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      Elizabeth Moynihan, Engine of the Senator’s Success, Dies at 94

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      She not only had an outsize role in New York and Washington politics as the wife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan; she also made a significant archaeological discovery in India.Elizabeth Moynihan, who was a vital political partner to her husband, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, during his four terms as a U.S. Senator from New York; played a consequential role in Washington herself; and, as an architectural historian, made a signal discovery in India, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Maura Moynihan. Reticent in public but spirited, irreverent and combustible in private, Mrs. Moynihan was a formidable political strategist. “I don’t choose to be a public person,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “You know, the more public Pat has become, the more adamantly private I have felt.”But she was Senator Moynihan’s full partner on the legislation and policy they debated with his staff members and other advisers at the couple’s kitchen table in Washington, and she was his surrogate in overseeing his Senate staff and maintaining its loyalty.Mrs. Moynihan managed all four of her husband’s successful, no-frills campaigns, beginning in 1976, when she was photographed here.Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York TimesWhile her role was never publicly acknowledged, Mrs. Moynihan deserved credit for helping to enact what in 1993 was considered the most important legislative issue of Bill Clinton’s presidency: the budget and tax increases that undergirded the White House’s five-year economic program.It was her browbeating of Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, that provided what turned out to be the one-vote margin needed to pass the legislation, after her husband and the president, fellow Democrats, had failed to convince him. The bill was viewed at the White House as essential to Mr. Clinton’s ultimate success as president.On the morning of Aug. 6, Senator Kerrey met for an hour with Mr. Clinton but was apparently unpersuaded until Mrs. Moynihan telephoned hours later, around 6 p.m.As Mr. Moynihan later recalled the conversation in a memo, his wife emphatically told Mr. Kerrey, “I want to live to see you president,” but by voting against the bill, she said, “your future as a national Democrat is at risk.” To be sure, it was a bad bill, she said, agreeing with the senator, but her husband “feels we cannot have another president fail.”At 8:30 p.m., Mr. Kerrey, the last to announce which way he would vote, declared on the Senate floor that he would support Mr. Clinton. Vice President Al Gore went on to cast the tiebreaking vote.“She turned him around from a hard no to yes,” Tony Bullock, Mr. Moynihan’s last chief of staff, said of Senator Kerrey.Mr. Kerrey said in an email on Tuesday that while he did not remember the specific conversation, “I know for certain that she would have been disappointed with a ‘no’ vote, and I know for certain it would have been easier to disappoint the president than to disappoint Liz.”Mrs. Moynihan, here with Senator Moynihan, persuaded Senator Bob Kerrey to vote yes on a bill central to President Bill Clinton’s economic agenda. “She turned him around from a hard no to yes,” a former Moynihan aide said.Barry Thumma/Associated PressMrs. Moynihan managed all four of her husband’s successful, no-frills Senate campaigns, beginning in 1976. She called them “mom-and-pop” operations, but they were thoroughly professional.She also bolstered his commitment to improving the architecture of proposed federal public works, the rehabilitation of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and historic preservation in New York and elsewhere.“Every night over dinner the Senator told her everything — and I mean everything — that took place in the office that day,” said Richard Eaton, a former chief of staff to the senator. “Many mornings Liz would call me and tell me something that could have been handled better, or about some personnel concern that I was not aware of so that it could be fixed.”Mrs. Moynihan was especially effective in dissuading potential Democratic challengers to her husband’s re-election (like H. Carl McCall, the New York State comptroller) and those from the Republican Party (including Rudolph W. Giuliani, when he was a U.S. attorney), in part by supporting a TV advertising blitz lauding Mr. Moynihan early in the campaign.In the late 1970s, when her husband was the ambassador to India, Mrs. Moynihan developed an interest in Babur, the emperor who founded the Mughal dynasty almost 500 years ago.Analyzing a 1921 translation of Babur’s journal, she became convinced that the elegant pleasure garden he built 150 miles south of New Delhi still existed, even though most scholars believed it had probably vanished. She unearthed the garden in 1978 in what The Times called “an important archaeological discovery.”Babur’s garden became an integral part of her book, “Paradise as a Garden: In Persia and Mughal India” (1979). She also edited the volume “The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal” (2000), which documented a study of the Mehtab Bagh, a forgotten garden near the Taj Mahal. She led an American team that collaborated with Indian scholars on the project, work that spurred the garden’s restoration and that provided a new and spectacular view of the Taj Mahal.Mrs. Moynihan continued to support the preservation of ancient sites as a founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation in New York.Elizabeth Therese Brennan was born on Sept. 19, 1929, in Norfolk County, Mass., on the outskirts of Boston. Her mother, Therese (Russell) Brennan, edited a local newspaper. Her father, Francis Brennan, was a chemical factory foreman who left the family during the Depression, when Liz was 5, a growing pain she shared with her future husband, whose father deserted his wife and children in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan when Pat Moynihan was 9.She attended Boston College but never finished because she ran out of money. After volunteering in the first Senate campaign of John F. Kennedy in 1952 and in Adlai Stevenson’s presidential race that year, she moved to New York, where she worked for Gov. W. Averell Harriman’s 1954 campaign and met Mr. Moynihan, who was writing speeches for the governor. They married in 1955.Elizabeth Brennan met Mr. Moynihan while they were both working on Gov. W. Averell Harriman’s 1954 campaign. They married in 1955.via Moynihan familyMr. Moynihan died in 2003. Their son Tim died in 2015, and another son, John, died in 2004. In addition to their daughter, Maura, Mrs. Moynihan is survived by two grandchildren.The family moved more than 16 times during Mr. Moynihan’s career, as he went from Harvard professor to presidential adviser to ambassador to India and the United Nations before reaching the Senate. But they found sanctuary in a 500-acre dairy farm near Oneonta, N.Y., which they bought in 1964. (It was the setting for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s announcement in 1999 that she would run for the Senate from New York.)If Mr. Moynihan played a singular role in public life, retiring from the Senate in 2001, Mrs. Moynihan’s province was also exceptional, in particular among Senate wives, for her hands-on involvement in politics. In “Irish Americans: The History and Culture of a People” (2015), Eugene J. Halus Jr. wrote that Mr. Moynihan was successful in government “in part because of his personality and efforts, but also because of his lifelong partner in politics.”Of his 1998 re-election victory, Mr. Moynihan wrote to a friend: “It is simply that when things got tough we were ready. Liz was ready.”Michael Geissinger, via Library of CongressPeter Galbraith, a former ambassador to Croatia and Senate staff member under Mr. Moynihan, described Mrs. Moynihan as “the architect” of the senator’s 1988 landslide re-election victory, in which he won by a record-breaking plurality of 2.2 million votes.Savoring his victory, Mr. Moynihan wrote to a friend: “It is simply that when things got tough we were ready. Liz was ready.”But he might never have joined the political fray in the first place had it not been for the encouragement and political instincts of Mrs. Moynihan, said Lawrence O’Donnell, another former Moynihan legislative aide and now an MSNBC host.“I don’t think Professor Moynihan could have become Senator Moynihan without Liz,” he said in an interview. “So Pat’s legacy is Liz’s legacy.” More

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      Maldives Votes in Presidential Runoff Overshadowed by India and China

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      The election has become a referendum on the two Asian giants’ influence on the small nation’s direction.As voting began on Saturday in the presidential runoff in the Maldives, the race was proving to be as much a referendum on the competition between India and China for influence as it was a chance to determine the small island nation’s next leader.The pro-India incumbent, President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, has trailed Mohamed Muizzu, the mayor of the capital, Malé City, who has pushed for stronger ties with China. When neither managed a first-round victory with half of the vote early this month, the race was pushed into a runoff.The campaign season has focused on a range of issues, including a housing crisis in the overcrowded capital, which is scarce on land, and the country’s dwindling dollar reserves. That problem has prompted parties to offer competing “de-dollarization” proposals relating to trade.But none of the issues have hung as heavily as the influence of the two Asian giants over the future of the Maldives, a nation of about a half-million people that lies 450 miles south of India. The Maldives is particularly important because it sits along busy shipping routes in the Indian Ocean.“The fact is, either of them will try to control the Maldives — it is inevitable,” Mohamed Rauhan Ahmed, 27, a political science student, said of China and India on Saturday outside a polling station in Malé City. “But I think Solih can do a better job of managing them both and keeping them at an arm’s length.”While his preferred candidate was not in the runoff, he said, “For a change, we experienced peace and freedom in the last five years” under Mr. Solih.For China and India, the jostling for influence among their neighbors is nothing new. China enjoyed an early advantage because of its deep pockets and the development loans it brought as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, but India has asserted itself more in the region in recent years.New Delhi stepped in to assist Sri Lanka with billions of dollars when the country’s economy crashed last year. It has also expanded its presence and projects in the Maldives since Mr. Solih won the presidency in 2018, ending the five-year tenure of the pro-Beijing Abdulla Yameen, who is now in prison for corruption.Outside a voting site in the Hulhumalé district of the capital, Ahmed Rassam, 36, complained Saturday of government graft and a lack of a promised judicial overhaul. “But mostly, we sensed the unpleasant feeling of losing our nation’s sovereignty to India,” he said in explaining his support for Mr. Muizzu. “He can bring progressive change.”As the election race heated up, the main opposition coalition, which includes Mr. Muizzu’s People’s National Congress, made maligning the current government’s growing relations with India a main focus. Using slogans like “India Out,” it has denounced Mr. Solih’s government for bringing a small contingent of Indian military personnel to the island.While Mr. Solih has embraced his ties to India, inviting investment from its companies and development aid from its government, he has denied that it has been at the cost of relationships with other countries. During one election debate, Mr. Solih also rejected the opposition’s assertion about the nature of foreign troops’ activity, saying, “There is no Indian military personnel conducting military work in the Maldives.”In the initial round of voting, which featured eight candidates, Mr. Solih got 39 percent, trailing Mr. Muizzu’s 46 percent.The president has been undermined by a messy public split in his Maldivian Democratic Party, with Mr. Solih’s childhood friend Mohamed Nasheed, a former president, parting ways before the election to create his own party. Mr. Nasheed, who helped Mr. Solih become president, had felt increasingly marginalized.The candidate put forward by Mr. Nasheed’s new party received 7 percent of the vote, making it a potential kingmaker in the runoff. But Mr. Nasheed, now the speaker of Parliament, has found himself in a difficult spot, torn between his longtime closeness to India and the breakdown of his relationship with the president, which he has said cannot be surmounted.Mr. Nasheed’s party announced that it would “refrain from supporting either candidate” in the runoff, results of which were expected on Saturday evening. More

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      Joe Biden calls for stable US-China relationship during south-east Asia tour

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      Joe Biden’s national security tour of south-east Asia reached Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, where the president called for stability in the US-China relationship against an increasingly complex diplomatic picture in the region for his country.“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden said. “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”Biden also said that China’s recent economic downturn may limit any inclination to invade Taiwan.“I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan – matter of fact the opposite, probably doesn’t have the same capacity as it had before,” he said on Sunday during a press conference in Hanoi.He added that the country’s economic woes had left President Xi Jinping with “his hands full right now”.The president’s remarks came after a meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist party, in the nation’s capital designed to secure global supply chains of semiconductors and critical minerals, which would offer a strategic alternative to China.“I think we have an enormous opportunity,” Biden said of the visit. “Vietnam and the United States are critical partners at what I would argue is a very critical time.”The meeting came during a multi-front diplomatic push to shore up international support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and enunciate a policy toward China that both encourages trade and reduces the potential for US-Chinese conflict.The complexities of the administration’s approach were illustrated on Saturday, a day before Biden landed in Hanoi, when the New York Times reported that Vietnam is in talks with Russia over a new arms supply deal that could trigger US sanctions.Reuters said it had seen – but could not authenticate – documents describing talks for a credit facility that Russia would extend to Vietnam to buy heavy weaponry, including anti-ship missiles, anti-submarine aircraft and helicopters, anti-aircraft missile systems and fighter jets.Earlier, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, western leaders failed to reiterate an explicit condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The summit declaration referred only to the “war in Ukraine” and lamented the “suffering” of the Ukrainian people – an equivocation that indicates a growing lack of international consensus.Less than a year ago, G20 leaders still issued a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion and called on Moscow to withdraw its forces.Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, attempted to smooth over the disparity, telling ABC’s This Week that world leaders meeting in New Delhi had “stood up very clearly, including in the statement, for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.Blinken said that virtually every meeting participant “is intent on making sure there is a just and durable end to this Russian aggression”.It was clear in the room, he said, that “countries are feeling the consequences and want the Russian aggression to stop”.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “The vast majority of G20 countries have supported multiple UN resolutions that call out Russia’s illegal aggression.”Jean-Pierre said the New Delhi communique “builds on that, to send an unprecedented, unified statement on the imperative that Russia refrain from using force for territorial acquisition, abide by its obligations in the UN charter, and cease attacks on civilians and infrastructure”.The comments came as a CBS News poll found only 1 in 4 Americans think Biden is improving the US’s global position. According to the survey, 24% thought Biden was making the US stronger, 50% said weaker and 26% that he was not having much effect.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust 29% said they were optimistic for the prospects of world peace and stability in the world, and 71% said they were increasingly pessimistic. Asked if the Biden administration was being “too easy” on China, 57% agreed.On CNN, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed the Biden administration’s policy toward China, describing the country as an “enemy”.“China has practically been preparing for war with us for years,” Haley said. “Yes, I view China as an enemy.”Haley said China had bought 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of US soil and the largest pork producer in the country, and continues to steal $600bn a year in intellectual property while spreading propaganda. She pointed to Chinese drones used by US law enforcement and to the crisis caused by Chinese-sourced fentanyl that “had killed more Americans than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam war combined”.“How much more has to happen for Biden to realize you don’t send cabinet members over to China to appease them?” she said, referring to the recent visit of the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, to Beijing.The administration’s effort to present a coherent picture of US foreign policy toward its two most vexing issues – China and Russia – continued Sunday with vice-president Kamala Harris telling CBS News that a planned meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “would be a huge mistake”.“When you look at Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, and the idea that they would supply ammunition to Russia – well, it’s predictable where that ends up,” Harris said. “I also believe very strongly that for both Russia and North Korea, this will further isolate them.”Harris also spoke to an emerging concern that China’s president, Xi Jinping, who skipped the G20, may decline to attend the Asia-Pacific economic cooperation leaders’ meeting in San Francisco, California, in November.Last week, China’s security agency hinted that a meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco will depend on the US “showing sufficient sincerity”.China’s ministry of state security said that the country “will never let its guard down”.The comments came after Raimondo said the US did not want to decouple from China but that American companies had complained to her that China had become “uninvestible”.Asked how important it is for Xi Jinping to come to America, Harris remarked that “it is important to the … stability of things that we keep open lines of communication”. More

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      Georgia special grand jury recommended charges against Lindsey Graham and former senators – live

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      From 1h agoThe special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.All told, the special grand jurors in Georgia recommended charges against 39 people for trying to overturn the state’s elections, but Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s indictment only targeted 19 people, Donald Trump among them.Among those who were named in the report, but not charged:David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were Georgia’s Republican senators, until both were ousted from office by the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in elections held the day before the January 6 insurrection.The special grand jury in Fulton county recommended that Perdue be charged “over the persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees between November of 2020 and January of 2021” – the period when Donald Trump was trying to overturn his election loss. The vote was 16 jurors in favor, one against, and one abstention.The jurors also recommended charges against both Loeffler and Perdue for “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”. However there was more dissent on this count. For Perdue, the vote was 17 in favor and four against, while for Loeffler, the vote was 14 in favor, 6 against, and one abstention.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis ultimately did not indict either of the former lawmakers.Lindsey Graham’s name appeared early as Donald Trump’s attempts to stay in the White House began shortly after his re-election defeat in November 2020.Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger told the press that the South Carolina senator had called him to ask if it was possible to throw away mail-in ballots in counties crucial to Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. From the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino’s report at the time:
      Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.
      In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.
      Raffensperger was reportedly “stunned” by the question, in which Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.
      “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
      Graham confirmed the conversation to reporters on Capitol Hill but said it was “ridiculous” to suggest that he pressured Raffensperger to throw out legally cast absentee ballots. According to Graham, he only wanted to learn more about the process for verifying signatures, because what happens in Georgia “affects the whole nation”.
      “I thought it was a good conversation,” Graham said on Monday after the interview was published. “I’m surprised to hear he characterized it that way.”
      Trump has refused to accept results showing Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, falsely blaming rampant fraud and irregularities that election officials in both parties have dismissed as meritless.
      The special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.The full report of the special grand jury whose investigation led to the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result has been released.We’re digging into it and will let you know what it says.The special grand jury report that was used in the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others in Georgia for trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results is expected to be released any minute now.While parts of it have already been unsealed, we will finally be getting a look at the full report by the jurors empaneled by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis. There are two main pieces of news expected from the report:
      Whether the grand jurors recommended charges be brought against people who Willis ultimately opted not to pursue.
      The vote counts for each person the jurors said should be indicted, and whether there were any significant splits within the panel.
      Yesterday, Ron DeSantis had a testy exchange with an audience member who accused the Republican governor of backing policies in Florida that enabled violence against Black people – such as last month’s shooting by a racist gunman in Jacksonville:Clearly smarting over the exchange, DeSantis later went on Fox News to call the questioner a “nutjob”:While Joe Biden is in India for a meeting of G20 leaders, Republicans angling to replace him next year are continuing their campaigns, including Ron DeSantis – who may have done himself more harm than good by skipping a meeting with the president after a hurricane struck Florida. Here’s the story, from the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe:One reality of Florida politics is that a bad hurricane for the state traditionally blows good fortune for its governor. It was true for Rick Scott, elected a senator in November 2018, one month after guiding Florida through Category 5 Hurricane Michael; and again for Ron DeSantis, whose landslide re-election last year followed his much-praised handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.This year, however, DeSantis is struggling to shake the dark clouds of Hurricane Idalia, as his return to the national stage to try to rescue his flailing presidential campaign after an 11-day break has been further scarred by his “petty and small” snub of Joe Biden’s visit to Florida last weekend to survey the storm’s damage.Opponents seized on it as a partisan politicization of a climate disaster, contrasting the Republican Florida governor’s approach to a year ago after Ian, when DeSantis and Biden put their differences aside to praise each other and tour the worst-affected areas with their respective first ladies.“Your job as governor is to be the tour guide for the president, to make sure the president sees your people, sees the damage, sees the suffering, what’s going on and what needs to be done to rebuild it,” Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade.“You’re doing your job. And unfortunately, he put politics ahead of his job,” added Christie, who was applauded by Democrats and savaged by Republicans for working closely with Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy mauled his state in 2012.The Twitter/X account of Joe Biden, who is currently flying on Air Force One to New Delhi for a summit of G20 nations, just released video showing him touring the renovated situation room.That’s the space in the White House where the president goes to handle emergencies or highly sensitive operations:Perhaps the most famous appearance of a president in the situation room is Barack Obama’s from 1 May 2011, as he watched US soldiers kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. His photographer Pete Souza captured the scene:Yesterday, Donald Trump indicated he may ask that his trial in the Georgia election subversion case be moved to federal court, which the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported could have a number of advantages for the former president:Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.The Georgia special grand jury report that is expected to be released at 10am ET today could reveal whether the investigative panel thought anyone else besides Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants should face charges for meddling in the state’s election result three years ago.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis convened the panel and used its subpoena power to compel witness testimony, and portions of its final report have already been released. The special grand jury did not indict Trump – that was done by one of the regular grand juries she convened in August.Good morning, US politics live blog readers. It’s going to be another big Friday in one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump, while US president Joe Biden is in India for G20 and a crucial bilateral with the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Here’s some of what’s ahead:
      The report of the special grand jury in Georgia that investigated Trump in the election subversion case – where the now-former president attempted to overturn the 2020 election in the swing state – is expected to be unsealed today.
      Biden is due to touch down in New Delhi, India, in under two hours, a day before the start of the G20 summit there. He and Modi will hold a bilateral meeting shortly after the US president arrives. The specter of Russia’s war in Ukraine looms over the event.
      Speaking of criminal cases against former US presidents, on this day 49 years ago Republican president Gerald Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon” to former president Richard Nixon covering his entire term in office, the AP notes.
      Trump will attend a rally tonight in South Dakota and the state’s rightwing governor Kristi Noem is expected to endorse his run for the 2024 Republican nomination for the White House. Noem is considered a vice-presidential hopeful. More

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      The US should not normalize Modi’s autocratic and illiberal India at the G20 | Jason Stanley

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      In December 2021, President Joe Biden hosted an event billed as a “Summit for Democracy”. Biden opened his address to the summit by describing his motivation for holding it: “in the face of sustained and alarming challenges … democracy needs champions”.Since that time Biden has embraced, as allies, autocrats and would-be autocrats all over the world, including the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who US intelligence has said was responsible for the brutal murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. More recently, Biden invited Benjamin Netanyahu, who is presiding over the destruction of Israel’s democracy by targeting its judicial system, for an official visit to the United States.Biden is right that there is an ever-larger club of backsliding democracies, with the US among them. And the American president is not the only openly hypocritical leader in this club. In fact, he is not even close to the worst offender.This September, India is hosting G20 leaders under the banner of “One Earth, One Family, One Future”. As a part of the transition to India’s assumption of this position, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has leaned heavily on these themes in promoting India as an inclusive, emerging global power.Yet behind these lofty ideals lies a very different, and dangerous, reality.Those in Modi’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), are hardline Hindu nationalists. Their ideology holds that India was originally a pure Hindu state, with minorities, such as India’s large Muslim population, the supposed result of colonization by outside forces.The hallmarks of fascism are everywhere. School textbooks are being rewritten to reinforce the fake history behind BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda. Topics like the theory of evolution and the periodic table have been replaced with traditional Hindu theories, and academics have been silenced for calling out the BJP’s election malpractices. The government has weaponized education in the manner typical of fascist regimes such as Russia. There are other clear indications of India’s slide towards fascism. On press freedom, India ranks 161st out of 180 countries, sandwiched between Venezuela (at 159) and Russia (at 164).Modi and the BJP have proven themselves to be fluent hypocrites on the world stage. Under the banner of anticolonialism, the party is replicating Britain’s colonial practices.In 2005 Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, was denied entry to the US because of his role in ethnic violence that left over 1,000 people dead, the vast majority of them Muslims. According to a recently declassified report from the British Foreign Office, the Hindu mobs’ “systematic campaign of violence has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and “Narendra Modi is directly responsible.”He’s much more powerful now, but the playbook remains the same. India’s minorities face lynchings and the bulldozing of their homes, among other abuses. Ten percent of the world’s Muslims live in India, over 200 million in all; as Gregory Stanton, the founder and director of Genocide Watch, has warned in a US congressional briefing, we are seeing in India the beginning of what would be by far the largest genocide in history.And it’s not just Muslims who are at risk. In Manipur, over 150 people have been killed since May 2023 in a vicious ethnic conflict pitting Hindus against Christians. More broadly, since Modi took over in 2014, hate crimes against minorities have increased by 300%.History tells us that this is how it works. Fascism grants the dominant majority special status, targeting national minorities by threatening their equal citizenship. In 2019, India passed a Citizenship Amendment Act that granted a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslims who lack documentation as citizens. The National Registry Act, already implemented in the Indian state of Assam, is a seemingly contradictory effort to expel illegal immigrants. It demands that residents provide proof of their citizenship in India, essentially a birth certificate, or face expulsion. Yet 38% of Indian children under five lack a birth certificate.This tangle of laws exemplifies the blatant hypocrisy of India’s ruling party, leaving India poised to disenfranchise much of its Muslim population.Nor is the problem only domestic. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has become one of the world’s largest importers of Russian oil – essentially propping up Russia’s occupation and genocide of its peaceful neighbor. Genocidal regimes support one another, in an alliance of evil, and the rest of the world must stand against them.So, has the US been listening? The answer is clearly no. In June, Biden gave Modi’s visit a red-carpet treatment. Jack Kirby, a US national security official, has made light of objections to Modi, declaring that “India is a vibrant democracy. Anybody that, you know, happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves.” With America’s help, the G20 platforms BJP’s transparently hypocritical embrace of humanitarian and liberal ideals.The US public and their leaders are paying attention, at least somewhat, to Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. But the collective shrug at a potentially vast genocide in India (as well as the ongoing genocide in Sudan) raises an obvious concern: is the US public’s standard for this crime much higher when black and brown people face the threat?
      Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and the author, most recently, of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them More

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      Indian Court Dismisses Rahul Gandhi’s Defamation Appeal

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      The defamation case, stemming from a comment Rahul Gandhi made about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, could go to the Supreme Court. It may hurt his ability to run in upcoming elections.Rahul Gandhi, India’s top opposition leader, faced another setback on Friday when a court in the state of Gujarat denied his request to stay his conviction in a defamation case, a move that leaves him at risk of imprisonment and possibly unable to run in national elections next year.Mr. Gandhi, the most prominent leader of the Indian National Congress party, was sentenced to two years in prison in March in connection with a 2019 campaign speech in which he likened Prime Minister Narendra Modi to two Indians accused of swindling money who shared the same last name.A member of Mr. Modi’s party, who also shared the Modi name, argued that the remark was offensive and filed a lawsuit. The sentence, the maximum for defamation cases, automatically disqualified Mr. Gandhi from his seat in Parliament. Members of the opposition have called the case politically motivated.The Gujarat High Court, where Mr. Gandhi had filed a petition seeking a stay on his conviction, said there was no reasonable ground to suspend it. “The conviction is just, proper and legal,” said Justice Hemant Prachchhak, who heard the review plea at the high court.Mr. Gandhi, 53, is out on bail, and his last option is to advance the case to India’s Supreme Court for final review. His party has said he will do so.His case is the latest example of what opposition parties have long accused Mr. Modi of: using branches of the government, including the police and the courts, to quash dissent and bog down political opponents and critics of his government.One of India’s premier law enforcement agencies that answer indirectly to Mr. Modi, the Enforcement Directorate, is being increasingly accused of conducting raids on places connected to political opponents of Mr. Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.Mr. Gandhi is among the most vocal of the national opposition leaders, and his legal woes are stymieing him at a time when he was trying to build momentum and to unite various political opposition groups around his party. He had rallied the public with a grass-roots march across India — some 2,000 miles over five months — during which he railed against Mr. Modi’s power.In actively seeking the public’s support, Mr. Gandhi, the scion of a once-mighty political dynasty, positioned himself as a main challenger to Mr. Modi, who remains popular with Indian voters.After his conviction in March in a lower court, Mr. Gandhi approached the high court in Gujarat seeking a stay of the conviction. As long as that conviction stands, Indian law bars him from competing in elections and from Parliament. “The use of defamation law is being utilized to crush a voice,” Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a member of the Indian National Congress, said after the high court verdict. “But that doesn’t mean Rahul Gandhi is afraid. He will continue to walk on the path of truth.”Lawmakers from the B.J.P. praised Friday’s ruling.One of them, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said Mr. Gandhi’s remarks were a direct attack on members of lower-caste groups, including the one with which Mr. Modi is often associated, who have faced discrimination in India for centuries.“It has become a chronic habit of Mr. Rahul Gandhi to abuse, to defame and shower the worst kind of abuses against eminent leaders and organizations,” he said. More

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      Modi’s Visits Abroad Help to Build His Image in India

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      For an audience in India, the prime minister is linking his diplomatic reception abroad, and himself, to the country’s growing importance on the world stage.His grip on the levers of national power secure, his hold on India’s domestic imagination cemented, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has increasingly turned to advancing himself on a new horizon: the global stage.With a packed diplomatic calendar that includes India’s hosting of the Group of 20 summit later this year, Mr. Modi is building an image going into his re-election campaign as a leader who can win respect and investment for his vast nation. The state visit accorded to Mr. Modi in Washington, which ends on Friday, is perhaps the biggest prize yet in that quest.“It’s not just about a fairer bargain abroad,” said Ashok Malik, a former government adviser who is the India chair at the Asia Group, a consulting firm. “It’s also that ‘my investments in key foreign policy relations are actually helping to build the Indian economy and therefore create opportunities for Indians at home and strengthen India overall.’”At home, Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist party has continued to sideline institutions that were once important checks on the government. It has persisted in its vilification of the country’s 200 million Muslims, even as Mr. Modi used an exceedingly rare news conference in Washington to claim that there was no discrimination against anyone in India.But abroad, world leaders eager to court an ascendant India have offered little pushback. And often, they have given Mr. Modi invaluable fodder for an information campaign that shapes perceptions of him among many Indian voters who are ecstatic to see their country’s importance affirmed.Eid-al Fitr prayers in Chennai, India, in April. Mr. Modi used a news conference in Washington to claim that there was no discrimination against anyone in India, including the country’s huge Muslim minority.Idrees Mohammed/EPA, via ShutterstockWhen Mr. Modi traveled to Australia last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese referred to him as “the boss” in front of an arena in Sydney packed with about 20,000 people. Mr. Modi then returned to New Delhi to a large crowd gathered for his welcome at 6 in the morning, telling supporters that the grand welcome for him abroad was about India, not him.On Friday, as Mr. Modi was wrapping up his meetings in the United States before arriving in Egypt for another grand greeting, his political party and the large sections of the broadcast media friendly to him reveled in the reception he had gotten from President Biden and other American leaders.The red carpet in Washington played perfectly into one of Mr. Modi’s talents: He can build a media campaign out of virtually anything, projecting himself as the only leader who can expand India’s economy and usher a nation coming into its own to new heights.While opposition leaders back home were holding their largest gathering yet, hoping to find a formula for uniting to challenge the prime minister in elections early next year, Mr. Modi was reaching for the world.Social media was flooded with montage videos, set to regal background music, of Mr. Modi making a grand entrance into the House of Representatives for his address to a joint session of Congress. The speech, after which several lawmakers sought Mr. Modi’s autograph, made him one of only a very small number of world leaders to have addressed that body twice.Another video online kept count of the number of times Mr. Modi received applause or standing ovations during his speech. A third cut to dramatic images of Mr. Modi contrasting him with the dynastic leaders who came before him, advancing a constant narrative that he represents a subversion of the old elite that long ruled India.“History tells us that powerful people come from powerful places. History was wrong,” a deep voice intones in the video. “Powerful people make places powerful.”Congress offers a standing ovation for Mr. Modi’s speech on Capitol Hill on Thursday.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesMr. Modi’s next major opportunity to appear as a global statesman will come in September when India welcomes the Group of 20 leaders, a summit meeting he has framed to his support base as his bringing the world to India.His government has turned promotion for the meeting into a roadshow, hosting hundreds of G20 events, so many that foreign diplomats in New Delhi quietly complain about travel fatigue. Cities and towns across India are decked out with billboards bearing the G20 logo — which cleverly incorporates the lotus, a symbol both of India and his Bharatiya Janata Party — and pictures of Mr. Modi.In promoting the G20 presidency, Mr. Modi has taken to frequently describing India, the world’s most populous nation, as the “mother of democracy.” Abroad, however, he has pursued a transactional brand of diplomacy built not on practicing democratic values, but on what best serves Indian economic and security interests, and what elevates India in the world.The image of “a rising India, a new India being seen more seriously abroad” helps Mr. Modi politically, Mr. Malik said. But Mr. Modi is also investing heavily in U.S. relations with an eye toward how they could help an Indian economy that is struggling to create enough jobs for its huge young population and that must put up a fight against an aggressive China next door.“Addressing China is not just about soldiers and weapons at the border, it’s also about building economic alternatives to what China offers,” Mr. Malik said.Supporters of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party cheer during a rally in Bengaluru, India, last month.Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe list of agreements between the United States and India, announced at the end of a bilateral meeting at the White House, was long, covering defense, space and a wide range of technological cooperation.Defense cooperation, in particular — including deals on Indian manufacturing of General Electric jet engines and purchasing Predator military drones — received a major boost after what had been a history of reluctance and bureaucratic hurdles on both sides. Dr. Tara Kartha, a former senior official in India’s security council who dealt with U.S. on defense, said the agreement on aircraft engines was “an affirmation of trust” that would help the military partnership beyond the smaller steps of the past two decades.“Each country is trying to get past its bureaucratic constrains,” she said. “Until the bureaucracy can catch up, there will be frustrations.”Among ordinary Indians on the streets of New Delhi, opinions of Mr. Modi’s diplomatic efforts were divided.Vijay Yadav, a 26-year-old taxi driver, said Mr. Modi’s outreach abroad could not cover for how India’s economy was struggling to create enough jobs.“I saw on Instagram a news feed which was constantly touting Mr. Modi’s trip to America as if no other Indian leader had been there before,” he said. “Firstly, he must get down to solving the problems of his own countrymen before he goes abroad to project himself as a hero.”Nidhi Garg, 41, who has inherited a vegetable and fruit shop from her father, said her heart swelled each time she saw Mr. Modi representing India abroad.“Today, wherever you see, the name of our nation is being taken,” she said. “The first thing that comes to anyone’s mind when they mention the word India, they immediately connect it to Prime Minister Modi.”Suhasini Raj More

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      Assessing Modi’s Leadership of India

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      More from our inbox:Trying to Make Sense of Donald Trump: ‘An Exercise in Futility’Depoliticize Helping the HomelessThose Annoying Noise Machines Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor: As an Indian American living in the United States for a long time, I have been a strong supporter of the media for their active stance against people like Donald Trump who engaged in egregious behavior while in office. But I’m totally aghast at the tirade against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in “During Modi’s Visit, Biden Plans to Focus on Common Interests” (news analysis, June 22).For the past year or so, you have published articles critical of Mr. Modi, accusing him of being authoritarian and anti-democratic. You seem to lump him in the same group as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orban.This article talks about a crackdown on dissent under Mr. Modi and India backsliding in democracy. Similar articles have pointed out large-scale incarceration of political opponents ever since Mr. Modi’s party has been voted to power.Are we living in an alternate world? I’ve not seen any mass jailing or subversion of democracy in India as is happening in other countries like Turkey.I can understand that the West is upset about India’s neutral stance in the Ukraine-Russia war and India’s continuing to buy oil from Russia despite Western sanctions. As S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, has said, India will do what is good for India.Every country has an obligation to take care of itself first.Mudi RameshKensington, Md.To the Editor:Re “Modi’s India Isn’t What It Seems,” by Maya Jasanoff (Opinion guest essay, June 22):Like Professor Jasanoff, I am Indian American. For many years after Indian independence in 1947, except for a brief period when J.F.K. was president, Indo-U.S. relations were marked by misunderstanding and acrimony.Perhaps the lowest point was reached in 1971 when the U.S. Seventh Fleet sailed into the Bay of Bengal, threatening India during its war with Pakistan.For Indian Americans, the joint Indo-U.S. effort to finally acknowledge shared interests in a global order based on the rule of law is a welcome relief, and we are grateful to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for encouraging this initiative. However, all this has to be set against the erosion of civil rights that is ongoing in India today.The resilience shown by U.S. career officials against the authoritarian dictates of former President Donald Trump has been absent in India. The U.S. has to exert greater pressure to strengthen civil governance in India or all our mutual interests in good governance will come to nothing.Bharat S. SarathEast Brunswick, N.J.To the Editor:Prof. Maya Jasanoff makes some valid points about harassment of minorities, journalists, media, etc., and the sliding of democratic norms in India. But Narendra Modi becoming an autocratic ruler is far-fetched. The Indian public will not stand for it. Case in point: His party recently lost an election in the Indian state of Karnataka.In the mid-1970s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed an emergency rule to subdue opposition. At the time I believed that the Indian populace would not stand for it. Sure enough, Gandhi’s party lost in 1977 when she called for an election. Having learned her lesson, she was back in power three years later.Mr. Modi is popular because he has provided a stable government and made substantial progress during the last 10 years. The general public cares about that and will ignore faults of his and his party’s rule. Opposition parties are splintered.With a country as large as India, there are bound to be some imperfections from our Western point of view. But I am confident that India will handle it as best as it can and prosper.Eswar G. PhadiaWayne, N.J.Trying to Make Sense of Donald Trump: ‘An Exercise in Futility’ Justice DepartmentTo the Editor: Re “To Jail or Not to Jail,” by Maureen Dowd (column, June 18):Everyone seems to be trying to make sense of Donald Trump’s disordered mind and unpredictable behavior. As if he did this because of this, and then this happened and he did/said this other thing.Trying to make sense of Mr. Trump is an exercise in futility. He is impulsive, irrational and thoughtless, lacks introspection and has no conscience. He acts on a whim, makes up things as he goes along, and everything is done in his own interest without concern or consideration for anyone else in the world. That’s it.If I were explaining him to a child, I’d say, “He’s a bad man.” And he is. Now, what are we going to do about it?Kathryn JanusChicagoTo the Editor:Maureen Dowd compares Donald Trump to Hamlet. But he’s more Macbeth or Richard III, men who violate higher moral laws to grasp power. And in many ways Mr. Trump ticks the boxes of the tragic protagonist: a man of high estate whose reversal of fortune flows from fatal flaws, usually overweening pride and blindness to his own weaknesses.What remains to be seen is if Mr. Trump’s downfall will bring about an anagnorisis, the tragic hero’s recognition that he brought it all upon himself. Will a playwright or opera composer or movie director portray him tragically? Or will he only inspire satire. “Springtime for Trump”?Arnold WengrowAsheville, N.C.The writer is professor emeritus of drama at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.Depoliticize Helping the Homeless Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Policy to Fight Homelessness Becomes a Target of the Right” (front page, June 21):Everyone loses when we politicize our response to homelessness, especially those we say we are trying to help. It is shameful that in America nearly 600,000 people experience homelessness on any given night.I have worked as a shelter director and service provider for 25 years. To suggest that our policies are enough and our efforts are meeting the need is irresponsible, yet to throw them out is misguided too. We need to build upon what we have, open our minds, expand our options and listen to people with lived experience, rather than fighting about which solution is right.There simply is no one-size-fits-all solution to address homelessness. People experiencing homelessness are diverse, and our solutions need to match that diversity. Communities need more tools including shelter, treatment, employment and housing.I have worked with the right and the left, and common ground is possible if we move beyond labels toward an integrated response.Isabel McDevittPhiladelphiaThe writer is the former C.E.O. of Bridge House, a homeless services agency in Colorado, and co-founder of Work Works America, which helps communities address homelessness.Those Annoying Noise MachinesNoise Could Take Years Off Your Life. Here’s How.We used a professional sound meter to measure the din of daily life and talked to scientists about the health risks it can pose.To the Editor: Re “Chronic Noise Proves Deadly” (Science Times, June 20):The bane of suburbia is the gas-powered, two-stroke leaf blower. Not only do those infernal things emit an ear-piercing sound, but they also generate an incredible amount of exhaust. Ban them!!Mark MaddaloniCloster, N.J.To the Editor:Your analysis is much appreciated. In Brooklyn, the noise from helicopters heading to and from the Hamptons has gone from an occasional annoyance to a constant. To ferry, what, two or four people at a time, tens of thousands are subject to noise so loud that it sets off car alarms on the ground and scares children.On Friday and Sunday evenings their low-altitude flyovers happen dozens of times in the space of a few hours. Flying at such low altitude may save fuel and time for the carriers, but doing so over densely populated areas is the height of selfishness.John WilkensBrooklyn More