of Congress to intervene in a criminal inquiry.Mr. Bragg’s office fired back in a letter on Friday, accusing three Republican committee chairmen who demanded documents — Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio on the Judiciary Committee, James R. Comer of Kentucky on the Oversight Committee and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin on the Administration Committee — of aiding a campaign to denigrate the district attorney’s office.The letter noted that before being indicted, Mr. Trump had used his social media platform to insult Mr. Bragg and threaten “death and destruction” if he were charged.“You could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury,” wrote Leslie Dubeck, the general counsel for the district attorney’s office.“Instead, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump’s efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges,” Ms. Dubeck wrote.Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum, Neil Vigdor, Ben Shpigel, Richard Fausset, Danny Hakim and Chelsia Rose Marcius in New York and by Luke Broadwater, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage in Washington. More

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      Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

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      Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.“Then, six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.Turnout in recent cycles has surged for young voters, who were energized by issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.They voted in rising numbers during the midterms last year in Kansas and Michigan, which both had referendums about abortion. And college students, who had long paid little attention to elections, emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms.But even with such gains, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program for the Brennan Center for Justice, said there was still progress to be made.“Their turnout is still far outpaced by their older counterparts,” Mr. Morales-Doyle said.Now, with the 2024 presidential election underway, the battle over young voters has heightened significance.Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration jumped 66 percent among 18- and 19-year-old voters, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.Gov. Brad Little of Idaho gave his approval to a law that bans student ID cards as a form of voter identification.Kyle Green/Associated PressOut of 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others — North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — that do not accept any student IDs, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a group that tracks legislation.Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules on student IDs that colleges and universities have struggled to meet, though some Wisconsin schools have been successful.Proponents of such restrictions often say they are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though instances of fraud are rare. Two lawsuits were filed in state and federal court shortly after Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed the student ID prohibition into law on March 15. “The facts aren’t particularly persuasive if you’re just trying to get through all of these voter suppression bills,” Betsy McBride, the president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, one of the plaintiffs in the state lawsuit, said before the bill’s signing.A fight over out-of-state students in New HampshireIn New Hampshire, which has one of the highest percentages in the nation of college students from out of state, G.O.P. lawmakers proposed a bill this year that would have barred voting access for those students, but it died in committee after failing to muster a single vote.Nearly 59 percent of students at traditional colleges in New Hampshire came from out of state in 2020, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts.The University of New Hampshire had opposed the legislation, while students and other critics had raised questions about its constitutionality.The bill, which would have required students to show their in-state tuition statements when registering to vote, would have even hampered New Hampshire residents attending private schools like Dartmouth College, which doesn’t have an in-state rate, said McKenzie St. Germain, the campaign director for the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting rights group.Sandra Panek, one of the sponsors of the bill that died, said she would like to bring it back if she can get bipartisan support. “We want to encourage our young people to vote,” said Ms. Panek, who regularly tweets about election conspiracy theories. But, she added, elections should be reflective of “those who reside in the New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results.”A Texas ban on campus polling places has made little headwayIn Texas, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill to eliminate all polling places on college campuses this year, Carrie Isaac, cited safety concerns and worries about political violence.Voting advocates see a different motive.“This is just the latest in a long line of attacks on young people’s right to vote in Texas,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that seeks to empower younger voters.Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate all college polling places in the state.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMs. Isaac has also introduced similar legislation to eliminate polling places at primary and secondary schools. In an interview, she mentioned the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers — an attack that was not connected to voting.“Emotions run very high,” Ms. Isaac said. “Poll workers have complained about increased threats to their lives. It’s just not conducive, I believe, to being around children of all ages.”The legislation has been referred to the House Elections Committee, but has yet to receive a hearing in the Legislature. Voting rights experts have expressed skepticism that the bill — one of dozens related to voting introduced for this session — would advance.G.O.P. voting restrictions flounder in other statesIn Virginia, one Republican failed in her effort to repeal a state law that lets teenagers register to vote starting at age 16 if they will turn 18 in time for a general election. Part of a broader package of proposed election restrictions, the bill had no traction in the G.O.P.-controlled House, where it died this year in committee after no discussion.And in Wyoming, concerns about making voting harder on older people appears to have inadvertently helped younger voters. A G.O.P. bill that would have banned most college IDs from being used as voter identification was narrowly defeated in the state House because it also would have banned Medicare and Medicaid insurance cards as proof of identity at the polls, a provision that Republican lawmakers worried could be onerous for older people.“In my mind, all we’re doing is kind of hurting students and old people,” Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the bill, said during a House debate in February.But some barriers are already in placeGeorgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, so students at private institutions, including several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification.Georgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, a rule that means students at private institutions, like several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification. Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIn Ohio, which has for years not accepted student IDs for voting, Republicans in January approved a broader photo ID requirement that also bars students from using university account statements or utility bills for voting purposes, as they had in the past.The Idaho bill will take effect in January. Scott Herndon and Tina Lambert, the bill’s sponsors in the Senate and the House, did not respond to requests for comment, but Mr. Herndon said during a Feb. 24 session that student identification cards had lower vetting standards than those issued by the government.“It isn’t about voter fraud,” he said. “It’s just making sure that the people who show up to vote are who they say they are.”Republicans contended that nearly 99 percent of Idahoans had used their driver’s licenses to vote, but the bill’s opponents pointed out that not all students have driver’s licenses or passports — and that there is a cost associated with both.Mae Roos, a senior at Borah High School in Boise, testified against the bill at a Feb. 10 hearing.“When we’re taught from the very beginning, when we first start trying to participate, that voting is an expensive process, an arduous process, a process rife with barriers, we become disillusioned with that great dream of our democracy,” Ms. Roos said. “We start to believe that our voices are not valued.” More

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      Sex, Lies and … Trump. What More Can You Ask For?

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      One thing we can be sure of: If this Stormy Daniels thing hurts Donald Trump politically, it will be for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with sex.Nobody cares whether or not the two of them once had an, um, intimate assignation. Although I do enjoy recalling that Daniels has referred to it as “the worst 90 seconds of my life.”Right now, the most pressing question is whether Trump committed a crime during the 2016 presidential campaign when his people paid Daniels to keep quiet about their mini-affair, an affair Trump denies ever took place. His lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and served more than a year in prison, but that apparently hasn’t caused Trump to question his own conduct.“The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,” Trump tweeted a few years back. “Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction.”We will stop here to note that our former president was a little off when it came to the word “role.” Only mentioning because it gives me an opportunity to recall that he once sent me a missive calling me a liar with “the face of a pig” in which he misspelled “too.”But about the sex. Our political history shows that while people are extremely interested in hearing about politicians’ bad behavior, they don’t base their votes on it.We’ve got a Republican presidential primary coming our way, and if Ron DeSantis is a big player, I think we can presume the Florida governor will win any morality standoff. This guy is apparently a very devoted husband. Whose wife, frankly, seems to be the brains behind his political career.DeSantis has been more or less following his party’s game plan, which is to change the subject when Trump’s legal problems come up and attack Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for presumably bringing the charges.“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said recently. “I just, I can’t speak to that.”Aha! The mention-by-attacking-the-mention approach! And the adding of “alleged” to all discussions of the affair. Much better than the DeSantis tactic of citing “people like our founding fathers” when it comes to exemplary private behavior. Once you get past George Washington it doesn’t take long before you are face to face with Thomas Jefferson’s four-decade entanglement with the enslaved Sally Hemings.The grand tradition of political sex scandals goes back a long way. The ancient Romans, after all, speculated about whether the emperor Nero and his mother had an incestuous … thing going. In early America, even deeply nonrambunctious John Adams was a target — people gossiped that he’d dispatched Gen. Charles Pinckney across the Atlantic to fetch four beautiful Englishwomen for them to share. (“I declare on my honor, if this be true, General Pinckney has kept them all four to himself and cheated me of my two,” Adams declared.)The people who are really affected by this sort of public gossip are the politicians who are the target, some of whom suffer greatly. Can’t believe Bill Clinton isn’t haunted by the fact that if one quote of his goes down in history, it’ll probably be, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”Or take my favorite subject, Grover Cleveland, who was the target of huge headlines claiming, inaccurately, that he’d fathered an illegitimate child. None of that bothered the citizenry — he won the popular vote for president in three straight elections. But the publicity tortured him, and for years his opponents enjoyed singing, “Ma, Ma, where’s Pa?”Not sure Grover ever totally got over it, even when his supporters got to retort, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”Now, publicity is never going to be an instrument of torture for Donald Trump. In fact, he’s reportedly all jazzed up about the possibility of doing one of the famous “perp walks” in which a suspect is paraded by Manhattan law officers past reporters after he’s arrested.And as we’ve seen, the American voters who liked Trump to begin with aren’t going to be turned off by a sex scandal. DeSantis’s support among Republicans actually seems to be dropping, maybe even sinking.There are way better lines of attack. Which do you think is worse for a president of the United States?A. Tried to bully a Georgia official into changing the election results.B. Ignored Justice Department demands that he return a pile of classified government documents he took with him when he left office.C. Incited his followers to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.D. No, no, I’m getting a headache.We haven’t even gotten to his advice to people who don’t love their children. That was part of a recent Trump video, in which he bragged that thanks to his reforms, farmers’ children wouldn’t have to pay inheritance tax on agricultural property.And Trump said he had also benevolently taken into consideration landowners who “don’t love your children so much.”Yes! “And there are some people that don’t,” he continued. “And maybe deservedly so, it won’t matter because frankly, you don’t have to leave them anything.”OK, Don Jr., this sort of thing might actually make you a sympathetic figure.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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      Ex-Attorney General in Arizona Buried Report Refuting Voter Fraud Claims

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      Under Mark Brnovich, a Republican who left office in January, a 10,000-hour review did not see the light of day. His Democratic successor, Kris Mayes, released investigators’ findings.Mark Brnovich, a Republican who served as Arizona’s attorney general until January, buried the findings of a 10,000-hour review by his office that found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, newly released documents reveal.The documents were released on Wednesday by Mr. Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat who took office last month as the top law enforcement official in the battleground state, which remains at the forefront of the election denial movement.The sweeping review was completed last year after politicians and other conspiracy theorists aligned with former President Donald J. Trump inundated Mr. Brnovich’s office with election falsehoods. They claimed baselessly that large numbers of people had voted twice; that ballots had been sent to dead people; and that ballots with traces of bamboo had been flown in from Korea and filled out in advance for Joseph R. Biden Jr., who won Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes.But investigators discredited these claims, according to a report on their findings that was withheld by Mr. Brnovich. (The Washington Post reported earlier on the findings.)“These allegations were not supported by any factual evidence when researched by our office,” Reginald Grigsby, chief special agent in the office’s special investigation’s section, wrote in a summary of the findings on Sept. 19 of last year.The summary was part of documents and internal communications that were made public on Wednesday by Ms. Mayes, who narrowly won an open-seat race in November to become attorney general.“The results of this exhaustive and extensive investigation show what we have suspected for over two years — the 2020 election in Arizona was conducted fairly and accurately by elections officials,” Ms. Mayes said in a statement. “The 10,000-plus hours spent diligently investigating every conspiracy theory under the sun distracted this office from its core mission of protecting the people of Arizona from real crime and fraud.”Efforts to reach Mr. Brnovich, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate last year, were not immediately successful.His former chief of staff, Joseph Kanefield, who was also Mr. Brnovich’s chief deputy, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In the eight-page summary of investigators’ findings, Mr. Grigsby wrote that the attorney general’s office had interviewed and tried to collect evidence from Cyber Ninjas, a Florida firm that conducted a heavily criticized review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, at the direction of the Republican-controlled State Senate.Investigators also made several attempts to gather information from True the Vote, a nonprofit group founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, a prominent election denier, the summary stated..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” Mr. Grigsby wrote. “The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”When investigators tried to speak to Wendy Rogers, an election-denying Republican state lawmaker, they said in the summary that she refused to cooperate and told them she was waiting to see the “perp walk” of those who had committed election fraud.Ms. Rogers, who was censured by the State Senate in March 2022 after giving a speech at a white nationalist gathering, declined to comment on Thursday.In a series of emails exchanged by Mr. Brnovich’s staff members last April, Mr. Grigsby appeared to object several times to the language in a letter drafted on behalf of Mr. Brnovich that explained investigators’ findings. Its intended recipient was Karen Fann, a Republican who was the State Senate’s president and was a catalyst for the Cyber Ninjas review in Arizona.One of the statements that Mr. Grigsby highlighted as problematic centered on election integrity in Maricopa County.“Our overall assessment is that the current election system in Maricopa County involving the verification and handling of early ballots is broke,” Mr. Brnovich’s draft letter stated.But Mr. Grigsby appeared to reach an opposite interpretation, writing that investigators had concluded that the county followed its procedures for verifying signatures on early ballots.“We did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election,” a suggested edit was written beneath the proposed language.Ms. Fann did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In his role in Arizona, Mr. Brnovich was something of an enigma. He defended the state’s vote count after the 2020 presidential election, drawing the ire of Mr. Trump. The former president sharply criticized Mr. Brnovich in June and endorsed his Republican opponent, Blake Masters, who won the Senate primary but lost in the general election.But Mr. Brnovich has also suggested that the 2020 election revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast last spring, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.”In January, as one of Ms. Mayes’s first acts in office, she redirected an election integrity unit that Mr. Brnovich had created, focusing its work instead on addressing voter suppression.The unit’s former leader, Jennifer Wright, meanwhile, joined a legal effort to invalidate Ms. Mayes’s narrow victory in November.Ms. Mayes has said that she did not share the priorities of Mr. Brnovich, whom she previously described as being preoccupied with voter fraud despite isolated cases. The office has five pending voter fraud investigations. More

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      John Eastman Is Defiant as Trump-Related Investigations Proliferate

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      A legal reckoning awaits a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss. But in Mr. Eastman’s telling, he was far from a criminal.WASHINGTON — John C. Eastman, a legal architect of Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times under questioning by the House Jan. 6 committee.But in recently released testimony from the committee’s investigation, other witnesses had plenty to say about him.Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr. Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world. Greg Jacob, the legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, characterized Mr. Eastman’s legal advice as “gravely, gravely irresponsible,” calling him the “serpent in the ear” of Mr. Trump. Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, recounted “chewing out” Mr. Eastman. Pat A. Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr. Eastman’s ideas “nutty.”In the coming months, Mr. Eastman will be facing a legal reckoning. He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments. The F.B.I. seized his iPhone. And the Jan. 6 committee, in one of its last acts, asked the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Eastman on a range of criminal charges, including obstructing a congressional proceeding. For good measure, he faces a disciplinary bar proceeding in California.A once-obscure scholar at the right-wing Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman joined the Trump camp shortly after the election and was soon among a group of lawyers who, with the president’s blessing, largely commandeered decision-making from lawyers at the White House and on the Trump campaign.He championed a two-pronged strategy that the Jan. 6 committee portrayed as a coup plot. The first was enlisting party officials to organize slates of bogus electors in swing states where Mr. Trump lost, even after the results had been certified and recertified, as in Georgia. The second was pressuring Mr. Pence to deviate from the vice president’s traditionally ceremonial role and decline to certify all the electoral votes on Jan. 6.While Mr. Eastman refused to answer most of the committee’s questions, he has hardly been at a loss for words. At the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, held on the Ellipse moments before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol, he spoke ominously of stolen elections, voting machine chicanery and ballots stuffed in a “secret folder.” Over the last two years he has remained defiant in a string of public appearances and interviews, and painted a picture sharply at odds with other accounts, most notably those of Mr. Pence and two of his aides who cooperated with the House committee.In Mr. Eastman’s telling of the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he was far from a criminal. In fact, in a recent interview — a fuller version of one he gave to The New York Times in the fall of 2021 — he says he was helping to head off a potentially more perilous outcome.Mr. Eastman spoke of voter fraud at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, just before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol.Jim Bourg/ReutersHe claims that in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4, he helped convince Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence did not have the power to pick whomever he wanted as president. And Mr. Eastman said his advice to the president and vice president was only that Mr. Pence should pause the certification of the election, giving legislatures more time to consider fraud allegations in certain states where Mr. Trump had lost.“I think my greatest contribution to this conversation is to have backed Trump away from the notion that Pence could just simply gavel him as re-elected,” Mr. Eastman said during the interview at his lawyer’s office in Washington, just blocks from the White House. “And, you know, you look at some of his tweets before that Jan. 4 meeting, he’s saying things like that, because that’s what people out there are saying. But if you look at his speech on Jan. 6, after I weigh in at that meeting, he’s saying exactly the opposite.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Few in the White House, however, saw him as anything close to a voice of moderation amid the riot that followed. And Mr. Eastman’s account differs in significant ways from those provided by Mr. Pence and his aides.The former vice president refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee but addressed the issue in a recent opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pence wrote that on Jan. 5, a day after first meeting with Mr. Eastman in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump summoned the vice president for another meeting where “the president’s lawyers, including Mr. Eastman, were now requesting that I simply reject the electors.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.He said that he “later learned that Mr. Eastman had conceded to my general counsel that rejecting electoral votes was a bad idea and any attempt to do so would be quickly overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. This guy didn’t even believe what he was telling the president.”The crux of Mr. Eastman’s defense is that he was simply a lawyer offering advice, and that he was acting in good faith, since he still believes many of the fraud claims that were made. “I’m not backing down on that,” he said. “I mean, the amount of evidence, even if I’m wrong about it, was certainly enough to have warranted further review.”In an email to Mike Pence’s lawyer on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. Eastman urged that the vice president should not certify the electoral vote.House Select Committee, via Associated PressAsked what he based such claims on, he cited a report issued last year by Michael J. Gableman, a former Wisconsin judge who was hired, and later fired, by the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos. The report endorsed a host of debunked claims. He also cited the deeply flawed documentary “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative activist who once pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance fraud. (He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.)In recent weeks, Mr. Eastman has continued to assert himself as a far-right stalwart, signing a letter endorsing dissident Republicans’ ultimately failed efforts to block Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from becoming speaker of the House. Among the other signatories to the letter was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman once clerked. In her own testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Thomas referred to Mr. Eastman as “an active participant with the ‘Thomas clique’ clerks” who keep in touch.Perhaps Mr. Eastman’s most immediate potential exposure comes in the criminal investigation into election interference in Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. One of Mr. Eastman’s lawyers said last year that his client was “probably a target” in the inquiry, but his lawyers said this month that he had received no notification that he is one.Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director of Election Day operations in Georgia, testified to the Jan. 6 committee that he later felt “ashamed” at having taken part in the plan orchestrated by Mr. Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, to assemble bogus slates of Trump electors in Georgia and other states that Mr. Trump had lost.“I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges,” he said. “It was clear to me that he was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the vice president to accept these slates of electors just regardless, without any approval from a governor, without any approval from, you know, the voters or a court, or anything like that.”Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said in an email that “if Sinner’s testimony, or similar testimony, is deemed credible, then John Eastman faces considerable risk of prosecution.”“If Eastman was part of a conspiracy to trick Georgia citizens into signing false election documents, neither his role as an attorney nor a personal belief that election results were tainted by fraud could justify such criminal conduct,” he added.In addition to his central role in the electors plan, Mr. Eastman appeared remotely before a Georgia State Senate panel on Dec. 3, 2020, and made several false claims about the election. Among them was the assertion that “the number of underaged individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”Asked about the claim during the interview last month, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who made an error that was later corrected, and that the actual number was about 2,000 who “were only 16 when they registered.” The new figure, he said, came from the same consultant. In a statement, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office said that “the system literally does not allow a person to register if they don’t have a birth date that makes them at least 17.5 years old.”A review of the data used by Mr. Eastman showed that he was referring to any Georgians who were recorded as having registered early going back to the 1920s; data entry errors appeared to be a common culprit, with many people’s registration year listed in place of their birth year. A review by The Times found only about a dozen Georgians who were recorded as having registered in 2020 when they were 16, in what appeared most likely to be another data-entry problem. Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment and co-author of a lengthy report on the Fulton County inquiry, said Mr. Eastman “was referred for criminal prosecution by the Jan. 6 committee, with good reason,” adding that if charges are brought in Georgia “it’s hard to imagine that D.A. Fani Willis does not include him.”Jack Begg More

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      The Costuming of George Santos

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      George Santos used fashion to flout the rules.There is a scene at the beginning of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the 1999 film adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith book, in which Tom Ripley, the young man who becomes one of fiction’s greatest fakers, borrows a Princeton jacket from a friend to sit in for the piano player at a ritzy garden party. From that assumed finery, an entire novel’s worth of cons are born.It’s not unlike Frank Abagnale shrugging on a PanAm pilot’s uniform in “Catch Me If You Can” to convince the watching world he is a pilot, or Anna Sorokin, a.k.a. Anna Delvey, the fake heiress of recent grift, swanning through New York society in Celine sunglasses and Gucci sandals. Or even Elizabeth Holmes assuming the black turtleneck of Steve Jobs, and with it his mystique.Throughout history, the greatest grifters have understood that dressing the part is half the game. And so it has been with George Santos, the Republican congressman representing parts of Long Island and Queens, who has been unmasked as having fabricated pretty much his entire résumé in his quest to get elected, potentially committing campaign finance fraud in the process.Why, people keep asking, did it take so long for his lies to be revealed? Why did no one think to poke deeper? Why did the people who did know something fishy was going on not speak up?In part because he just looked so darn convincing.He went to Horace Mann, Baruch and N.Y.U. and came from money? Behold, the uniform of preppy private-school boys everywhere: the button-up white shirt, crew-neck sweater (most often in the old-school colors of periwinkle and gray), blue blazer and khaki trousers, like something straight out of “Dead Poets Society.”More on the George Santos ControversyBehind The Times’s Investigation: The Times journalists Michael Gold and Grace Ashford discuss how Representative George Santos was elected to Congress and how they discovered that he was a fraud.Split View: New York Republicans are ready to rid themselves of the newly elected representative after his pattern of deception was revealed. But House Republican leaders badly need his vote.Facing Inquiries: Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Santos committed crimes involving his finances or made misleading statements, while authorities in Brazil said they would revive a 2008 fraud case against him.Alternate Identities: A newly surfaced video shows Mr. Santos in 2019 using one of his alternate identities and urging members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community to embrace Republicans. The clip offers insight into Mr. Santos’s early forays into public political life.He was a financier, who had worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs? Lo, the three-quarter zip sweater and fleece (or fleece-like) vest, uniform of bankers everywhere. Just consider the last six seasons of “Billions.”The semiotics of sweater dressing: Mr. Santos in zip-front knitwear. Tom Brenner for The New York TimesHe went deep into the costume department of the popular culture hive mind and built his cover story layer by layer, garment by garment.He may wear suits sometimes, but it is the sweaters, in their various permutations, that have been the telling detail, along with the horn-rimmed glasses — visual shorthand, in pretty much every medium, for intellectual. Both are props that push the buttons of stereotype buried in our subconscious. We are so much more likely to believe a story if it is embedded in the codes we expect, dress code being among the first.Yes, it’s a cliché. That doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Clothes are the camouflage that gets you in the door. Especially in a world in which the line between visual truth and fiction is increasingly filtered.It would not be surprising then, that Mr. Santos is alleged to have bought hundreds of dollars worth of garments and shoes in Brazil using checks stolen from his mother’s handbag. And that a former roommate claimed in The New York Post that the Burberry scarf Mr. Santos wore to a Stop the Steal rally in 2021 didn’t actually belong to him but to the roommate, and Mr. Santos took it when the two men shared an apartment. That another said Mr. Santos had taken some of his dress shirts, including an Armani number. Mr. Santos clearly understood that no matter the character you are playing, what you wear tells the story.So he dressed up his story of embodying the American dream in the fashion vernacular of archetypes. By indulging public preconceptions of how someone with his résumé should look, Mr. Santos was implicitly underscoring his own credibility.And he is still doing it. It is not an accident that since his fabrications have been revealed, he has stuck largely to his preppy layering. See the periwinkle blue crew neck he wore over a white shirt and navy-and-white tie and under a navy suit during the House swearing-in; it’s a uniform both protective and promising. One that had a Pavlovian association with words like “wholesome,” “polite,” “youthful,” “well intentioned.” It’s the kind of style that conjures up images of grandmothers saying, “But he looks like such a nice boy.” (He even arrived for the ceremony toting a backpack.)Outside a Stop & Shop in a fleece-adjacent look. Mary Altaffer/Associated PressJust as when writers sometimes clean up the language of interviewees to make the written statement easier to read than the spoken one — which can often seem garbled on the page — dressing to satisfy expectations rather than reflect everyday reality is a form of sleight of hand.(The practice of quote amelioration became something of a cause célèbre when the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson sued the journalist Janet Malcolm for libel for massaging his words.)But in fact, while bankers may love a logo fleece, it’s usually one that advertises the institutions to which they belong or the invite-only conferences that they attend (Sun Valley! Davos!). Mr. Santos’s version, worn mostly on the campaign trail as he was selling his myth, advertised his own candidacy.And according to Lisa Birnbach, the author of “The Official Preppy Handbook,” Mr. Santos’s version of preppy style is too groomed, too layered, too contrived to be that of a genuine prepster. She said she hadn’t seen a crew neck under a blazer over a tie since George Plimpton ran The Paris Review in the second half of the 20th century. Mr. Santos, she said, looks like an extra in “Family Ties,” the sitcom that starred Michael J. Fox as a teenage Republican. He’s trying too hard.Some are now beginning to speculate that even the glasses are fakes, donned to complete the picture, that they don’t have the distortions associated with corrective lenses.That we should have realized, really, they were too easy to see through. More

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      George Santos: What We Know and Don’t Know About the Representative-Elect

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      Mr. Santos admitted that the information in his résumé about where he worked and went to school was not true. Other discrepancies in his biography remain a mystery.For a week, Representative-elect George Santos avoided answering questions from the media, after The New York Times reported several notable fabrications on his résumé.Now, Mr. Santos has swapped out silence for a new tactic: creating the appearance of coming clean.In three separate interviews — two of them with conservative media, none with The Times — Mr. Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, even as he has denounced “elitist” institutions seeking to hold him to account and suggested that he is no more duplicitous than your average member of Congress.‘Did I embellish my résumé? Yes, I did,” he told City & State, a New York political publication. “And I’m sorry, and it shouldn’t be done. And words can’t express 100 percent how I feel, but I’m still the same guy. I’m not a fraud. I’m not a cartoon character. I’m not some mythical creature that was invented.”Voters from New York’s Third Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Nassau County and Queens, elected Mr. Santos, 34, a Republican, in November. When he enters Congress in 2023, several important unanswered questions will still hang over him.Here is what we do and do not know about the representative-elect.Mr. Santos did not work where he said he did.Over the course of his two campaigns for Congress, the first of which was unsuccessful, Mr. Santos cast himself as an accomplished veteran of Wall Street, with work experience at both Citigroup, where he said he was “an associate asset manager,” and at Goldman Sachs. Both firms told The Times that they had no record of Mr. Santos’s ever working for them.In recent interviews, Mr. Santos has claimed that he did not actually work for those companies, but rather with them, when he was employed at a company called LinkBridge Investors, which says it connects fund managers with investors.Mr. Santos told The New York Post that he had merely used a “poor choice of words.”Mr. Santos did not graduate from the schools he said he had.Mr. Santos has said he graduated from Baruch College in Manhattan with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. A biography on the website of the House Republicans’ campaign committee said he had also studied at N.Y.U. But neither college could find records verifying those claims, and in his interview with The Post, Mr. Santos admitted that he had lied about his education.“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” he told the newspaper. “I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé.”Mr. Santos says he is not Jewish, so much as “Jew-ish.”Mr. Santos has said that his mother was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium and again fled persecution during WW II.” And he has identified as both Catholic and as a nonobservant Jew.But citing genealogy records and Brazilian records, both The Forward, a Jewish publication, and CNN have reported that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents appear to have been born in Brazil before World War II. Mr. Santos has responded to those revelations by modifying his story ever so slightly.“I always joke, I’m Catholic, but I’m also Jew-ish — as in ‘ish,’” he told City & State. “I grew up fully aware that my grandparents were Jewish, came from a Jewish family, and they were refugees to Brazil. And that was always the story I grew up with, and I’ve always known it very well.”Mr. Santos amends story on Pulse nightclub shooting.After he won election, Mr. Santos, who says he is gay, claimed to have “lost four employees” at the 2016 shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, a claim for which The Times could find no evidence.During an interview on WABC radio, Mr. Santos said that those “four employees” did not actually work for his Florida company. Rather, those four individuals were in the process of being hired, he said.“We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando,” he said.Mr. Santos denied committing any crimes.Contrary to records unearthed by The Times, Mr. Santos has seemed to insist that he was never charged with fraud for writing checks with a stolen checkbook in Brazil.“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”In the radio interview with WABC, Mr. Santos offered to provide documents to corroborate his assertion. But he declined to provide any documentation to The Times.Mr. Santos does not own 13 properties.During his most recent congressional campaign, Mr. Santos cast himself and his family as the owners of 13 properties. He also suggested he was a beleaguered landlord whose tenants were unjustly withholding rent.On Monday, he said his family owns property, but he does not.“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post.The sources of Mr. Santos’s $700,000 campaign loan remain unclear.Though Mr. Santos’s adulthood has been marked by a trail of unpaid debts to landlords and creditors, in 2021 and 2022, he lent $700,000 to his congressional campaign, according to federal campaign finance documents. It remains unclear where that money came from.Mr. Santos continues to claim it originated with his work at The Devolder Organization, which he described as a consulting firm to City & State.Mr. Santos has disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no property or public-facing assets linked to the firm. More

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      George Santos Breaks Silence: ‘I Have My Story to Tell.’ (Next Week.)

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      Mr. Santos, the congressman-elect from New York, has yet to address numerous inconsistencies raised by The New York Times about his background.Representative-elect George Santos broke his silence on Thursday, vowing that he would come forward next week to address questions surrounding his background.Mr. Santos has been the subject of intense scrutiny following the publication of a New York Times report that raised questions about whether he misrepresented key parts of his background and finances, and filed incomplete or inaccurate congressional disclosures.“I have my story to tell and it will be told next week,” Mr. Santos, a Republican, said on Twitter.Mr. Santos, 34, has refused to answer any questions from The Times about his past and finances, and has only pointed to a statement released by his lawyer that accused the Times of attempting to smear him. In the report published on Monday, The Times found that key pillars of Mr. Santos’s résumé — including his education, ties to Wall Street firms and charitable endeavors that formed the basis of his pitch to voters — could not be substantiated. Instead, The Times found a string of debts and legal trouble, including an unresolved criminal matter in Brazil, that raise questions about the congressman’s rise to power and wealth.Mr. Santos has faced numerous calls to address The Times’s reporting. In his statement on Twitter, he said, “I want to assure everyone that I will address your questions and that I remain committed to deliver the results I campaigned on; Public safety, Inflation, Education & more. Happy Holidays to all!”Mr. Santos’s brief statement on Twitter came a day after the incoming House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, suggested that Mr. Santos appeared “to be in the witness protection program” after he spent the week avoiding the press.“No one can find him,” Mr. Jeffries, a Democrat, said at a news conference. “He’s hiding out from legitimate questions that his constituents are asking about his education, about his so-called charity, about his work experience, about his criminal entanglement in Brazil, about every aspect, it appears, of his life.”On Wednesday, The Forward, a Jewish publication, reported that Mr. Santos may have misled voters about his account of his Jewish ancestry, including that his maternal grandparents fled persecution around World War II.The House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, did not answer questions about Mr. Santos on Thursday afternoon before walking onto the House floor, according to several accounts on Twitter from Washington reporters.Mr. Santos’s lawyer, Joe Murray, told The Times earlier on Thursday that he did “not anticipate any response” to further inquiries, though he acknowledged that would be subject to change.On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said that her office was “looking into some of the things that were raised” by The Times’s report.Jonah E. Bromwich More