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      Liz Cheney’s Unlikely Journey From G.O.P. Royalty to Republican Outcast

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      Dick Cheney always saw doomsday threats from America’s enemies. His daughter is in a lonely battle against what both see as a danger to American democracy: Donald J. Trump.CASPER, Wyo. — Representative Liz Cheney was holed up in a secure undisclosed location of the Dick Cheney Federal Building, recounting how she got an alarmed phone call from her father on Jan. 6.Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, recalled that she had been preparing to speak on the House floor in support of certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election as president. Mr. Cheney, the former vice president and his daughter’s closest political adviser, consulted with her on most days, but this time was calling as a worried parent.He had seen President Donald J. Trump on television at a rally that morning vow to get rid of “the Liz Cheneys of the world.” Her floor speech could inflame tensions, he told her, and he feared for her safety. Was she sure she wanted to go ahead?“Absolutely,” she told her father. “Nothing could be more important.”Minutes later, Mr. Trump’s supporters breached the entrance, House members evacuated and the political future of Ms. Cheney, who never delivered her speech, was suddenly scrambled. Her promising rise in the House, which friends say the former vice president had been enthusiastically invested in and hoped might culminate in the speaker’s office, had been replaced with a very different mission.“This is about being able to tell your kids that you stood up and did the right thing,” she said.Ms. Cheney entered Congress in 2017, and her lineage always ensured her a conspicuous profile, although not in the way it has since blown up. Her campaign to defeat the “ongoing threat” and “fundamental toxicity of a president who lost” has landed one of the most conservative House members in the most un-Cheney-like position of resistance leader and Republican outcast. Ms. Cheney has vowed to be a counterforce, no matter how lonely that pursuit might be or where it might lead, including a possible primary challenge to Mr. Trump if he runs for president in 2024, a prospect she has not ruled out.Ms. Cheney, with her establishment background and partisan instincts, was seen as a possible speaker after her election to the House. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesBeyond the daunting politics, Ms. Cheney’s predicament is also a father-daughter story, rife with dynastic echoes and ironies. An unapologetic Prince of Darkness figure throughout his career, Mr. Cheney was always attuned to doomsday scenarios and existential threats he saw posed by America’s enemies, whether from Russia during the Cold War, Saddam Hussein after the Sept. 11 attacks, or the general menace of tyrants and terrorists.Ms. Cheney has come to view the current circumstances with Mr. Trump in the same apocalyptic terms. The difference is that today’s threat resides inside the party in which her family has been royalty for nearly half a century.“He is just deeply troubled for the country about what we watched President Trump do,” Ms. Cheney said of her father. “He’s a student of history. He’s a student of the presidency. He knows the gravity of those jobs, and as he’s watched these events unfold, certainly he’s been appalled.”On the day last month that Ms. Cheney’s House colleagues ousted her as the third-ranking Republican over her condemnations of Mr. Trump, she invited an old family friend, the photographer David Hume Kennerly, to record her movements for posterity. After work, they repaired to her parents’ home in McLean, Va., to commiserate over wine and a steak dinner.“There was maybe a little bit of post-mortem, but it didn’t feel like a wake,” said Mr. Kennerly, the official photographer for President Gerald R. Ford while Mr. Cheney was White House chief of staff. “Mostly, I got a real sense at that dinner of two parents who were extremely proud of their kid and wanted to be there for her at the end of a bad day.”Mr. Cheney declined to be interviewed for this article, but provided a statement: “As a father, I am enormously proud of my daughter. As an American, I am deeply grateful to her for defending our Constitution and the rule of law.”The Cheneys are a private and insular brood, though not without tensions that have gone public. Ms. Cheney’s opposition to same-sex marriage during a brief Senate campaign in 2013 enraged her sister, Mary Cheney, and Mary’s longtime partner, Heather Poe. It was conspicuous, then, when Mary conveyed full support for her sister after Jan. 6.“As many people know, Liz and I have definitely had our differences over the years,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Jan. 7. “But I am very proud of how she handled herself during the fight over the Electoral College…Good job Big Sister.’’Ms. Cheney with her father after the vice presidential debate in 2004. Mr. Cheney has long been her closest professional alter ego.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesHer Father’s Alter EgoIn an interview in Casper, Ms. Cheney, 54, spoke in urgent, clipped cadences in an unmarked conference room of the Dick Cheney Federal Building, one of many places that carry her family name in the nation’s least populous and most Trump-loving state. Her disposition conveyed both determination and worry, and also a sense of someone who had endured an embattled stretch.Ms. Cheney had spent much of a recent congressional recess in Wyoming and yet was rarely seen in public. The appearances she did make — a visit to the Chamber of Commerce in Casper, a hospital opening (with her father) in Star Valley — were barely publicized beforehand, in large part for security concerns. She has received a stream of death threats, common menaces among high-profile critics of Mr. Trump, and is now surrounded by a newly deployed detail of plainclothes, ear-pieced agents.Her campaign spent $58,000 on security from January to March, including three former Secret Service officers, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. Ms. Cheney was recently assigned protection from the Capitol Police, an unusual measure for a House member not in a leadership position. The fortress aura around Ms. Cheney is reminiscent of the “secure undisclosed location” of her father in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.Ms. Cheney’s temperament bears the imprint of both parents, especially her mother, Lynne Cheney, a conservative scholar and commentator who is far more extroverted than her husband. But Mr. Cheney has long been his eldest daughter’s closest professional alter ego, especially after he left office in 2009, and Ms. Cheney devoted marathon sessions to collaborating on his memoir, “In My Times.” Their work coincided with some of Mr. Cheney’s gravest heart conditions, including a period in 2010 when he was near death.His health stabilized after doctors installed a blood-pumping device that kept him alive and allowed him to travel. This included trips between Virginia and Wyoming in which Mr. Cheney would drive while dictating stories to Ms. Cheney in the passenger seat, who would type his words into a laptop. He received his heart transplant in 2012.Mr. Cheney, left, served as Wyoming’s at-large congressman from 1979 to 1989. As powerful as he was as vice president, he had always considered himself a product of the House.George Tames/The New York TimesFather and daughter promoted the memoir in joint appearances, with Ms. Cheney interviewing her father in venues around the country. “She was basically there with her dad to ease his re-entry back to health on the public stage,” said former Senator Alan K. Simpson, a Wyoming Republican and a longtime family friend.By 2016, Ms. Cheney had been elected to Congress and quickly rose to become the third-ranking Republican, a post her father also held. As powerful as Mr. Cheney was as vice president, he had always considered himself a product of the House, where he had served as Wyoming’s at-large congressman from 1979 to 1989.Neither father nor daughter is a natural politician in any traditional sense. Mr. Cheney was a plotter and bureaucratic brawler, ambitious but in a quiet, secretive and, to many eyes, devious way. Ms. Cheney was largely focused on strategic planning and hawkish policymaking.After graduating from Colorado College (“The Evolution of Presidential War Powers” was her senior thesis), Ms. Cheney worked at the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development while her father was defense secretary. She attended the University of Chicago Law School and practiced at the firm White & Case before returning to the State Department while her father was vice president. She was not sheepish or dispassionate like her father — she was a cheerleader at McLean High School — but held off running for office until well into her 40s.Once in the House, Ms. Cheney was seen as a possible speaker — a hybrid of establishment background, hard-line conservatism and partisan instincts. While she had reservations about Mr. Trump, she was selective with her critiques and voted with him 93 percent of time and against his first impeachment.As for Mr. Cheney, his distress over the Trump administration was initially focused on foreign policy, though he eventually came to view the 45th president’s performance overall as abysmal.“I had a couple of conversations with the vice president last summer where he was really deeply troubled,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former American ambassador to Turkey, a Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration and family friend.People protesting Ms. Cheney’s decision to impeach President Donald J. Trump this year at Wyoming’s Capitol in Cheyenne.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesAs a transplant recipient whose compromised immune system placed him at severe risk of Covid-19, Mr. Cheney found that his contempt for the Trump White House only grew during the pandemic. He had also known and admired Dr. Anthony S. Fauci for many years.At the same time, Ms. Cheney publicly supported Dr. Fauci and seemed to be trolling the White House last June when she tweeted “Dick Cheney says WEAR A MASK” over a photograph of her father — looking every bit the stoic Westerner — sporting a face covering and cowboy hat (hashtag “#realmenwearmasks”).She has received notable support in her otherwise lonely efforts from a number of top-level figures of the Republican establishment, including many of her father’s old White House colleagues. Former President George W. Bush — through a spokesman — made a point of thanking Mr. Cheney “for his daughter’s service” in a call to his former vice president on his 80th birthday in January.Ms. Cheney did wind up voting for Mr. Trump in November, but came to regret it immediately. In her view, Mr. Trump’s conduct after the election went irreversibly beyond the pale. “For Liz, it was like, I just can’t do this anymore,” said former Representative Barbara Comstock, Republican of Virginia.A 2024 Run for President?Ms. Cheney returned last week to Washington, where she had minimal dealings with her former leadership cohorts and was less inhibited in sharing her dim view of certain Republican colleagues. On Tuesday, she slammed Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona for repeating “disgusting and despicable lies” about the actions of the Capitol Police on Jan. 6.“We’ve got people we’ve entrusted with the perpetuation of the Republic who don’t know what the rule of law is,” she said. “We probably need to do Constitution boot camps for newly sworn-in members of Congress. Clearly.”She said her main pursuit now involved teaching basic civics to voters who had been misinformed by Mr. Trump and other Republicans who should know better. “I’m not naïve about the education that has to go on here,” Ms. Cheney said. “This is dangerous. It’s not complicated. I think Trump has a plan.”Ms. Cheney voted for Mr. Trump’s agenda 93 percent of time and against his first impeachment in 2019.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMs. Cheney’s own plan has been the object of considerable speculation. Although she was re-elected in 2020 by 44 percentage points, she faces a potentially treacherous path in 2022. Several Wyoming Republicans have already announced plans to mount primary challenges against Ms. Cheney, and her race is certain to be among the most closely followed in the country next year. It will also provide a visible platform for her campaign to ensure Mr. Trump “never again gets near the Oval Office” — an enterprise that could plausibly include a long-shot primary bid against him in 2024.Friends say that at a certain point, events — namely Jan. 6 — came to transcend any parochial political concerns for Ms. Cheney. “Maybe I’m being Pollyanna a little bit here, but I do think Liz is playing the long game,” said Matt Micheli, a Cheyenne lawyer and former chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party. Ms. Cheney has confirmed as much.“This is something that determines the nature of this Republic going forward,” she said. “So I really don’t know how long that takes.” More

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      For Republicans, ‘Crisis’ Is the Message as the Outrage Machine Ramps Up

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      With next year’s midterm elections seen as a referendum on Democratic rule, Republicans are seeking to create a sense of instability and overreach, diverting focus from their own divisions.WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders would like everyone to know that the nation is in crisis.There is an economic crisis, they say, with rising prices and overly generous unemployment benefits; a national security crisis; a border security crisis, with its attendant homeland security crisis, humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis.Pressed Tuesday on whether the nation is really so beleaguered, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, thought of still more crises: anti-Semitism in the Democratic ranks, “yet another crisis,” he asserted, and a labor shortage crisis.“Unfortunately they’re all real,” he said capping a 25-minute news conference in which the word “crisis” was used once a minute, “and they’re all being caused by President Biden’s actions.”As Americans groggily emerge from their pandemic-driven isolation, they could be forgiven for not seeing the situation as quite so dire. They might also be a little confused about which of the many outrages truly needs their focus: the border, perhaps, but what about Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the Wuhan lab leak theory, the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s schools, the fact that some schools are not fully reopened, Representative Ilhan Omar, or all those transgender athletes competing in high school sports?But for divided House Republicans, outrage may be the tie that binds — at least their leaders hope so.“Look, our main crisis is we’re not the majority — that’s our top crisis,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma.House Republicans, still overwhelmingly in the thrall of Donald J. Trump, have learned over the last four years that grievance, loudly expressed, carries political weight, especially with their core voters. Mr. Trump certainly did not teach members of his party how to express anger over perceived injustices; many of them had been doing it for years. But the House Republican leadership has shifted to Trumpian expressions of outrage since the days of former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, a self-described “policy guy” with a happy-warrior image, and the backslapping bonhomie of his predecessor John A. Boehner.There is a method to all the remonstrance. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who took over as the message maestro of the Republican conference after the banishment of Representative Liz Cheney, hatched the crisis strategy as one of her first ventures, Mr. Cole said, distributing talking points this month on the perils facing the country.He thought the list had five crises; Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, remembered four.The idea is that with Democrats in control of the White House, House and Senate, next year’s midterm elections will be a referendum on one-party control, not on Republican governing plans, said Mr. Cole, a former chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm. The Republicans, at least this early in the political cycle, need to seed a sense of instability, overreach and fear, he said.The strategy is also predicated on the adage that the best defense is a good offense. By focusing on an array of real or imagined disasters, Republicans avoid addressing the crisis in democracy created by Mr. Trump with his efforts to nullify the election, which he continues to stoke. On Tuesday night, 21 House Republicans voted against awarding congressional gold medals to the Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers who protected them when a mob of the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.David Winston, who has long worked with congressional Republicans on polling and messaging, said every new president faces an early challenge, and how he responds helps cement his image with curious voters. Republicans tried to make that early challenge the surge of migrants — including unaccompanied children — at the border.But there is a risk of throwing up too much chaff, he said. And eventually, Republican leaders are going to have to find a theme, like former Speaker John Boehner’s groan-worthy “Where are the jobs?” mantra. Its repetition might have annoyed reporters, but it was effective with voters.A group of migrants who recently crossed the border from Mexico into Yuma, Ariz., waiting to be taken to a processing center. Republican leaders have focused on a “crisis” at the border as well as several other issues.Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesRepublicans have long been better than Democrats at imparting a sense of crisis. They made Solyndra a household name, with heated news conferences, accusatory hearings and angry statements, when the solar company went bankrupt and left the Obama administration — and the taxpayers — the bill for a $535 million federal loan guarantee that was part of Barack Obama’s economic rescue plan. This week, an electric pickup truck plant in Lordstown, Ohio, midwifed by Mr. Trump, lost its top executives, its prototype burst into flames and it is on the brink of collapse — with hardly a Democratic peep.The deadly terrorist assault on Benghazi became a two-year ordeal for Hillary Clinton, thanks to the Republican outrage machine, while a botched military raid ordered by Mr. Trump in Niger, which left four Americans dead, has largely been forgotten — even after Mr. Trump fumbled the name of one of the dead and told a grieving widow her husband “knew what he signed up for.”Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic operative, said some in the party had wanted to “Benghazi” the Niger raid, but, “It’s just not who most of the Dem Party and Dem Party leadership is.”“I guess you can say we don’t gin up phony crises, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he added. “At some point, the public turns back to what they think is reasonable leadership.”Democrats have not been able to get the same traction even on the Capitol riot, which aimed to stop the official awarding of a presidential election to its victor, in part because Republican antics and accusations have disrupted hearings on the assault.Part of the Republican advantage is just a sheer will to muscle through, regardless of Democratic incredulity. One of this week’s outrages is Mr. Biden’s supposed weakness before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a “crisis” that seeks to send four years of Mr. Trump’s deference to the Russian leader down the memory hole.Veteran House Republicans say they have a traditional message to impart.“I think the biggest contrast right now with the Biden-Pelosi agenda is their goal to control from Washington so much of your daily life, from your paycheck to your health care decisions to everything else,” said Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas. “We stand for the opposite. We want to create more freedom for individuals with lower taxes, a stronger economy and a safer nation.”But that message has been lost amid a constantly shifting menu of crises and outrages. At the state level, Republican legislators have obscured very real efforts to curtail voting access by spotlighting cultural issues like blocking transgender athletes from high school competitions or stopping the teaching to children of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that explores how racism is infused in American institutions.But a drumbeat of cries for Vice President Kamala Harris to visit a southwestern border in crisis gave way to accusations that the nation’s gasoline supply was nearing collapse, which then subsided amid demands for the firing of the government’s leading virologist, Dr. Fauci, and an investigation of the theory that the coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, then released on the world.Last week, the target of Republican outrage was Ms. Omar, after a tweet she posted that appeared to equate the actions of Israel and the United States with the human rights abuses of Hamas and the Taliban. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, called the tweet anti-Semitic — though it did not mention Jews or Judaism — and threatened to try to remove Ms. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, an action they have yet to take.Republicans are also pressing their case that the push by some progressive Democrats to “defund the police” has led directly to a very real surge in crime facing the nation’s cities.It can get difficult to keep up with all the catastrophizing. On Tuesday, minutes after Representative Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, warned of Moscow’s aggressive cyber attacks and a looming Russian stranglehold over Europe’s power supply, Mr. Scalise said, “I don’t know if Vice President Harris understands the crisis is not in Europe, it’s at America’s southern border, and she and President Biden created it.”There are plans to put together some Republican policy proposals. Mr. McCarthy has assembled seven task forces: jobs and the economy; Big Tech censorship; the “Future of American Freedoms”; energy, climate and conservation; American security; “healthy future”; and China. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who leads the big tech task force, said the panels will take a year to come up with legislative and policy responses to take into the midterm elections.“The goal is to be ready on Day 1,” should the Republicans take back the majority, she said.For now, even Republicans who have been critical of their leaders say they have time to formulate an agenda beyond the outrage machine they are eagerly feeding. Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, noted that Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America really didn’t emerge until September 1994, two months before Republicans’ resounding midterm sweep.“There’s night-and-day difference between Republicans and Democrats, say, on border security, where we’re fairly united that we need to secure the border, and I don’t think they care,” he said. “We’re watching small businesses unable to hire people because they’re paying people more not to work. We’re pretty united on those key differences. Thematically bringing all that together and how you message that the American people, I think that’s something you work on.”As for the Democrats, most simply don’t think the crisis talk is working, beyond spinning out clicks for right-wing media outlets and Facebook algorithms that thrive on outrage over such things as the decision by Dr. Seuss’s estate to cease publishing works that include egregious racial and ethnic stereotypes or the switch by Hasbro to a non-gendered brand name for its iconic plastic toy, now known as Potato Head.“President Biden, for all this angst, including Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, has a plus-eight approval rating overall, a plus-four on the economy and a plus-28 approval on the pandemic,” Mr. Woodhouse said.As House Republican leaders were leaving the stage on Tuesday, Ms. Stefanik wanted to reiterate for one last time the state of a nation on the brink.“Thank you so much for embracing our effective messaging,” she told a small clutch of reporters, sitting in socially distanced seating. “America is in crisis.” More

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      in US Politics

      Marjorie Taylor Greene apologizes for comparing House mask rule to the Holocaust

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman, has apologized for her comments comparing the required wearing of safety masks in the US House to the horrors of the Holocaust.“I’m truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust,” Taylor Greene told reporters outside the Capitol on Monday, saying she had visited Washington’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier in the day. “There’s no comparison and there never ever will be.“Greene’s comments were a rare expression of regret by the conservative, who has a record of racist and Islamophobic remarks, as well support for QAnon and other antisemitic conspiracy theories.Her apology came more than three weeks after appearing on a conservative podcast and comparing Covid-19 safety requirements adopted by Democrats controlling the House to “a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star”. She said they were “put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. This is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about”.Her comments sparked widespread outrage across the political spectrum, and were condemned by Republican leaders, including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who called the comparison “appalling”.GOP leaders, however, have been reluctant to take concrete action against Greene, a close ally of Donald Trump. After social media posts were unearthed in which Greene suggested support for executing some Democratic leaders, McCarthy and most Republicans stood by her when the House took the unusual step of stripping her of her committee assignments in February.But as House members returned to the Capitol on Monday after a three-week break, Greene was contrite.“Antisemitism is true hate,” she said. “And I saw that today at the Holocaust museum.”In 2018, two years before her election to Congress, she speculated on Facebook that California wildfires may have been caused by “lasers or blue beams of light” controlled by a leftwing cabal tied to a powerful Jewish family.On Monday, she told reporters that when she was 19, she visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. “It isn’t like I learned about it today,” she said of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and huge numbers of other people were killed. “I went today because I thought it was important,” she said, and wanted to talk about it as she apologized.House leaders have recently said vaccinated people are no longer required to wear masks in the chamber.The US is approaching nearly 600,000 deaths from Covid-19. More

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      in Elections

      In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril

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      As G.O.P. legislatures move to curtail voting rules, congressional Democrats say authoritarianism looms, but Republicans dismiss the concerns as politics as usual.WASHINGTON — Senator Christopher S. Murphy concedes that political rhetoric in the nation’s capital can sometimes stray into hysteria, but when it comes to the precarious state of American democracy, he insisted he was not exaggerating the nation’s tilt toward authoritarianism.“Democrats are always at risk of being hyperbolic,” said Mr. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “I don’t think there’s a risk when it comes to the current state of democratic norms.”After the norm-shattering presidency of Donald J. Trump, the violence-inducing bombast over a stolen election, the pressuring of state vote counters, the Capitol riot and the flood of voter curtailment laws rapidly being enacted in Republican-run states, Washington has found itself in an anguished state.Almost daily, Democrats warn that Republicans are pursuing racist, Jim Crow-inspired voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise tens of millions of citizens, mainly people of color, in a cynical effort to grab power. Metal detectors sit outside the House chamber to prevent lawmakers — particularly Republicans who have boasted of their intention to carry guns everywhere — from bringing weaponry to the floor. Democrats regard their Republican colleagues with suspicion, believing that some of them collaborated with the rioters on Jan. 6.Republican lawmakers have systematically downplayed or dismissed the dangers, with some breezing over the attack on the Capitol as a largely peaceful protest, and many saying the state voting law changes are to restore “integrity” to the process, even as they give credence to Mr. Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 election.They shrug off Democrats’ warnings of grave danger as the overheated language of politics as usual.“I haven’t understood for four or five years why we are so quick to spin into a place where part of the country is sure that we no longer have the strength to move forward, as we always have in the past,” said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, noting that the passions of Republican voters today match those of Democratic voters after Mr. Trump’s triumph. “Four years ago, there were people in the so-called resistance showing up in all of my offices every week, some of whom were chaining themselves to the door.”For Democrats, the evidence of looming catastrophe mounts daily. Fourteen states, including politically competitive ones like Florida and Georgia, have enacted 22 laws to curtail early and mail-in ballots, limit polling places and empower partisans to police polling, then oversee the vote tally. Others are likely to follow, including Texas, with its huge share of House seats and electoral votes.Because Republicans control the legislatures of many states where the 2020 census will force redistricting, the party is already in a strong position to erase the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the House. Even moderate voting-law changes could bolster Republicans’ chances for the net gain of one vote they need to take back the Senate.And in the nightmare outcome promulgated by some academics, Republicans have put themselves in a position to dictate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if the voting is close in swing states.“Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations,” 188 scholars said in a statement expressing concern about the erosion of democracy.Demonstrators protesting new voting legislation in Atlanta this month. Fourteen states, including Georgia, have enacted laws to restrict practices like early voting. Brynn Anderson/Associated PressSenator Angus King, an independent from Maine who lectured on American politics at Bowdoin College before going to the Senate, put the moment in historical context. He called American democracy “a 240-year experiment that runs against the tide of human history,” and that tide usually leads from and back to authoritarianism.He said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.“This is an incredibly dangerous moment, and I don’t think it’s being sufficiently realized as such,” he said.Republicans contend that much of this is overblown, though some concede the charges sting. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Democrats were playing a hateful race card to promote voting-rights legislation that is so extreme it would cement Democratic control of Congress for decades.“I hope that damage isn’t being done,” he added, “but it is always very dangerous to falsely play the race card and let’s face it, that’s what’s being done here.”Mr. Toomey, who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his second impeachment trial, said he understood why, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, states sharply liberalized voting rules in 2020, extending mail-in voting, allowing mailed ballots to be counted days after Election Day and setting up ballot drop boxes, curbside polls and weeks of early voting.But he added that Democrats should understand why state election officials wanted to course correct now that the coronavirus was ebbing.“Every state needs to strike a balance between two competing values: making it as easy as possible to cast legitimate votes, but also the other, which is equally important: having everybody confident about the authenticity of the votes,” Mr. Toomey said.Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, he added, “were more likely to resonate because you had this system that went so far the other way.”Some other Republicans embrace the notion that they are trying to use their prerogatives as a minority party to safeguard their own power. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said the endeavor was the essence of America’s system of representative democracy, distinguishing it from direct democracy, where the majority rules and is free to trample the rights of the minority unimpeded.“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Mr. Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”Democrats and their allies push back hard on those arguments. Mr. King said the only reason voters lacked confidence in the voting system was that Republicans — especially Mr. Trump — told them for months that it was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary, and now continued to insist that there were abuses in the process that must be fixed.“That’s like pleading for mercy as an orphan after you killed both your parents,” he said.Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesSenator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said in no way could some of the new state voting laws be seen as a necessary course correction. “Not being able to serve somebody water who’s waiting in line? I mean, come on,” he said. “There are elements that are in most of these proposals where you look at it and you say, ‘That violates the common-sense test.’”Missteps by Democrats have fortified Republicans’ attempts to downplay the dangers. Some of them, including President Biden, have mischaracterized Georgia’s voting law, handing Republicans ammunition to say that Democrats were willfully distorting what was happening at the state level.The state’s 98-page voting law, passed after the narrow victories for Mr. Biden and two Democratic candidates for Senate, would make absentee voting harder and create restrictions and complications for millions of voters, many of them people of color.But Mr. Biden falsely claimed that the law — which he labeled “un-American” and “sick” — had slapped new restrictions on early voting to bar people from voting after 5 p.m. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said the Georgia law had ended early voting on Sunday. It didn’t.And the sweep — critics say overreach — of the Democrats’ answer to Republican voter laws, the For the People Act, has undermined Democratic claims that the fate of the republic relies on its passage. Even some Democrats are uncomfortable with the act’s breadth, including an advancement of statehood for the District of Columbia with its assurance of two more senators, almost certainly Democratic; its public financing of elections; its nullification of most voter identification laws; and its mandatory prescriptions for early and mail-in voting.“They want to put a thumb on the scale of future elections,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Wednesday. “They want to take power away from the voters and the states, and give themselves every partisan advantage that they can.”Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who could conceivably be a partner in Democratic efforts to expand voting rights, called the legislation a “fundamentally unserious” bill.Republican leaders have sought to take the current argument from the lofty heights of history to the nitty-gritty of legislation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, pointed to the success of bipartisan efforts such as passage of a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans, approval of a broad China competition measure and current talks to forge compromises on infrastructure and criminal justice as proof that Democratic catastrophizing over the state of American governance was overblown.But Democrats are not assuaged.“Not to diminish the importance of the work we’ve done here, but democracy itself is what we’re talking about,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “And to point at other bills that don’t have to do with the fair administration of elections is just an attempt to distract while all these state legislatures move systematically toward disenfranchising voters who have historically leaned Democrat.”Mr. King said he had had serious conversations with Republican colleagues about the precarious state of American democracy. Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir V. Putin, Viktor Orban and Adolf Hitler have come to power by election, and stayed in power by warping or obliterating democratic norms.But, he acknowledged, he has yet to get serious engagement, largely because his colleagues fear the wrath of Mr. Trump and his supporters.“I get the feeling they hope this whole thing will go away,” he said. “They make arguments, but you have the feeling their hearts aren’t in it.” More

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      Joe Biden’s reforming agenda at risk of dying a slow death in Congress

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      Joe Biden’s first hundred days surpassed progressive expectations with the scope of their ambition. His second hundred days are being mugged by reality: the one that says Washington DC is a place where dreams go to die.A once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure and the climate crisis has hit a wall. Reforms on gun safety, immigration and police brutality are in limbo. Legislation to expand voting rights and reduce the influence of money in politics appears doomed.The stalled agenda reflects Republican obstruction, Democratic disunity and the inherent messiness of “sausage-making” on Capitol Hill. But it also shines a light on taken-for-granted structures of American government and democracy that many argue are no longer fit for purpose because they favor gridlock and militate against sweeping change.“The American system of government is a beta form of democracy,” said Ezra Levin, a former congressional staffer who is co-executive director of the grassroots movement Indivisible. “We have a presidential system that hasn’t really substantially been updated since the 19th century.“Nobody designing a democracy today would create as many veto points as we have and nobody, including the original founders, would have developed a system like the Senate filibuster where theoretically senators representing 11% of the population can veto legislation that is wildly popular.”Much has been written about Biden’s prospects of emulating Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) with a transformational presidency and eclipse Barack Obama by throwing caution to the winds. The excitement only grew with the passage of a $1.9tn coronavirus relief package in March.But that, it transpires, was the exception not the rule. The Democrats’ progressive wing is becoming increasingly frustrated as other promises go unrealised, fearing an all-too-familiar pattern of hopes dashed and dreams deferred that will only feed anti-Washington resentment.Ro Khanna, a congressman from California who was a co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, told the Associated Press: “There’s a lot of anxiety. It’s a question really for President Biden: what kind of president does he want to be?”Joe Biden won a fairly significant personal victory but the 2020 elections were hardly a victory for the Democratic party as a wholeThe first problem is that Biden does not have a Roosevelt-like majority in Congress. Democrats have only a wafer-thin advantage in the House of Representatives. The Senate is evenly divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, giving Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaker vote. It is hardly a recipe for revolution.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “There was always the brute fact that the Democrats had the slimmest margin in the House of Representatives they’ve enjoyed since the 1940s and you can’t get any closer in the Senate than a tie broken by the vice-president.“So the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden won a fairly significant personal victory but the 2020 elections were hardly a victory for the Democratic party as a whole. Anything but. So I really had to shake my head and chuckle when I read all of those early comparisons to FDR and LBJ.”The balance of power leaves Biden’s entire legislative agenda subject to the whims of any individual senator. He got a taste of this last weekend when Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, declared his opposition to the For the People Act, a voting rights bill that many activists regard as crucial to protecting democracy and a direct response to restrictive new voting laws being passed in Republican-led states.In a newspaper column, Manchin described the bill as the “wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together” and a barrier to Senate bipartisanship. This was despite polls showing clear support for it in his home state. His stand provoked anger among progressives and prompted civil rights leaders to meet Manchin on Tuesday.Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, a member of the Just Democracy coalition, said: “There is nothing partisan about this. What’s partisan is what’s happened since 2020 where you have Republican state legislatures proposing bills and enacting laws that will restrict Black and brown people all over this country from being able to participate in our democracy.“That’s sad to me. especially because some of the Black men that we talk to voted for the first time in 2020 in ways that are no longer legal in some of the states in this country, simply because Republicans saw that if they allow people to vote by mail or use drop boxes, which are some of the most secure ways to vote, they lose elections.”Manchin has also joined the Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona in publicly refusing to end the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, meaning that at least 10 Republicans would need to cross party lines to help Democrats achieve their priorities. Some senators propose reducing the voting threshold to 51.Activists increasingly regard blowing up the filibuster as essential and fundamental. Robinson added: “The fact that Joe Biden has been more progressive than I thought is a testament to him understanding the moment and I feel like some other elected officials aren’t reading the tea leaves. Roosevelt had a majority that Joe Biden can only dream for and we don’t have those majorities right now.What our lawmaking process does is make it all but impossible to enact sweeping, comprehensive change“So what it all leads back to is a need to eliminate the filibuster. We need to continue to make it clear to Senator Manchin he has a choice to do something or do nothing, and then someone has to press upon him that history will remember those choices.”America’s founding fathers constructed a government of checks and balances that guarded against rash action: a chief executive, a bicameral Congress with veto power, an independent judiciary. Washington mythology held that they invented the filibuster to guard against the tyranny of the majority but this has repeatedly been debunked by scholars who say it was created by mistake and first used in 1837.William Howell, a political scientist at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, said: “The framers didn’t create the filibuster. It’s excessive even by their standards.“What our lawmaking process does generally, and what the filibuster does in particular, is make it all but impossible to enact sweeping, comprehensive change. It leaves in its wake pervasive gridlock and sporadic opportunity to make incremental changes and that’s about it.”Every major piece of legislation successfully enacted over the past decade has circumvented the filibuster through a process called budget reconciliation, Howell noted. This tool may allow Democrats to go it alone with the American Jobs Plan, which would invest heavily in bridges, railways and roads, “soft” infrastructure such as caregiving and clean energy.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator for Rhode Island, tweeted that he is “nervous” about Congress doing too little to address the climate crisis. “We must get Senate Dems unified on climate on a real reconciliation bill, lest we get sucked into ‘bipartisanship’ mud where we fail on climate,” he wrote.The filibuster is hardly the only design fault. It comes on top of a Senate that is deeply unrepresentative because each state gets two seats, no matter the size of its population. That means small, predominantly white states carry as much heft as huge, racially diverse states such as California. An effort to make the District of Columbia the 51st state would begin to redress the balance but Manchin has again vowed opposition.Levin, the Indivisible organiser, said: “The 50 Democratic senators represent 41 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators. I think anybody objectively looking at how legislation is passed in this country has to come away with the conclusion that we are not set up to tackle 21st-century problems with a 19th-century democracy.”I don’t think it’s fair to say that an op-ed from a single senator dictates the future of that legislationDespite these headwinds, Levin is not giving up on Biden’s progressive project, pointing out that Democratic presidents have been here before. In 1964, under Johnson, the Civil Rights Act passed the Senate after overcoming a 54-day filibuster, and the following year the Voting Rights Act took more than a month of full Senate debate to escape the threat.“Neither of those things were passed with the snap of a finger,” he said. “It is fair to say the For the People Act is a tough fight. I don’t think it’s fair to say that an op-ed from a single senator dictates the future of that legislation. It’s always easy to be cynical about these things but there’s reason to hope. There are very real pathways forward to get this done.”Groups supporting the legislation intend to press ahead with a $30m campaign pressing Democratic senators to rewrite filibuster rules and pass the bill. Manchin has talked about supporting another voting bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but activists insist that both pieces of legislation are needed.LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “What we are seeing is that, as America becomes younger and more diverse, the reality is we currently do not have a political infrastructure that can support the kind of democracy that is laid out in the constitution where people have free and fair access to the ballot.“We need the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act as a step closer to strengthening our democracy and protecting those elements that have literally been fought and won through protest, through giving of lives.” More

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      in Elections

      How Democrats Should Approach the Midterm Elections

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      Since most of us are sleeping better in the quietude of a sane presidency, it’s tempting to ignore the current craziness of the Republican Party. Between the QAnon wackos, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, the voter suppression hard-liners, the coup enthusiasts and the election deniers, the party is showing a mash-up of madness.But here’s the scariest part of all that: They’re still likely to take the House next year during the midterm elections, and possibly the Senate, as they continue to rewrite rules in several states to make it easier to compromise fair elections.That means the Biden presidency, though riding high on a popular economic agenda and public health competence, may turn out to be a brief, single-term calm between two storms of authoritarianism.Democrats can blame themselves, in part. They’ve given just enough ammunition to Republicans that a party waging war on democracy is on the cusp of undermining much of that democracy next year.The Republican tank of ideas is full of the tired and the preposterous. Cut taxes for the wealthy. Climate change is fake. Make voting harder. And the big unifier: The 2020 presidential election was stolen. Try finding a national majority for any of that. So the Republican Party will run on what the Democrats have given them. Or at least what the far left of the party has given them.“G.O.P. candidates in 2022 will happily accuse Democratic opponents of wanting to defund the police and teach contempt for the country in schools,” wrote James A. Baker III, a venerable party operative, sketching a rosy scenario in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a powerful one-two punch: Dems will make us less safe while preaching identity politics to the kids.Republicans already control a majority of statehouses, and with them, the redistricting process. They need a net gain of only five seats to take the House, and a lone pickup to get control of the Senate.The warning signs were there in 2020, and in a recent local election in which Democrats lost in a Latino-heavy part of Texas. Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million, but Democrats suffered a net loss of 11 House seats.In a post-mortem, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the New York Democrat overseeing his party’s congressional campaigns, told The Washington Post that the “lies and distortions about defund and socialism carried a punch.”The way to hold off the barbarians on the right should be pretty simple. A unified Democratic message — helping people live better lives with a targeted hand from government — is hugely popular. It’s the essence of both the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill. And it should be the essence of what voters think about when they think about Democrats.Another message, on cultural issues, is much less popular. In a recent congressional race for an open seat in New Mexico, Democrats won in a landslide by emphasizing economic fairness while directly confronting attacks on law and order. The winner, Melanie Stansbury, ran an ad that featured support from a former sheriff’s deputy.The rise in violent crime is now the top concern of many voters across the country, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, and in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, according to a recent poll by Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos. Polling also shows that a majority of Americans oppose defunding the police, and Maloney says it’s a “pernicious lie” to label Democrats as the party of defund. But lies, fueled by lefty overreach in some cities as well as social media amplification, tend to have a much longer shelf life than boring talk about infrastructure.On race, the great reckoning that began with George Floyd’s death last year should continue to expose the overlooked lowlights of history and work to get rid of the bias built into the system.But in promoting the teaching of critical race theory — a term so misunderstood that it’s best known now as a Republican weapon — some educators have played into the hands of the Trumpers, even those less talented in the dark art of demagoguery. At the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner in New Hampshire in early June, former Vice President Mike Pence said that children are being taught “to be ashamed of their skin color,” a popular Republican talking point.If the message is that being born white is something akin to the Roman Catholic concept of original sin, then there’s bound to be a backlash among the moderate voters who came around to Democrats in the Trump era.The longtime liberal strategist Ruy Teixeira warned of this very thing in his newsletter in May and said moderates are afraid to push back. “The administration is doing nothing to head off this impending culture war in the schools because to do so would bring the wrath of the stridently woke sector of the Democratic Party down upon Biden’s head,” he wrote.Trump is diminished but still very dangerous. His party is stocked with brick-headed deniers. Nearly three in 10 Republicans said they think he will be reinstated in the White House this year. This month, Trump called his defeat “the crime of the century” and got applause when he denounced critical race theory.Democrats won’t be able to contain the tornado of awfulness around Trump with the “stridently woke,” in Teixeira’s words. Common-sense politics may not be a rallying cry, but it wins elections.Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and the author of, most recently, “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Seized Records of Democrats

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      The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.WASHINGTON — As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had subpoenaed.Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.Prosecutors also eventually secured subpoenas for reporters’ records to try to identify their confidential sources, a move that department policy allows only after all other avenues of inquiry are exhausted.The subpoenas remained secret until the Justice Department disclosed them in recent weeks to the news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN — revelations that set off criticism that the government was intruding on press freedoms.The gag orders and records seizures show how aggressively the Trump administration pursued the inquiries while Mr. Trump declared war on the news media and perceived enemies whom he routinely accused of disclosing damaging information about him, including Mr. Schiff and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom prosecutors focused on in the leak inquiry involving Times records.Former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly attacked Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who worked on leak investigations. “In combination with former President Trump’s unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Barr and a representative for Apple.As the years wore on, some officials argued in meetings that charges were becoming less realistic, former Justice Department officials said: They lacked strong evidence, and a jury might not care about information reported years earlier.The Trump administration also declassified some of the information, making it harder for prosecutors to argue that publishing it had harmed the United States. And the president’s attacks on Mr. Schiff and Mr. Comey would allow defense lawyers to argue that any charges were attempts to wield the power of law enforcement against Mr. Trump’s enemies.But Mr. Barr directed prosecutors to continue investigating, contending that the Justice Department’s National Security Division had allowed the cases to languish, according to three people briefed on the cases. Some cases had nothing to do with leaks about Mr. Trump and involved sensitive national security information, one of the people said. But Mr. Barr’s overall view of leaks led some people in the department to eventually see the inquiries as politically motivated.Mr. Schiff called the subpoenas for data on committee members and staff another example of Mr. Trump using the Justice Department as a “cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media.”“It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears,” Mr. Schiff said in a statement. “The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.”He said the department informed him in May that the investigation into his committee was closed. But he called on its independent inspector general to investigate the leak case and others that “suggest the weaponization of law enforcement,” an appeal joined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Early Hunt for LeaksSoon after Mr. Trump took office in 2017, press reports based on sensitive or classified intelligence threw the White House into chaos. They detailed conversations between the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time and Mr. Trump’s top aides, the president’s pressuring of the F.B.I. and other matters related to the Russia investigation.The White House was adamant that the sources be found and prosecuted, and the Justice Department began a broad look at national security officials from the Obama administration, according to five people briefed on the inquiry.While most officials were ruled out, investigators opened cases that focused on Mr. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, the people said. Prosecutors also began to scrutinize the House Intelligence Committee, including Mr. Schiff, as a potential source of the leaks. As the House’s chief intelligence oversight body, the committee has regular access to sensitive government secrets.Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in 2017.Al Drago/The New York TimesJustice Department National Security Division officials briefed the deputy attorney general’s office nearly every other week on the investigations, three former department officials said.In 2017 and 2018, a grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider for the records of the people associated with the Intelligence Committee. They learned about most of the subpoenas last month, when Apple informed them that their records had been shared but did not detail the extent of the request, committee officials said. A second service provider had notified one member of the committee’s staff about such a request last year.It was not clear why family members or children were involved, but the investigators could have sought the accounts because they were linked or on the theory that parents were using their children’s phones or computers to hide contacts with journalists.There do not appear to have been similar grand jury subpoenas for records of members or staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to another official familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a question about whether they were issued subpoenas. The Justice Department has declined to tell Democrats on the committee whether any Republicans were investigated.Apple turned over only metadata and account information, not photos, emails or other content, according to the person familiar with the inquiry.After the records provided no proof of leaks, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington discussed ending that piece of their investigation. But Mr. Barr’s decision to bring in an outside prosecutor helped keep the case alive.A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.Revived CasesIn February 2020, Mr. Barr placed the prosecutor from New Jersey, Osmar Benvenuto, into the National Security Division. His background was in gang and health care fraud prosecutions.Through a Justice Department spokesman, Mr. Benvenuto declined to comment.Mr. Benvenuto’s appointment was in keeping with Mr. Barr’s desire to keep matters of great interest to the White House in the hands of a small circle of trusted aides and officials.William P. Barr brought a trusted prosecutor in from New Jersey to help investigate leak cases.Al Drago for The New York TimesWith Mr. Benvenuto involved in the leak inquiries, the F.B.I. questioned Michael Bahar, a former House Intelligence Committee staff member who had gone into private practice in May 2017. The interview, conducted in late spring of 2020, did not yield evidence that led to charges.Prosecutors also redoubled efforts to find out who had leaked material related to Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Details about conversations he had in late 2016 with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, appeared in news reports in early 2017 and eventually helped prompt both his ouster and federal charges against him. The discussions had also been considered highly classified because the F.B.I. had used a court-authorized secret wiretap of Mr. Kislyak to monitor them.But John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and close ally of Mr. Trump’s, seemed to damage the leak inquiry in May 2020, when he declassified transcripts of the calls. The authorized disclosure would have made it more difficult for prosecutors to argue that the news stories had hurt national security.Separately, one of the prosecutors whom Mr. Barr had directed to re-examine the F.B.I.’s criminal case against Mr. Flynn interviewed at least one law enforcement official in the leak investigation after the transcripts were declassified, a move that a person familiar with the matter labeled politically fraught.The biweekly updates on the leak investigations between top officials continued. Julie Edelstein, the deputy chief of counterintelligence and export control, and Matt Blue, the head of the department’s counterterrorism section, briefed John C. Demers, the head of the National Security Division, and Seth DuCharme, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, on their progress. Mr. Benvenuto was involved in briefings with Mr. Barr.Mr. Demers, Ms. Edelstein, Mr. Blue and Mr. Benvenuto are still at the Justice Department. Their continued presence and leadership roles would seem to ensure that Mr. Biden’s appointees, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, would have a full understanding of the investigations. More