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      As Prosecutors Revisit Police Killings, Charges Are Still Rare

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      Pamela Price, a new district attorney in Northern California, is the latest to reopen cases that had seemingly been shut, including one from more than 15 years ago.Agustin Gonsalez was shot dead in 2018 by police officers in Hayward, Calif., when he refused to drop a sharp object during a confrontation on a dark street.Andrew Moppin-Buckskin was killed by Oakland officers in 2007 after he ran away following a car chase, hid under a vehicle and failed to comply with their demands.Two years ago, Mario Gonzalez died after he was pinned on the ground for more than five minutes by officers in Alameda, Calif.In all three cases, prosecutors determined that the police should not be criminally charged, seemingly closing the book.But shortly after she became the district attorney of Alameda County in January, Pamela Price initiated a new review of those cases and five others in one of the most extensive re-examinations of police killings launched by progressive prosecutors.Ms. Price’s review is notable because her predecessors had already cleared the officers of wrongdoing and two of the reopened cases occurred more than 15 years ago.As high-profile instances of police brutality shocked the public in recent years and raised questions about official law enforcement accounts, liberal prosecutors campaigned on the promise that they would review cases that they felt were hastily closed without charges. Their efforts to revisit old cases have won praise from the activists and liberal Democrats who voted for them.But the re-examinations so far have rarely led to criminal charges.“To reopen a police use-of-force case is, in many ways, a herculean task,” said Steve Descano, the commonwealth’s attorney in Fairfax County, Va. He lost in court after he charged two federal Park Police officers for the 2017 shooting of a man who fled a car crash, a case that the Justice Department previously reviewed and declined to pursue.The incidents almost never have evidence as stark as the bystander video showing George Floyd being pinned to the ground in 2020 for more than nine minutes by Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd.The circumstances often are more ambiguous, the footage less telling. And once a district attorney writes a lengthy memo detailing why criminal charges are unjustified against a police officer, it can be difficult for a successor to overcome those arguments, absent new evidence.“Everybody is going to go through it again, and the outcome in all probability is going to be the same,” said Jim Pasco, the executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “And what’s Einstein’s definition of insanity?”The biggest hurdle for pursuing criminal charges is the wide latitude that officers have to use force. State legislatures, including California’s, have tried to narrow that ability. But officers generally can still use lethal force when they feel they or others could be killed, a level of immunity that law enforcement officials say is necessary to ensure the public’s safety.Pamela Price, the new district attorney of Alameda County, Calif., announced this year that she would review eight police killings, including one dating to 2007.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesAlameda County, Ms. Price’s jurisdiction, covers a large swath of the East Bay across from San Francisco, containing 14 cities and numerous police departments. In the county seat of Oakland, where the Black Panther Party emerged in the 1960s, a legacy of radical politics is intertwined with a troubled history of law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department has been under federal oversight for more than two decades.Ms. Price campaigned on a liberal platform that, besides reviewing old cases, included removing local residents from death row and resentencing inmates serving life sentences — an effort, she said, to restore public trust. Since taking office, she has directed her staff to seek the lowest possible prison sentence for most crimes.She said that in the past, prosecutors routinely gave officers a pass when they killed someone on the job, and she wants questionable police killings to face the same rigor that other criminal cases get.“Every case that we’re looking at now was determined under a double standard,” Ms. Price said in an interview. “Police officers received a different standard of justice than everyday people.”Ms. Price is among a growing cadre of progressive prosecutors elected over the last decade, beginning with the 2016 elections of Kim Foxx in Chicago and Kimberly Gardner in St. Louis, on promises of reducing jail populations and holding police accountable. The movement gained steam after Floyd’s murder.Some prominent district attorneys have since faced a backlash over crime concerns. Chesa Boudin was recalled last year in San Francisco, while Ms. Gardner resigned last week as she faced criticism for her handling of violent crime. Ms. Foxx is not running for re-election next year and has endured criticism from moderates and conservatives, especially for her support of eliminating cash bail statewide.In Maine, a police officer has never been prosecuted for an on-duty killing. But in July 2020, Natasha Irving, the district attorney for four counties, said she would seek charges for the 2007 police shooting death of Gregori Jackson, who was drunk and ran away after a routine traffic stop in Waldoboro, the town where Ms. Irving grew up.Three years later, however, Ms. Irving said that based on the attorney general’s review of the forensics from the case, she will not file charges.“It’s just not going to be a provable case,” she said in an interview.Karla Gonsalez stood at a memorial to her son at the site in Hayward, Calif., where he was shot and killed by police officers.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesIn the Virginia case pursued by Mr. Descano, Bijan Ghaisar, 25, was involved in a minor car crash and then fled in his Jeep, pursued by two officers who cornered Mr. Ghaisar in a residential neighborhood. When the vehicle moved toward a police car, they opened fire, killing him.Mr. Descano brought a case, but a judge dismissed the charges, ruling the officers reasonably feared they were in danger. His efforts to pursue the case further were rejected by the state’s attorney general and the Justice Department.Such reviews offer the possibility of justice for still grieving families but also may unrealistically raise their hopes. Karla Gonsalez, the mother of Mr. Gonsalez, the man who was killed in Hayward, said she was torn when she heard Ms. Price was reopening her son’s case.Television outlets began replaying the body camera footage of Mr. Gonsalez’s confrontation with police. For his family, all of the anger, grief and unresolved questions came rushing back. Why had the officers not tried to de-escalate the situation?“I was excited to know that it was going to be opened up again,” Ms. Gonsalez said. “At the same time, I was very nervous that it was going to be another roadblock, another failure.”Less than 2 percent of police killings result in charges, according to Philip M. Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. That figure has not budged since 2020. The number of people killed by the police is holding steady — last year it was 1,200, compared with 1,147 in 2022, according to Mapping Police Violence.“From where I sit, nothing has changed,” Mr. Stinson said.In Los Angeles County, George Gascón, who was elected district attorney in 2020, appointed a special prosecutor to reopen four cases in which his predecessor declined to file charges.Ryan Young for The New York TimesIn Los Angeles County, George Gascón, who was elected district attorney in 2020, appointed a special prosecutor to reopen four cases in which his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, declined to file charges. He also asked an independent team of experts to review more than 300 previous use-of-force cases to see if the evidence warranted criminal charges.The special prosecutor, Lawrence Middleton, had secured convictions in a 1993 federal trial against Los Angeles Police Department officers for beating Rodney King. In the new cases, he has secured indictments against two officers in the 2018 shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, who was driving a stolen vehicle and had an air rifle between his legs when he was confronted by officers in a grocery store parking lot. (“Both officers’ use of deadly force was reasonable under the circumstances,” Ms. Lacey wrote in a 2019 memo.)The re-examinations themselves take time, and liberal prosecutors may yet file criminal charges against more officers in past cases. But they said that charges should not be the only benchmark of whether their reviews are worthwhile.“I think there is huge value to reopening a case if there is probable cause, or if there is evidence that seems compelling in any way,” Ms. Irving, the prosecutor in Maine, said. “Yes, part of it is to send a message to people who would be bad actors. Part of it is to send a message to families that have lost loved ones, or individuals who have been harmed, that they count.”Ed Obayashi, a California-based expert in use of force who trains law enforcement, said in 2021 that Mario Gonzalez did not seem to be a threat to the public in Alameda and questioned why officers restrained him before he died. The police had responded to a call that Mr. Gonzalez, 26, was acting strangely in a park and talking to himself.Mr. Obayashi said this week that he did not fault Ms. Price for reviewing the case, but he also felt that if there was consensus in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office under her predecessor, Ms. Price should not have reopened it.“It’s a big concern to law enforcement because these types of decisions, to revisit old cases that former prosecutors have decided that no charges should be brought against the officer, it’s political,” Mr. Obayashi said. “It’s politically driven.”Ms. Price’s review also includes two cases from 15 years ago that occurred seven months apart and involved the same officer killing men who ran away after traffic stops, including Mr. Moppin-Buckskin. The officer, Hector Jimenez, was cleared in each case and remains with the Oakland Police Department.“For the life of me I can’t understand what Ms. Price thinks she’s doing with those kinds of cases, some 15 years after they occurred,” said Michael Rains, a lawyer for Mr. Jimenez.In Hayward, the city agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a federal lawsuit with Agustin Gonsalez’s family but said it was a way to support his children rather than an admission of wrongdoing. The city said in April that there appeared to be no new evidence that warranted reopening the case.Mr. Gonsalez was shot in November 2018 after police officers confronted him. He was suicidal and was holding a razor blade. He refused to drop the blade and approached the officers with his arms outstretched. That’s when the two veteran police officers shot him 12 times.Karla Gonsalez recently sat in her sister’s kitchen and described her son as a father of two who was an Oakland sports fan and often drove nearly 400 miles south to Disneyland with his season pass. In the corner of her living room was a makeshift shrine, with a flickering candle and a crucifix draped over his portrait.Cynthia Nunes, Mr. Gonsalez’s cousin, said her family was grateful his case was being reopened. But they want more.“Charges actually have to be brought forward, too,” she said. “The system needs to change.”Julie Bosman More

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      Mark Meadows Testified to Grand Jury in Trump Special Counsel Investigation

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      Mr. Meadows, the final White House chief of staff under Donald Trump, is seen as a potentially key witness in the documents and Jan. 6 inquiries.Mark Meadows, the final White House chief of staff under President Donald J. Trump and a potentially key figure in inquiries related to Mr. Trump, has testified before a federal grand jury hearing evidence in the investigations being led by the special counsel’s office, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. Meadows is a figure in both of the two distinct lines of inquiry being pursued by the special counsel appointed to oversee the Justice Department’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump, Jack Smith.One inquiry is focused on Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, culminating in the attack by a pro-Trump mob on the Capitol during congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. The other is an investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of hundreds of classified documents after he left office and whether he obstructed efforts to retrieve them.It is not clear precisely when Mr. Meadows testified or if investigators questioned him about one or both of the cases.For months, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit have been puzzled by and wary about the low profile kept by Mr. Meadows in the investigations. As reports surfaced of one witness after another going into the grand jury or to be interviewed by federal investigators, Mr. Meadows has kept largely out of sight, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers believe he could be a significant witness in the inquiries.Mr. Trump himself has at times asked aides questions about how Mr. Meadows is doing, according to a person familiar with the remarks.Asked about the grand jury testimony, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George Terwilliger, said, “Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”Mr. Meadows was a polarizing figure at the White House among some of Mr. Trump’s aides, who saw him as a loose gatekeeper at best during a final year in which the former president moved aggressively to mold the government in his image.Mr. Meadows was around for pivotal moments leading up to and after the 2020 election, as Mr. Trump plotted to try to stay in office and thwart Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being sworn in to succeed him. Some of them were described in hundreds of text messages that Mr. Meadows turned over to the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol before he decided to stop cooperating. Those texts served as a road map for House investigators.But Mr. Meadows also has insight into efforts by the National Archives to retrieve roughly two dozen boxes of presidential material that officials had been told Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House in January 2021. Mr. Meadows was one of Mr. Trump’s representatives to the archives, and he had some role in trying to discuss the matter with Mr. Trump, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. Meadows is also now connected tangentially to a potentially vital piece of evidence that investigators uncovered in recent months: an audio recording of an interview that Mr. Trump gave to two people assisting Mr. Meadows in writing a memoir of his White House years.Mr. Meadows did not attend the meeting, which took place in July 2021 at Mr. Trump’s club at Bedminster, N.J. During the meeting, Mr. Trump referred to a document he appeared to have in front of him and suggested that he should have declassified it but that he no longer could, since he was out of office.That recording could undercut Mr. Trump’s claim that he believed he had declassified all material still held at his properties for months after he left office. More

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      Pence Won’t Face Charges in Classified Documents Inquiry

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      The Justice Department informed the former vice president of its decision days before he was expected to announce his campaign for president.The Justice Department has declined to pursue charges against former Vice President Mike Pence in its investigation into his retention of classified documents at his home in Indiana, informing him in a brief letter on Thursday night, according to three people familiar with the situation.Word that the case would be closed came days before Mr. Pence, 63, was set to announce his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.The F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s national security division “conducted an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information,” the department wrote to Mr. Pence’s lawyer, according to a person who had read the letter. Based on the results of that investigation, “no criminal charges will be sought,” that person said.The decision served as a reminder of an enormously consequential plotline that remains unresolved as the 2024 election season gets underway.The most important, by far, is the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and whether he sought to obstruct the inquiry now led by a special counsel, Jack Smith, after Mr. Trump and his aides repeatedly resisted efforts to return sensitive government documents. President Biden is also under investigation by a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, over the improper retention of materials dating from his eight years as vice president — although Mr. Biden has been far more cooperative with investigators.A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the Pence investigation. But Attorney General Merrick B. Garland did not deem the matter serious enough to appoint a special counsel in the case, as he had done for the investigations into Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, senior law enforcement officials said.For Mr. Pence, a man who has made personal probity — and a determination to defend the rule of law in defiance of Mr. Trump after the 2020 election — the core of his long-shot presidential campaign, the decision represented bittersweet vindication, ending an embarrassing episode that had threatened his reputation.From the start, Mr. Pence and his team cooperated with the authorities, in stark contrast to Mr. Trump, who defied a federal subpoena to return materials stored at his Florida residence and resort, Mar-a-Lago.In January, a lawyer for Mr. Pence voluntarily searched the former vice president’s house in Carmel, Ind., for documents after aides to President Biden discovered sensitive material at an office the president had once occupied in Washington and at his home in Delaware.About a dozen documents with classified markings were “inadvertently boxed and transported” to Mr. Pence’s home, according to one of his aides at the time, and subsequently returned to the National Archives and Records Administration.After the F.B.I. searched his home in February and found one additional classified document, his advisers continued to emphasize his cooperation.“The vice president has directed his legal team to continue its cooperation with appropriate authorities and to be fully transparent through the conclusion of this matter,” his adviser, Devin O’Malley, said then.Mr. Pence and Trump remain in a legal and political tangle resulting from their odd-couple White House partnership.In April, Mr. Pence testified for more than five hours before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the actions of Mr. Trump and his aides in the days leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He had sought to limit his testimony and avoid appearing, citing the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution to argue that he was protected from legal scrutiny.Mr. Trump unsuccessfully sought to prevent Mr. Pence from discussing their private interactions, citing executive privilege.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s account of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that he could delay or block the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with that plan infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.He subsequently became a target of the Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol building that day, with some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Someone erected a fake gallows outside the building.Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, faces significant challenges in his bid for the presidency. He trails far behind his former boss and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the polls, and has made no effort to channel the harder-edged populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.Instead, he is expected to pitch himself as a “classical conservative” who would return his party to its Reagan-era brand of mainstream conservatism. He is also likely to appeal to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban and promoting free trade and government regulations. More

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      Trump White House Aides Subpoenaed in Firing of Election Security Expert

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      The special counsel is scrutinizing the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, who contradicted baseless claims by the former president that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.The special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election has subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who may have been involved in firing the government cybersecurity official whose agency judged the election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter.The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Krebs enraged Mr. Trump when his agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, released a statement nine days after the 2020 election attesting to the security of the results. The statement added a sharp rebuke — in boldface type — to the unfounded conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump and his allies were spreading about compromised voting machines.“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” the statement from Mr. Krebs’s agency read.Five days later, Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Krebs was “terminated” after releasing a “highly inaccurate” statement about the 2020 election.Mr. Krebs later testified to the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that before his firing, he was aware of “skepticism” among Trump allies about his “loyalty to the president.”It was far more than skepticism. Within the Presidential Personnel Office, a small group of Trump loyalists, led by Mr. Trump’s former personal aide, John McEntee, were on a mission to find and fire people perceived as disloyal to Mr. Trump within the federal bureaucracy. And they had fingered the outspoken Mr. Krebs, who had been appointed by Mr. Trump himself, as among the ranks of the disloyal.Staff members within the personnel office had drafted a document about Mr. Krebs that outlined reasons to distrust him. The memo, first reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, detailed a litany of Mr. Krebs’s alleged sins against Mr. Trump, including: “Wife posted a family photo on Facebook with the ‘Biden Harris’ logo watermarked at the bottom.”Mr. Smith’s team is asking witnesses about broader efforts made by Mr. Trump’s personnel officials to test the loyalty of federal officials and potential hires, the people briefed on the matter said. Mr. McEntee was seen going into the grand jury in recent months.Months before the 2020 election, Mr. McEntee, now the head of a dating app for conservatives, and a deputy sought to overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed what became known by some officials as “the loyalty test” — a new questionnaire for government hires that asked such questions as “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?”Mr. Krebs is among those whom Mr. Smith’s team has interviewed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Krebs declined to comment when contacted.Mr. Smith’s team has also been trying to figure out how the personnel office interacted with the Justice Department as Mr. Trump grasped at any available instrument within his bureaucracy that might help him subvert the 2020 election result.In his final weeks in office, Mr. Trump grew increasingly frustrated with the department’s leaders as one after another rebuffed his pressure on them to falsely declare that large-scale voter fraud had occurred in swing states, such as Georgia, that Mr. Trump had lost to Mr. Biden.By the time the election took place, Heidi Stirrup, a loyalist close to Mr. Trump’s policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had been installed as the White House liaison at the Justice Department. Mr. Smith’s office has asked questions about her role, one of the people briefed on the matter said.Ms. Stirrup was banned from entering the Justice Department building a month after the 2020 election, after she tried to glean sensitive information from department officials about efforts to hunt for election fraud, according to officials with knowledge of the episode.Soon after, Attorney General William P. Barr, whom Mr. Trump had long seen as an ally, resigned after telling Mr. Trump that his election fraud theories were bogus and that the legal team he had assembled to challenge the results was a “clown show.” Jeffrey A. Rosen, who replaced Mr. Barr, also refused to follow Mr. Trump’s orders to use the machinery of the Justice Department to overturn the election.Jeffrey B. Clark, the acting head of the civil division, was the one senior Justice Department official who embraced Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory. Mr. Clark had a relatively low profile, but in the frantic period after the election, Mr. Trump identified him as his most important ally inside the department. Mr. Trump seriously considered firing Mr. Rosen and putting Mr. Clark in charge.Justice Department leaders were horrified and pledged to collectively resign. Mr. Trump shelved the plan, but during the past two years has spoken warmly of Mr. Clark and hosted him at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.Mr. Clark has been the focus of investigators’ attention as well in connection with his role in helping Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election outcome. More

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      Trump Lawyers Seek Meeting With Garland Over Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Two lawyers for the former president asserted that he was being treated unfairly in the investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to remain in power.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump sent a letter on Tuesday requesting a meeting with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland related to the special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump’s conduct.The letter cited no specifics but asserted that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the Justice Department through the investigations led by the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Smith is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material that was discovered at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, after his presidency, as well as his efforts to retain power after he lost the 2020 election.There are indications that Mr. Smith is approaching the stage of the investigation where he could start making decisions about whether to seek indictments of Mr. Trump and others in the documents case. The status of his other line of inquiry, into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and how they contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters, is less clear.“Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly,” the lawyers for Mr. Trump, James Trusty and John Rowley, wrote to Mr. Garland.“No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion,” they wrote.They requested a meeting to discuss the “ongoing injustice” by Mr. Smith’s team.The letter was reported earlier by ABC News.A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment.The letter’s tone is markedly different from the approach taken by Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, recovering documents that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena demanding that they be returned to the government. At the time, Mr. Trump, through an intermediary, sent a message to Justice Department officials that the search inflamed the country, and he asked how he could help to lower the temperature.The letter from his lawyers on Tuesday was directly confrontational. It implied that the family of Mr. Biden, who appointed Mr. Garland and who is himself the focus of a special counsel investigation into a far smaller number of classified documents from his vice-presidential and Senate days found in spaces where he worked and in his home, is benefiting from more favorable treatment.Hunter Biden is under separate investigation on possible tax charges and for possibly having lied about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in an increasingly crowded Republican field. But with the letter, Mr. Trump is relying on a frequently used playbook, in which he suggests a judge or prosecutor is treating him unfairly by the act of investigating him.Most recently, he tried suggesting the judge overseeing an indictment against him in a state court in Manhattan has a conflict because a family member works for Democrats.Seen another way, the letter could be an attempt by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to lay down a marker toward asking Mr. Garland to recuse himself from involvement in whether Mr. Trump faces charges.While Mr. Smith will make the recommendation on whether to charge Mr. Trump with federal crimes in the two cases, a final decision would be made by Mr. Garland. In the documents-related case, prosecutors have examined evidence related to obstruction of justice, as well as to whether he mishandled classified material.Mr. Smith’s team is still hearing from witnesses in the two cases, according to multiple familiar with the activity, although all signs point to the documents investigation nearing its end point.Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately predicted that the former president will face charges in the case related to the documents at a minimum, although they maintain he did nothing wrong. They have also grown angry at the number of people who have been subpoenaed, from low-level workers at Mar-a-Lago to former government officials.Mr. Trump is under indictment in New York on charges of paying hush money to a porn star and is facing a separate investigation in Georgia into his efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls there in 2020.It is highly unlikely that Mr. Garland would agree to meet with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of the attorney general’s former aides said.“Merrick Garland will not meet with Trusty or any of the other Trump lawyers,” said Anthony Coley, Mr. Garland’s former spokesman. “Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Merrick Garland.”Glenn Thrush More

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      Trump Lawyer Resigns From Defense Team in Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Timothy Parlatore, who has been defending the former president in the investigations into classified documents and Jan. 6, is leaving as federal prosecutors appear to be nearing decisions about bringing charges.Timothy Parlatore, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump in the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has resigned from the former president’s legal team.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Parlatore declined to discuss the specific reasons for his departure, but said it was not related to the merits of either inquiry — both of which are being led by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Parlatore said that he informed Mr. Trump of his decision directly and that he left the legal team on good terms with the former president.His departure was reported earlier by CNN.Mr. Parlatore’s withdrawal from the twin special counsel cases leaves Mr. Trump a lawyer short at a moment when prosecutors under Mr. Smith seem to be nearing the end of their sprawling grand jury investigations and may be approaching a decision about whether to bring charges.Two other lawyers — James Trusty and John Rowley — will for now continue to take the lead in representing Mr. Trump in both of the cases.Mr. Parlatore informed Mr. Trump’s team on Monday that he anticipated withdrawing, according to a person familiar with the events.Since last summer and until recently, Mr. Parlatore played a key role in Mr. Trump’s attempts to use attorney-client and executive privilege to limit the scope of the testimony provided by a series of witnesses who appeared in front of grand juries hearing evidence in both of the matters.Over and over in sealed filings and at closed-door hearings, Mr. Parlatore and his colleagues sought to assert privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump in the hopes of narrowing testimony from top Trump aides like Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence. But their efforts were almost completely unsuccessful.At one point, Mr. Parlatore himself was subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury investigating the documents case. During his appearance, he answered questions about efforts made by Mr. Trump’s legal team to comply with a subpoena issued by the Justice Department last May demanding the return of all classified material in the former president’s possession.Among the things that Mr. Parlatore said he discussed with the grand jury were searches — ordered by a judge in response to a push from the Justice Department — that he oversaw at the end of last year of several properties belonging to Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla. During the search of the storage site, investigators found at least two more documents with classified markings.Those searches followed a search in August of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, by the F.B.I., which led to the discovery of more than 100 classified documents that had not been returned in response to the earlier subpoena.Mr. Parlatore was brought on to the legal team by Boris Epshteyn, who had been serving as something of an in-house counsel, hiring and negotiating contracts for lawyers. Mr. Epshteyn has shown a penchant for delivering sunny news to Mr. Trump despite bad circumstances, and for creating a bottleneck for the lawyers in dealing with the client, according to several people familiar with the events.Last month, Mr. Parlatore wrote a letter to Congress asking lawmakers for help in taking the documents investigation away from prosecutors and giving it to the intelligence community — a move that, among other things, would have removed the threat of a criminal indictment against Mr. Trump.The letter also seemed to preview some of Mr. Trump’s potential defenses in the documents case, noting that during his chaotic departure from the White House, aides “quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida.” This hasty process, Mr. Parlatore argued, suggested that “White House institutional processes,” not “intentional decisions by President Trump,” were responsible for sensitive material being hauled away.Last week, Mr. Trump appeared to undercut those assertions on live television, declaring at a CNN town hall event that he knowingly removed government records from the White House and claiming that he was allowed to take anything he wanted with him as his personal property.“I took the documents,” he said at the event. “I’m allowed to.” More

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      Analysis: Durham Report Failed to Deliver After Years of Political Hype

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      A dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability in politically sensitive matters.The limping conclusion to John H. Durham’s four-year investigation of the Russia inquiry underscores a recurring dilemma in American government: how to shield sensitive law enforcement investigations from politics without creating prosecutors who can run amok, never to be held to account.At a time when special counsels are proliferating — there have been four since 2017, two of whom are still at work — the much-hyped investigation by Mr. Durham, a special counsel, into the Russia inquiry ended with a whimper that stood in contrast to the countless hours of political furor that spun off from it.Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.Predictably, the report’s actual content — it contained no major new revelations, and it accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias” rather than making a more explosive conclusion of political bias — made scant difference in parts of the political arena. Mr. Trump and many of his loyalists issued statements treating it as vindication of their claims that the Russia inquiry involved far more extravagant wrongdoing.“The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people,” Mr. Trump insisted on social media. “This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so. This totally illegal act had a huge impact on the Election.”Mr. Trump’s comparison was unintentionally striking. Just as his and his supporters’ wild and invented claims of election fraud floundered in court (Fox News also agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement for amplifying lies about Dominion Voting Systems), the political noise surrounding Mr. Durham’s efforts ultimately ran up against reality.In that sense, it was less that Mr. Durham failed to deliver and more that Attorney General William P. Barr set him up to fail the moment he assigned Mr. Durham to find evidence proving Mr. Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation.There were real-world flaws with the Russia investigation, especially how the F.B.I. botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser. But the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found those problems, leaving Mr. Durham with depleted hunting grounds.Indeed, credit for Mr. Durham’s only courtroom success, a guilty plea by an F.B.I. lawyer who doctored an email during preparations for a wiretap renewal, belongs to Mr. Horowitz, who uncovered the misconduct.At the same time, Mr. Horowitz kneecapped Mr. Durham’s investigation by finding no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. He also concluded that the basis of the Russia inquiry — an Australian diplomat’s tip related to the release of Democratic emails hacked by Russia — was sufficient to open a full investigation.Before Mr. Horowitz released his December 2019 report, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop that finding, arguing the F.B.I. should have instead opened a preliminary inquiry. When Mr. Horowitz declined, Mr. Durham issued an extraordinary statement saying he disagreed based on “evidence collected to date” in his inquiry.But even as Mr. Durham’s report questioned whether the F.B.I. should have opened it as a lower-level investigation, he stopped short of stating that opening a full one violated any rule.Mr. Durham also used court filings in those cases to insinuate that the Clinton campaign framed former President Donald J. Trump for collusion.Sophie Park for The New York TimesA remaining rationale for the Durham investigation was that Mr. Horowitz lacked jurisdiction to scrutinize spy agencies. But by the spring of 2020, according to officials familiar with the inquiry, Mr. Durham’s effort to find intelligence abuses in the origins of the Russia investigation had come up empty.Instead of wrapping up, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham shifted to a different rationale, hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for suspicions surrounding myriad links Trump campaign associates had to Russia.By keeping the investigation going, Mr. Barr initially appeased Mr. Trump, who, as Mr. Barr recounted in his memoir, was angry about the lack of charges as the 2020 election neared.But Mr. Barr’s public statements about Mr. Durham’s investigation also helped foster perceptions that he had found something big. In April 2020, for example, he suggested in a Fox News interview that officials could be prosecuted and said: “The evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”Mr. Trump and some of his allies in the news media went further, stoking expectations among his supporters that Mr. Durham would imprison high-level officials. Those include the former directors of the F.B.I. and C.I.A., James B. Comey and John O. Brennan, and Democratic leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.In fact, Mr. Durham only ever developed charges against two outsiders involved in efforts to scrutinize links between Mr. Trump and Russia, accusing them both of making false statements to the F.B.I. and treating the bureau as a victim, not a perpetrator.While in office, Mr. Barr worked closely with Mr. Durham, regularly meeting with him, sharing Scotch and accompanying him to Europe. When it became clear that Mr. Durham had found no one to charge before the election, Mr. Barr pushed him to draft a potential interim report, prompting Mr. Durham’s No. 2, Nora R. Dannehy, to resign in protest over ethics, The New York Times has reported.Against that backdrop, the first phase of Mr. Durham’s investigation — when he was a U.S. attorney appointed by Mr. Trump, not a special counsel — illustrates why there is a recurring public policy interest in shielding prosecutors pursuing politically sensitive matters from political appointees.But the second phase — after Mr. Barr made him a special counsel, entrenching him to remain under the Biden administration with some independence from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — illustrates how prosecutorial independence itself risks a different kind of dysfunction.The regulations empowered Mr. Garland to block Mr. Durham from an action, but only if it was “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established departmental practices that it should not be pursued” and required him to tell Congress. Mr. Garland gave Mr. Durham free rein, avoiding Republican accusations of a cover-up.Mr. Durham continued for another two and a half years, spending millions of dollars to bring the two demonstrably weak cases involving accusations of false statements; in each instance, a jury of 12 unanimously rejected the charges. One of Mr. Durham’s handpicked prosecutors resigned from his team in protest of the first of those indictments, The Times has reported.But Mr. Durham’s use of his law enforcement powers did achieve something else. He used court filings to insinuate a theory he never found evidence to charge: that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump for collusion. Those filings provided endless fodder for conservative news media.Even after Mr. Durham’s cases collapsed, some Trump supporters held out hope that his final report would deliver a bombshell. But it largely consisted of recycled material, interlaced with conclusions like Mr. Durham’s accusation that the F.B.I. had displayed a “lack of analytical rigor.”Attorney General William P. Barr bestowed Mr. Durham with special counsel status.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Durham’s own analytical rigor was subject to scrutiny. At one point he wrote that he had found “no evidence” that the F.B.I. ever considered whether Clinton campaign efforts to tie Mr. Trump to Russia might affect its investigation.Yet the same page cited messages by a top F.B.I. official, Peter Strzok, cautioning colleagues about the Steele dossier, a compendium of claims about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia that, it later became clear, were Clinton campaign-funded opposition research. He wrote that it “should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform” and whoever commissioned it was “presumed to be connected to the campaign in some way.”As Mr. Horowitz uncovered and criticized, the F.B.I. later cited the Steele dossier in wiretap applications, despite learning a reason to doubt its credibility. But Trump supporters often go further, falsely claiming that the F.B.I. opened the entire Russia investigation based on the dossier.Mr. Durham’s report appeared to nod to that false claim, saying that “information received from politically affiliated persons and entities” in part had “triggered” the inquiry. Yet elsewhere, his report acknowledged that the officials who opened the investigation in July 2016 had not yet seen the dossier, and it was prompted by the Australian diplomat’s tip. He also conceded that there was “no question the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” that lead.Tom Fitton, a Trump ally and the leader of the conservative group Judicial Watch, expressed disappointment in the Durham investigation in a statement this week, while insisting that there had been a “conspiracy by Obama, Biden, Clinton and their Deep State allies.”“Durham let down the American people with few and failed prosecutions,” Mr. Fitton declared. “Never in American history has so much government corruption faced so little accountability.”But Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Mr. Strzok, said that while the special counsel accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias,” it was Mr. Durham who spent four years trying to find support for a preformed belief about the Russia investigation.“In fact, it is Mr. Durham’s investigation that was politically motivated, a direct consequence of former President Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, an effort that unanimous juries in each of Mr. Durham’s trials soundly rejected,” he said.Adam Goldman More

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      Durham Report Finds Fault With FBI Over Trump-Russia Investigation

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      The special counsel’s final report nevertheless did not produce blockbuster revelations of politically motivated misconduct, as Donald J. Trump and his allies had suggested it would.John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years has pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, accused the F.B.I. of having “discounted or willfully ignored material information” that countered the narrative of collusion between Donald J. Trump and Russia in a final report made public on Monday.Mr. Durham’s 306-page report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations accusing the bureau of politically motivated misconduct that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies suggested Mr. Durham would uncover.Instead, the report — released without substantive comment or any redactions by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — largely recounted previously exposed flaws in the inquiry, while concluding that the F.B.I. suffered from confirmation bias and a “lack of analytical rigor” as it pursued leads about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the F.B.I. to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the F.B.I. was being manipulated for political or other purposes,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, it did not.”Mr. Durham said he was not recommending any “wholesale changes” to F.B.I. rules for politically sensitive investigations and for national-security wiretaps, which have already been tightened in recent years. He did recommend that the Justice Department consider assigning an official to internally challenge steps taken in politically sensitive investigations.The report amounted, in part, to a defense and justification of a lengthy investigation that developed only two criminal cases, both of which ended in acquittal.Mr. Durham repeated his own insinuations, presented in court filings, that information developed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign had helped fuel the Russia investigation, which shadowed nearly two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency and was eventually overseen by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.He also repeated criticisms made in 2019 by an inspector general who uncovered how the F.B.I. botched wiretap applications used in the inquiry.In a statement, the F.B.I. emphasized its numerous overhauls since the 2019 report.“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current F.B.I. leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time,” it said.Mr. Durham went beyond criticizing the wiretap applications, writing: “Our investigation also revealed that senior F.B.I. personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities. This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane and contributed to the subsequent need for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”But in using the word “triggered,” Mr. Durham’s report echoed a conspiracy theory pushed by supporters of Mr. Trump that the F.B.I. opened the investigation in July 2016 based on the so-called Steele dossier, opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign that was later discredited.In fact, as Mr. Durham acknowledged elsewhere in the report, the dossier did not reach those investigators until mid-September. The F.B.I. instead opened the investigation based on a tip from an Australian diplomat, after WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic emails, that a Trump campaign aide seemed to have advance knowledge that Russia would release information damaging to the Clinton campaign.The special prosecutor’s findings were sent to Mr. Garland on Friday, a department spokeswoman said.Mr. Durham’s team submitted a draft report to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. in March so those agencies could flag classified and other sensitive information, according to people familiar with the matter. A career Justice Department employee also inspected the draft for information that could raise privacy issues for government employees.The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a close Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said on Twitter that he would invite Mr. Durham to testify next week.Other Republicans seized on the report as confirmation that the Russia investigation had been tainted by partisanship, suggesting that Mr. Durham’s report would continue to fuel accusations that the Justice Department had been deployed against the former president.“The Durham Report confirmed what we already knew: weaponized federal agencies manufactured a false conspiracy theory about Trump-Russia collusion,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Twitter.Mr. Durham’s investigation traces back to early 2019, when Mr. Mueller delivered a final report that detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.” It established how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference, but Mr. Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to charge any Trump campaign associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.Seizing on the findings, Mr. Trump portrayed that report as vindication that the Russia investigation was based on a hoax, as he had insisted.The next month, Attorney General William P. Barr assigned Mr. Durham, then the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Mr. Barr later bestowed special counsel status on Mr. Durham, allowing him to stay in place after Mr. Trump left office.The Durham report has been long awaited by supporters of Mr. Trump, who once hoped that the special counsel would prove Mr. Trump’s theory that the Russia investigation had been a “deep state” conspiracy to sabotage him for political reasons. Mr. Trump would put high-level political or national security officials in prison, they insisted.But over an investigation that lasted about four years — far longer than the Russia investigation — Mr. Durham never fulfilled those expectations.Critics have argued his investigation was superfluous: An inspector general for the Justice Department, Michael E. Horowitz, was already scrutinizing the Russia investigation for evidence of misconduct or bias, and he released a report on the matter in December 2019.Mr. Horowitz did not find evidence that the F.B.I. had taken any investigative steps based on improper political reasons. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — the Australian diplomat’s tip — had been sufficient to lawfully open the full counterintelligence inquiry.In his report, Mr. Durham also criticized the F.B.I. for relying on the Australian diplomat’s tip without asking more questions about the credibility of what the Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had said. But Mr. Durham also acknowledged there was “no question the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” what the Australians had provided, striking a contradictory tone. Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Peter Strzok, the former F.B.I. agent who opened the Russia investigation and interviewed the Australians, defended the inquiry and noted that the inspector general had said it was properly predicated.“When the F.B.I. received credible information from a senior official of a close American ally that the government of Russia was interfering in the upcoming presidential election on behalf of the Trump campaign, the bureau could not ignore that information,” he said in a statement.Mr. Durham also broached the Steele dossier, building on extensive findings by Mr. Horowitz.In his December 2019 report, Mr. Horowitz pointed to multiple ways in which the F.B.I. had botched wiretap applications used to target a former Trump campaign adviser with links to Russia, Carter Page. That included relying on allegations in the dossier in renewal applications after the F.B.I. had reason to doubt its credibility.Mr. Horowitz also developed a criminal referral against an F.B.I. lawyer who had doctored an email used in preparation for a renewal application.Picking up that referral, Mr. Durham negotiated a guilty plea with that lawyer, which resulted in no prison time. The only two cases Mr. Durham himself developed, both cases of false statements against people involved in outside efforts that raised suspicions over Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia, ended in acquittal.Some Trump supporters grew disillusioned as Mr. Durham did not indict high-level officials leading up to the 2020 election. In March 2021, Mr. Trump issued a sarcastic statement, asking: “Where’s Durham? Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?”After Mr. Durham had spent a year fruitlessly hunting for evidence to support Mr. Barr’s theory that intelligence abuses lurked in the origins of the Russia inquiry, he and his prosecutors shifted gears to look for a basis to blame Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the fact that Mr. Trump came under suspicion of colluding with Russia.The two cases Mr. Durham brought were against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with Democratic ties who had passed on a tip to the F.B.I. about odd internet data linking servers for the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, and Igor Danchenko, a primary researcher for the Steele dossier.Mr. Durham’s court filings in both cases extensively implied that the Clinton campaign had essentially set out to frame Mr. Trump for collusion. Although he charged no conspiracy, his insinuation that there might have been one provided fodder to right-wing media.Mr. Durham returned to a Clinton theme in his report.The F.B.I.’s “apparent confirmation bias, and an overwillingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign a foreign power,” Mr. Durham wrote.Mr. Durham also compared the F.B.I.’s aggression in investigating potential links between Mr. Trump and Russia with what he described as its greater caution toward several investigations involving allegations related to Mrs. Clinton.Still, Mr. Durham’s report added a new detail about the F.B.I.’s investigation of a foreign donor who apparently sought to buy influence with the Clinton campaign.In January 2016, Mr. Durham revealed, a confidential informant attended a Clinton fund-raiser with the F.B.I.’s approval. The F.B.I. later told the informant to stay away from Clinton campaign events.The F.B.I. eventually gave Mrs. Clinton’s campaign a so-called defensive briefing about the effort. Mr. Durham criticized the F.B.I. for giving Mrs. Clinton’s campaign the briefing but not supplying one to Mr. Trump about the Russia suspicions, and for not following up on a suggestion that the informant may have been illegally reimbursed by the foreign donor for a $2,700 donation to the Clinton campaign.In January, a report by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, showed how Mr. Durham’s inquiry became roiled by internal dissent over prosecutorial ethics, leading two prosecutors on his staff to resign in protest.The article also described how Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who is a target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham shifted to using grand jury powers to obtain the information after a judge twice rejected his request for an order as legally insufficient.The article also revealed that in the fall of 2019, Italian officials unexpectedly gave Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham a tip about suspected financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump. While the tip was unrelated to the Russia investigation, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter rather than referring it to another prosecutor. Mr. Durham brought no charges.Mr. Durham’s report did not mention any of those matters.Maggie Astor More