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      D.N.C. Helped Pay Biden’s Legal Bills in Special Counsel Investigation

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      Even as some of President Biden’s top campaign officials were attacking Donald J. Trump’s campaign for soliciting donations to pay his legal fees, the Biden-aligned Democratic National Committee was helping pay for lawyers in the special counsel investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents.The D.N.C. has directed at least $1.7 million to lawyers since July to cover the president’s representation in the documents inquiry, a figure that pales in comparison to Mr. Trump’s use of supporters’ donations to pay his hefty legal fees. The former president has spent more than $100 million on legal bills since leaving office, relying almost entirely on donations.Federal Election Commission records show that since the investigation began last year, the D.N.C. has paid $1.05 million to Bob Bauer, the president’s lawyer. The party committee has also paid $905,000 to Hemenway & Barnes, a Boston firm that employs Jennifer Miller, a lawyer whom the special counsel’s report identified as a “personal counsel for Mr. Biden.”The party’s payments to cover Mr. Biden’s lawyers — first reported by Axios on Friday — are roughly in line with amounts donors spent to pay for legal defenses for President Barack Obama during his first term.The Biden campaign has repeatedly amplified the Trump campaign’s use of donor money to pay the former president’s legal bills in his four criminal cases.As recently as last weekend, top Biden campaign officials celebrated their fund-raising prowess with jabs at Mr. Trump for asking donors to subsidize his lawyers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Cornell Student Admits Targeting Jewish Students With Online Threats

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      Patrick Dai pleaded guilty to posting a series of messages in which he threatened to stab, rape and behead Jewish people.A former Cornell University student pleaded guilty on Wednesday to posting a series of online messages shortly after the war in Gaza began last fall in which he threatened to stab, rape and behead Jewish people, federal prosecutors said.The former student, Patrick Dai, pleaded guilty to posting threats to kill or injure another person using interstate communications, according to federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for New York’s Northern District.Mr. Dai, 21, who is originally from Pittsford, N.Y., is scheduled to be sentenced in August and faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, prosecutors said.“This defendant is being held accountable for vile, abhorrent, antisemitic threats of violence levied against members of the Cornell University Jewish community,” Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.Lisa Peebles, a federal public defender representing Mr. Dai, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with WHEC, a local television station, outside the federal courthouse in Syracuse, N.Y., on Wednesday, she said the threats were a product of a “bad decision” over “a bad couple of days.”“He’s very remorseful,” she said. “He accepts responsibility.”A university spokesman declined to comment on the plea.Mr. Dai was a junior majoring in computer science when he made the threats. In pleading guilty, he admitted to posting them anonymously on Oct. 28 and Oct. 29 in the Cornell section of an online discussion forum about fraternity and sorority life, prosecutors said.The threats included saying he was “gonna shoot up” a kosher dining hall on the Cornell campus and was “gonna bomb” a Jewish residence there, prosecutors said.In one post, prosecutors said, he threatened to “stab” and “slit the throat” of any Jewish man he saw on campus; to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish women; to behead Jewish babies; and to “bring an assault rifle to campus” and shoot Jews.The F.B.I. traced the threats to Mr. Dai through an IP address, and he admitted they were his in an interview with federal agents, according to a criminal complaint.The threats came amid a surge in antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric across the United States, including at colleges and universities, after the war in Gaza began in October. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, traveled to Cornell’s Ithaca campus to show support for rattled students. Cornell canceled classes for a day.Mr. Dai’s mother, Bing Liu, told The Associated Press in November that she believed the threats were partly the fault of medication her son had been taking for depression and anxiety.She told The A.P. that her son’s depression had prompted her to bring him home on weekends, that he was home the weekend the threats were made and that he had previously taken three semesters off. More

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      Beeper Messaging App Is Acquired as a Bet on a Regulatory Shift

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      Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, bought Beeper in an effort to build a system that works across Android and Apple devices.Beeper, the app that brought iPhone messaging features to Android smartphones, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to support the development of a single service for sending and receiving chats from WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn and others.The deal, which is valued at about $125 million, was announced on Tuesday. It comes as regulators in Europe and the United States pressure the biggest tech companies to open their messaging services to third parties. Regulators believe doing so will make it easier for people to communicate with friends and family and to switch messaging providers.Automattic is betting that the changing regulatory environment will make people more interested in finding a unified messaging system like Beeper, said Toni Schneider, Automattic’s interim chief executive.Beeper is Automattic’s second messaging service acquisition. Last year, it bought Texts, an iPhone app that brings together messages from Instagram, iMessage and others. Mr. Schneider said Beeper and Texts employees would combine their systems into a single app that worked on iPhones and Android smartphones as well as computers.“Everyone has this problem where they say, ‘I know I had this conversation with this person, but I can’t remember where,’” Mr. Schneider said. “We think we can innovate a lot in this space.”Eric Migicovsky, who co-founded Beeper in 2020, said Beeper and Texts would deliver their combined service this year. The teams that built those companies will meet in two weeks in Portugal to begin that process.“The real thing we have been competing against was apathy about new experiences in chat,” Mr. Migicovsky said.Last year, Beeper released an app that offered Android phone users the ability to send encrypted messages and high-resolution videos to iPhones. The app added more than 100,000 users in three days before Apple blocked it by changing its iMessage system.Though a Justice Department lawsuit accusing Apple of maintaining an iPhone monopoly did not refer specifically to Beeper, the problems highlighted by Beeper’s conflict with Apple were mentioned in the complaint, which was filed in March. The department faulted Apple for making “iPhone users less secure than they would otherwise be” by “rejecting solutions” for smartphone messaging like those provided by Beeper.Beeper will soon be open to anyone who wants to download it after a testing period that limited the app to about 100,000 users, Mr. Migicovsky said. The company had 466,000 people on a waiting list. About 60 percent of its users are on Android smartphones.Automattic was an early investor in Beeper, which had raised $16 million from investors that included Y Combinator and Initialized Capital, Mr. Migicovsky said. Last week, Beeper’s 27 employees officially began work at their new company. More

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      Prosecutors Ask Supreme Court to Reject Trump’s Immunity Claim in Election Case

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      The filing was the main submission from Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting the former president. The case will be argued on April 25.Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, urged the Supreme Court on Monday to reject Mr. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution.“The president’s constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed does not entail a general right to violate them,” Mr. Smith wrote.The filing was Mr. Smith’s main submission in the case, which will be argued on April 25.He wrote that the novelty of the case underscored its gravity.“The absence of any prosecutions of former presidents until this case does not reflect the understanding that presidents are immune from criminal liability,” Mr. Smith wrote. “It instead underscores the unprecedented nature of petitioner’s alleged conduct.”He urged the justices not to lose sight of the basic legal terrain.“A bedrock principle of our constitutional order,” he wrote, “is that no person is above the law — including the president.” He added, “The Constitution does not give a president the power to conspire to defraud the United States in the certification of presidential-election results, obstruct proceedings for doing so or deprive voters of the effect of their votes.”Mr. Smith urged the court to move quickly, though he did not directly address the pending election.When the Supreme Court said in February that it would hear the case, it set what it called an expedited schedule. But it was not particularly fast, with oral arguments scheduled about seven weeks later. That delay was a significant partial victory for Mr. Trump, whose trial had been expected to start March 4.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Eastman, Former Trump Election Lawyer, Should Be Disbarred, Judge Finds

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      The decision was only the latest effort by bar officials to seek accountability against a group of lawyers who sought to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office despite his election loss.A judge in California recommended on Wednesday that the lawyer John Eastman be stripped of his law license, finding he had violated rules of professional ethics by persistently lying in his efforts to help former President Donald J. Trump maintain his grip on power after losing the 2020 election.In a 128-page ruling, the judge, Yvette Roland, said Mr. Eastman had willfully misrepresented facts in lawsuits he helped file challenging the election results and acted dishonestly in promoting a “wild theory” that Mr. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, could unilaterally declare him the victor during a certification proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.“In sum, Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon,” Judge Roland found, adding that he had breached “his ethical duty as an attorney to prioritize honesty and integrity.”The ruling said Mr. Eastman would lose his license within three days of the decision being issued. While he can appeal the finding, the ruling makes his license “inactive,” meaning that he cannot practice law in California while a review is taking place.The decision was only the latest effort by bar officials across the country to seek accountability against a group of lawyers who pushed false claims of election fraud and sought to help Mr. Trump stay in office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Insurance Companies and the Prior Authorization Maze

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      More from our inbox:Elect the U.S. Attorney GeneralFriendship MemoriesA Leadership GapInsurance companies have weaponized a seemingly benign process to protect their profits, and it’s putting patients at risk.To the Editor:Re “‘What’s My Life Worth?’ The Big Business of Denying Medical Care,” by Alexander Stockton (Opinion video, March 14), about prior authorization:Mr. Stockton’s video captures a current snapshot of an important truth about medical insurance in our country and in doing so does a service to all citizens by making them aware of this threat to themselves and their families.The immediate truth is that medical insurance companies are inadequately regulated, monitored and punished for their greed. In their current iteration they are bastions of greed, power and money. They need to be reined in.But there are other truths as well. Some physicians, just like some pharmaceutical companies, are unable to contain their greed and allow avarice to cloud their judgment, compromise their ethics and in some cases cross the line to Medicare fraud or other illegal activity.Medical care in our country is very big business involving billions of dollars. Without proper controls, regulation and monitoring, malfeasance follows. The challenge in such a complex and multifaceted context is how to implement such controls and monitoring without making things worse.Ross A. AbramsJerusalemThe writer, a retired radiation oncologist, is professor emeritus at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.To the Editor:The Times’s video exploits tragic outcomes and does not mention basic important facts about the limited yet key role of prior authorization in ensuring that patients receive evidence-based, affordable care.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly

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      The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.The Justice Department and 16 state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday, the federal government’s most significant challenge to the reach and influence of the company that has put iPhones in the hands of more than a billion people.The government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws by preventing other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallets, which could diminish the value of the iPhone. Apple’s policies hurt consumers and smaller companies that compete with some of Apple’s services, according to excerpts from the lawsuit released by the government, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.“Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,” the government said in the lawsuit.The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $2.75 trillion public company that was for years the most valuable on the planet. It takes direct aim at the iPhone, Apple’s most popular device and most powerful business, and attacks the way the company has turned the billions of smartphones it has sold since 2007 into the centerpiece of its empire.By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field, where it grants its own products and services access to core features that it denies rivals. Over the years, it has limited finance companies’ access to the phone’s payment chip and Bluetooth trackers from tapping into its location-service feature. It’s also easier for users to connect Apple products, like smartwatches and laptops, to the iPhone than to those made by other manufacturers.The company says this makes its iPhones more secure than other smartphones. But app developers and rival device makers say Apple uses its power to crush competition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Read the Lawsuit Against Apple

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      Case 2:24-cv-04055 Document 1 Filed 03/21/24 Page 4 of 88 PageID: 4

      across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others.

      Apple’s conduct also stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple’s smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone- -or make users device-agnostic altogether. As one Apple manager recently observed, “Imagine buying a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and it works fine…. And you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are.” Simply put, Apple feared the disintermediation of its iPhone platform and undertook a course of conduct that locked in users and developers while protecting its profits.

      Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries-and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone.

      This case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future. The United States and the States of New Jersey, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, acting by and through their respective

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