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      United Auto Workers reformers prevail in vote to choose president by direct election.

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      Members of the United Automobile Workers union have voted decisively to change the way they choose their president and other top leaders, opting to select them through a direct vote rather than a vote of delegates to a convention, as the union has done for decades.The votes on the election reform proposal were cast in a referendum open to the union’s roughly one million current workers and retirees and due by Monday morning. Nearly 64 percent of the roughly 140,000 members who cast valid ballots favored a direct-election approach, according to a court-appointed independent monitor of the union.“It is time to move forward on behalf of the over one million members and retirees of the U.A.W. in solidarity,” the union said in a statement.The referendum was required by a consent decree approved this year between the union and the Justice Department, which had spent years prosecuting a series of corruption scandals involving the embezzlement of union funds by top officials and illegal payoffs to union officials from the company then known as Fiat Chrysler.More than 15 people were convicted as a result of the investigations, including two recent U.A.W. presidents.Reformers within the U.A.W. have long backed the one member, one vote approach, arguing that it would lead to greater accountability, reducing corruption and forcing leaders to negotiate stronger contracts. A group called Unite All Workers for Democracy helped organize fellow members to support the change in the referendum.“The membership of our great union has made clear that they want to change the direction of the U.A.W. and return to our glory days of fighting for our members,” said Chris Budnick, a U.A.W. member at a Ford Motor plant in Louisville, Ky., who serves as recording secretary for the reform group, in a statement Wednesday evening. “I am so proud of the U.A.W. membership and their willingness to step up and vote for change.”David Witwer, an expert on union corruption at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, said the experience of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which shifted from voting through convention delegates to direct election in 1991, after an anti-racketeering lawsuit by federal prosecutors, supported the reformers’ claims.Dr. Witwer said the delegate system allowed seemingly corrupt union leaders to stay in power because of the leverage they had over convention delegates, who were typically local union officials whom top leaders could reward or punish.“Shifting the national union election process from convention delegates to membership direct voting was pivotal in changing the Teamsters,” he said by email.At the U.A.W., leadership positions have been dominated for decades by members of the so-called Administration Caucus, a kind of political party within the union whose power the delegate system enabled.Some longtime U.A.W. officials credit the caucus with helping to elevate women and Black people to leadership positions earlier than the union’s membership would have directly elected them.But the caucus could be deeply insular. The Justice Department contended in court filings that Gary Jones, a former U.A.W. president who was sentenced to prison this year for embezzling union funds, used some of the money to “curry favor” with his predecessor, Dennis Williams, while serving on the union’s board.Union officials have said Mr. Williams, who was recently sentenced to prison as well, later backed Mr. Jones to succeed him, helping to ensure Mr. Jones’s ascent. More

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      U.S. Indicts Iranian Hackers in Voter Intimidation Effort

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      The hackers are accused of sending threatening messages to thousands of people after breaking into voter registration systems and a media company.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department indicted two Iranian hackers on Thursday for seeking to influence the 2020 election with a clumsy effort to intimidate voters, just a day after the nation’s cyberdefense authorities warned of an escalating Iranian effort to insert malicious code into the computer networks of hospitals and other critical infrastructure.The hackers, identified in a grand jury indictment handed up in New York as Seyyed Kazemi, 24, and Sajjad Kashian, 27, are accused of sending threatening messages to several thousand voters, after breaking into some voter registration systems and at least one media company. Many of the messages sent by the Iranians were designed to look like they were from the Proud Boys, the right-wing extremist group.Law enforcement officials said Facebook messages and emails from the Iranians to Republicans falsely claimed the Democrats were planning to exploit security vulnerabilities in state voter databases to register nonexistent voters. But the hackers also sent tens of thousands of emails to Democrats. They demanded recipients change their party affiliation and vote for President Donald J. Trump.The emails were so badly written, however, that they immediately seemed suspect, and the effort was quickly exposed by Mr. Trump’s own administration. Intelligence officials have long considered the emails to Democrats to be a bit of ham-handed reverse psychology, meant to make the recipients more likely to turn out to vote against Mr. Trump.Law enforcement officials also revealed Thursday that the Iranians had hacked into a media company that provides a content management system for dozens of newspapers, although officials did not reveal the name of the organization.Had they kept access, they might have been able to post fake stories to undermine the election, law enforcement officials said. But the F.B.I. detected the intrusion and notified the company. When the Iranians tried to enter the system the day after the election, they discovered their access was blocked.While the timing seemed coincidental, the indictment was announced after the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a bulletin on Wednesday warning of a broad, state-sponsored Iranian campaign to get into American computer networks, including hospitals. The warning was a rare one: The governments of Australia and Britain joined in issuing it, and said that a number of ransomware attacks were being organized by the Iranian government, not just criminal groups.Taken together, the indictment and the warning suggest that the Iranian government is making broader use of its offensive cyber-units, and learning from techniques it is picking up from Russia and elsewhere. The warning did not name which American hospitals or transportation systems were the focus of Iranian attacks.“Our intelligence officials have continually warned that other countries would seek to follow Russia’s 2016 playbook,’’ Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement after the indictment was announced. “Today’s charges and sanctions against several Iranians believed to be behind a cyber campaign to intimidate and influence American voters in the 2020 election are further evidence that attempts to interfere in our elections will continue, and we must all be on guard against them.”The indictment Thursday did not directly state that the two men were working for the Iranian government. Instead, they were employed by a cybersecurity firm that claims to do defensive work for the Iranian government. But U.S. officials have long contended that several such companies focus on offensive cyber activities — from theft of data to sabotaging of networks, often directed at the U.S.In the election case, previously declassified intelligence reports have linked the efforts to Tehran’s government ministries, and suggested that Iran was attempting to use variations of the playbook designed by Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 election.In 2016 and in 2020, intelligence officials concluded Russia was trying to influence the election to benefit Mr. Trump. And while Thursday’s indictment did not specify the goal of the Iranian hackers — beyond sowing divisions among Americans — intelligence officials have repeatedly said that Iranian influence efforts were aimed at hurting Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts.“This indictment details how two Iran-based actors waged a targeted, coordinated campaign to erode confidence in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system and to sow discord among Americans,” Matthew G. Olsen, who recently took over as head of the National Security Division of the Justice Department, said. “The allegations illustrate how foreign disinformation campaigns operate and seek to influence the American public.”Officials said that the Treasury Department would impose sanctions related to the charges, and rewards would likely be set up for information that would enable the U.S. to arrest the two indicted hackers. But the men are in Iran, and the best officials can hope for is to get them arrested and extradited if they travel outside the country.In a speech earlier this week, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, said one of the main lessons of the government’s 2020 election defense efforts was that multiple foreign governments had tried to influence the outcome.Intelligence officials have said that Russia, Iran and China mounted the biggest efforts to influence American politics in 2020, although Cuba also pushed narratives to denigrate Mr. Trump, the March intelligence report found.“What did we learn? That we had more adversaries. We had more committed adversaries,” General Nakasone said.Other intelligence officials have noted that Russia appeared to hold back from the kind of tactics it used in 2016; instead, the SVR, one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies, focused on the SolarWinds infiltration, altering a type of software used by thousands of companies and government agencies. That gave them access to a far larger group of targets — a technique that China and other countries are also using. More

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      Project Veritas Tells Judge It Was Assured Biden Diary Was Legally Obtained

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      But a search warrant in the case suggests the Justice Department believes the diary kept by the president’s daughter Ashley Biden was stolen.Project Veritas, the conservative group under scrutiny in a Justice Department investigation of how a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden was published days before the 2020 election, has told a federal judge that it received a diary from two people who said they had legally obtained it after she had abandoned it.“Project Veritas had no involvement with how those two individuals acquired the diary,” lawyers for the group said in a letter dated Wednesday to a federal judge in New York. The group’s lawyers were asking U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres for a so-called special master to determine what materials seized by federal investigators could be used as evidence in their investigation.Using initials for the individuals who the lawyers said approached the group with the diary, the lawyers said the group’s “knowledge about how R.K. and A.H. came to possess the diary came from R.K. and A.H. themselves.”In contrast with Project Veritas’s description in the letter of how the diary was obtained, a warrant used by federal authorities to search the home of the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, last Saturday indicated that federal authorities believed the property was stolen.The proceedings in the case have been sealed, but a producer for Fox News provided The New York Times with a copy of the letter written by the Project Veritas lawyers and its attachments, including a copy of the search warrant. The producer was seeking comment from The Times about allegations in the letter that the Justice Department had leaked news of the searches to the Times.Judge Torres ruled on Thursday that the government should refrain from examining the materials it obtained in the search, including from Mr. O’Keefe’s cellphones, until she decides whether to appoint a special master, according to a ruling from the judge posted on Twitter by a Project Veritas lawyer. The judge set a schedule for the government and Project Veritas to provide her with more information in the coming days, and indicated that she is unlikely to rule for at least a week.The F.B.I. executed search warrants last week at the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two former employees for the group.Project Veritas never ended up publishing Ms. Biden’s diary. It was made public less than two weeks before the 2020 election by a right-wing website that posted several photographs of diary pages it claimed were written by Ms. Biden. The website said it had obtained the diary from a “whistle-blower” who worked for a media organization that had decided not to publish a story on the topic. The search warrant provided some sense of the specific questions the government is seeking to answer in its investigation related to Project Veritas, which has previously said it purchased the diary.According to the search warrant — which described Ms. Biden’s property as “stolen” — the government said it was looking for any evidence Mr. O’Keefe had about how Ms. Biden’s property was obtained and whether Ms. Biden was surveilled before the property was taken.The government also said it was seeking any communications that the group prepared to send to Ms. Biden, Mr. Biden and others about her property.The government said in the search warrant that among the crimes it was investigating were conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines, conspiracy to possess stolen goods and transporting stolen property across state lines.Project Veritas has sought to portray itself as a news media organization that made a journalistic decision not to publish the diary, suggesting it is being targeted by the Biden Justice Department and that federal investigators disclosed the existence of the searches to a reporter for The Times.“This leaked information likely was intended to preemptively deflect criticism that the D.O.J. was being used to target a news organization viewed by some as critical of the Biden administration over the matter of President Biden’s daughter’s diary,” the Project Veritas lawyers said in their letter.They added: “Members of the news media like Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas depend on an atmosphere of confidence and trust. If the government may, pursuant to a search warrant, fully examine a reporter’s electronic devices — which include information and communications with government critics, watchdogs and whistle-blowers — then the truth-seeking function of the press will wither.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      F.B.I. Searches James O’Keefe’s Home in Ashley Biden Diary Theft Inquiry

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      Authorities carried out a court-ordered search at the New York apartment of the Project Veritas founder two days after searching the homes of his associates.Federal authorities on Saturday searched the home of James O’Keefe, the founder of the conservative group Project Veritas, according to witnesses and people briefed on the matter, a day after Mr. O’Keefe acknowledged that the group was under investigation by the Justice Department in connection with a diary reported to have been stolen from Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter.The F.B.I. carried out a court-ordered search of Mr. O’Keefe’s apartment in Mamaroneck, N.Y., early on Saturday morning, after having searched the homes of two associates of Mr. O’Keefe on Thursday as part of the investigation.An F.B.I. spokesman on Saturday said that agents had “performed law enforcement activity” at the building, but would not discuss the investigation.Mr. O’Keefe did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. But in a video statement on Friday, he said that his group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources last year about the diary.Jimmy Maynes, who lives next to Mr. O’Keefe at an apartment complex in Mamaroneck, said a handful of F.B.I. agents arrived early Saturday morning.“They asked for James,” Mr. Mayne, an entertainment manager, said. “I thought they were banging on my door. I opened the door.”“They told me to close the door and I closed the door,” he added. “That’s exactly what happened. It was still dark.”Brent Mickol, a teacher who lives across the hall from Mr. O’Keefe, said it was about 6 a.m. when agents arrived. Mr. Mickol said the agents said “something along the lines of ‘F.B.I. Warrant. Open up.’”“I ran to the door and looked out the peep hole and clearly saw an F.B.I. raid,” he said. “You saw the jackets. Literally, it was just out of a movie.”Mr. Maynes and Mr. Mickol said the F.B.I. agents were at the apartment for several hours.In his video statement on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists, had turned the diary over to the law enforcement authorities last year and had sought to return it to a lawyer for Ms. Biden.“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said in the video statement. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right-wing website last year a week and a half before Election Day, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son Hunter as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother.The Trump administration’s Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.On Thursday, federal authorities searched the residence in Manhattan of Spencer Meads, a longtime Project Veritas operative and confidant of Mr. O’Keefe, and an apartment in Mamaroneck linked to another O’Keefe associate.Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor groups, news media organizations and others. The group conducts sting operations using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address. More

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      People Tied to Project Veritas Scrutinized in Theft of Diary From Biden’s Daughter

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      The F.B.I. carried out search warrants in New York as part of a Justice Department investigation into how pages from Ashley Biden’s journal came to be published by a right wing website.The Justice Department searched two locations associated with the conservative group Project Veritas as part of an investigation into how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election, according to people briefed on the matter.Federal agents in New York conducted the court-ordered searches on Thursday — one in New York City and one in suburban Westchester County — targeting people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events. The investigation is being handled by F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who work on public corruption matters, the people said.After this article was initially published online on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe put out a video confirming that current and former Project Veritas employees had their homes searched on Thursday.He said the group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources about the diary. But he offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists.“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said, referring to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right wing website on Oct. 24, 2020, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son, Hunter, as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.The Trump administration Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations, news media and others. The group conducts sting operations, using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.Project Veritas has a pending libel suit against The New York Times over a 2020 story about a video the group made alleging voter fraud in Minnesota.Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother. In 2019, Mr. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine at the same time he pressured that country’s president for support in investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.President Biden hugged his daughter, Ashley, after he was sworn in last year.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAn F.B.I. spokesman in New York would not comment on the investigation, saying only that agents had “performed law enforcement activity related to an ongoing investigation” at two locations. One of the searches took place in an apartment on East 35th Street near the Midtown Tunnel and the other in Mamaroneck, N.Y., north of New York City.A spokesman for the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.In Manhattan, a neighbor a floor above the apartment that was searched on East 35th Street said she was woken out of her sleep early Thursday morning by agents pounding on a door and repeatedly shouting “Open Up!” and “F.B.I.!”“I thought it was a joke,” said the neighbor, Mychael Green, 23. “For 10 minutes they were knocking on his door obviously really loud,” and eventually forced their way into the apartment, Ms. Green said. Hours later, the doorjamb was clearly broken and the door was hanging ajar.Spencer Meads, the longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, has lived in that apartment since 2019, according to public records.Ms. Green said that the agents were yelling “Spencer, open up!”A former Project Veritas employee said that Mr. Meads had been involved in recruiting operatives. A website that tracks Project Veritas operatives said that Mr. Meads had also been involved in undercover operations for the group.Mr. Meads did not respond to an email and a text message seeking comment.The Justice Department finds itself in a highly unusual situation in regards to Mr. Biden’s children. Not only is it investigating the case of Ms. Biden’s diary, but Hunter Biden disclosed last year that Justice Department prosecutors in Delaware were investigating his taxes.The pages were posted online under the byline of Patrick Howley, a reporter who has worked for several conservative outlets in recent years. He was the first to disclose a yearbook photo from the page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia that showed one individual in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and another individual in blackface.Mr. Howley also disclosed damaging text messages between Cal Cunningham, a Democrat running for Senate in North Carolina, and a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.While the disclosure of Ms. Biden’s diary was largely ignored, some far right outlets and supporters of Mr. Trump jumped on the news of the diary as further evidence that Mr. Biden was unfit to be president. Alex Jones, a prominent far right radio host, brought up the diary on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.Mr. Trump used Twitter to send or promote positive comments about Project Veritas at least six times in the last two years of his presidency. Mr. Trump boosted Project Veritas content even before he became president, and shortly after he announced his campaign for president in 2015, Mr. O’Keefe visited Trump Tower and showed Mr. Trump footage he was intending to release to damage Hillary Clinton, the most likely Democratic nominee.In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners, a political consulting firm, using a fake name, fabricated résumé and made secret recordings of the staff.Democracy Partners later sued Project Veritas. In a ruling last month in the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman said that Democracy Partners could refer to the conduct by Project Veritas as a “political spying operation” in the upcoming trial.Kitty Bennett and Matthew Cullen contributed research. More

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      Trump Justice Dept. Official Defies Request by Jan. 6 Panel

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      Jeffrey Clark, who aided in the former president’s efforts to overturn the election, appeared before the committee but would not answer substantive questions.WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official involved in former President Donald J. Trump’s frenzied efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, refused to cooperate on Friday with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, leading to a sharp rebuke from the committee’s chairman.The standoff between Mr. Clark and the committee is the second such confrontation since Congress began investigating the circumstances surrounding the Capitol violence, seeking information on Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the election. The House has already voted to find one Trump ally, Stephen K. Bannon, in criminal contempt of Congress for stonewalling the inquiry.“Mr. Clark’s complete failure to cooperate today is unacceptable,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee. “As prescribed by the House rules, I have considered Mr. Clark’s claim of privilege and rejected it. He has a very short time to reconsider and cooperate fully. We need the information that he is withholding, and we are willing to take strong measures to hold him accountable.”Mr. Clark appeared before the committee on Friday but delivered a letter saying he would not answer substantive questions. He cited attorney-client privilege protecting his conversations with Mr. Trump.“He is duty-bound not to provide testimony to your committee covering information protected by the former president’s assertion of executive privilege,” Mr. Clark’s lawyer, Harry W. MacDougald, wrote in a letter to the committee, which was reported earlier by Politico. “Mr. Clark cannot answer deposition questions at this time.”Mr. Bannon also cited Mr. Trump’s directive for former aides and advisers to invoke immunity and refrain from turning over documents that might be protected under executive privilege in his refusal to cooperate. A federal judge expressed skepticism on Thursday about the merits of Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the committee seeking to block from release at least 770 pages of documents related to the Capitol riot.Under federal law, any person summoned as a congressional witness who refuses to comply can face a misdemeanor charge that carries a fine of $100 to $100,000 and a jail sentence of one month to one year.Mr. Thompson suggested such a penalty could await Mr. Clark, once a little-known official who repeatedly pushed his colleagues at the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump undo his loss.The committee has issued a subpoena seeking testimony and records from Mr. Clark, a focus that indicates it is deepening its scrutiny of the root causes of the attack, which disrupted a congressional session called to count the electoral votes formalizing President Biden’s victory.Mr. Thompson contrasted Mr. Clark’s refusal to cooperate with the actions of Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, and previously sat for a lengthy interview with the committee..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media 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solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“His refusal to answer questions about the former president’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the election is in direct contrast to his supervisors at the department,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement. “It’s astounding that someone who so recently held a position of public trust to uphold the Constitution would now hide behind vague claims of privilege by a former president, refuse to answer questions about an attack on our democracy and continue an assault on the rule of law.”Mr. MacDougald’s letter argued that Mr. Clark had nothing to do with the events of Jan. 6.“He has informed me he worked from home that day to avoid wrestling with potential street closures to get to and from his office at Main Justice,” the letter said. “Nor did Mr. Clark have any responsibilities to oversee security at the Capitol or have the ability to deploy any Department of Justice personnel or resources there.”But the Senate Judiciary Committee said in a recent report there was credible evidence that Mr. Clark was involved in other efforts to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power, citing his proposal to deliver a letter to state legislators in Georgia and others encouraging them to delay certification of election results.The Senate committee also said Mr. Clark recommended holding a news conference announcing that the Justice Department was investigating allegations of voter fraud, in line with Mr. Trump’s repeated demands, despite a lack of evidence of any fraud. Both proposals were rejected by senior leaders in the department.The New York Times reported in January that Mr. Clark also discussed with Mr. Trump a plan to oust Mr. Rosen, and wield the department’s power to force state lawmakers in Georgia to overturn its presidential election results. Mr. Clark denied the report, which was based on the accounts of four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.Mr. Clark’s subpoena is one of 19 issued by the committee. The panel has interviewed more than 150 witnesses so far, according to a person with knowledge of its activities. More

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      Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier

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      Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.William K. Rashbaum More

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      House Finds Bannon in Contempt for Defying Jan. 6 Inquiry Subpoena

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      The vote came after a bitterly partisan debate over the Capitol attack and as Republicans sought to deflect questions about Donald J. Trump’s role in the violence.The House recommended that Stephen K. Bannon, a former top adviser to President Donald J. Trump, face criminal contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with its select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The House voted on Thursday to find Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for stonewalling the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, pressing for information from a close ally of Donald J. Trump even as Republicans moved to insulate the former president from accountability.The vote of 229 to 202, mostly along party lines, came after Mr. Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the assault, declining to provide the panel with documents and testimony. The action sent the matter to the Justice Department, which now must decide whether to prosecute Mr. Bannon and potentially set off a legal fight that could drag on for months or years.But what was clear on Thursday was that nine months after the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries, many Republicans in Congress remain bent on whitewashing, ignoring or even validating what took place as their party continues to embrace the lie of a stolen election. Only nine Republicans joined Democrats in voting to enforce the panel’s subpoena.The rest followed the lead of Mr. Trump, who in a statement before the vote derided the election he lost as a crime and praised the mob attack — which injured 140 police officers and claimed several lives — as a legitimate response.“The insurrection took place on Nov. 3, Election Day,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Jan. 6 was the protest!”Before the vote, Republicans argued that the investigation — which Democrats undertook after Republicans blocked the formation of an independent, bipartisan inquiry — was a partisan exercise devised to smear Mr. Trump and persecute his supporters for their political beliefs.On the House floor, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and an ardent Trump supporter, accused the committee of harassing Mr. Bannon and organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot.“You’re involved in political activity? They’re going to investigate you,” Mr. Jordan said. “You know what this is really about: getting at President Trump.”Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, condemned the former president’s comments and the way Republicans continued to follow his lead.“We live in an age where apparently, some put fidelity to Donald Trump over fidelity to the Constitution,” he said.“He is so feared,” Mr. McGovern added, “that my Republican colleagues are going to keep denying what happened that day.”Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who broke sharply with Mr. Trump, pleaded with her fellow Republicans to stop following him down a path that she warned would lead to ruin.“There’s a moment when politics must stop if we want to defend and protect our institutions,” said Ms. Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the select committee. “A violent assault on the Capitol to stop a constitutional process of counting electoral votes is that moment.”The question of what will happen to Mr. Bannon now goes to the Justice Department, where Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has declined to say whether he will move forward with charges.“We’ll apply the facts in the law and make a decision, consistent with the principles of prosecution,” he told the House Judiciary Committee during an oversight hearing on Thursday.The question of what will happen to Mr. Bannon now goes to the Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has declined to say whether he will move forward with charges.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesPresident Biden has endorsed prosecuting those who do not cooperate with the investigation. On Thursday, he made a point of condemning the riot and its origins.“The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago — it was about white supremacy,” Mr. Biden said in a speech on Thursday to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Washington.Robert J. Costello, Mr. Bannon’s lawyer, informed the House committee this month that his client would not comply with its subpoena, citing Mr. Trump’s directive for his former aides and advisers to invoke immunity and refrain from turning over documents that might be protected under executive privilege.Under federal law, any person summoned as a congressional witness who refuses to comply can face a misdemeanor charge that carries a fine of $100 to $100,000 and a jail sentence of one month to one year.Members of the investigative committee, which is controlled by Democrats, believe that Mr. Bannon has crucial information about plans to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory, including conversations Mr. Bannon had with Mr. Trump in which he urged the former president to focus his efforts on Jan. 6.In its report recommending that the House find Mr. Bannon in contempt, the committee repeatedly cited comments he made on his radio show on Jan. 5 — when Mr. Bannon promised “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” — as evidence that “he had some foreknowledge about extreme events that would occur the next day.”“He was deeply involved in the so-called Stop the Steal campaign,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said of Mr. Bannon. “We know that the forces that tried to overturn the election persist in their assault on the rule of law.”Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, was stripped of her leadership post over her opposition to Mr. Trump’s election lies. She has pleaded with her colleagues to stop enabling him.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMs. Cheney has suggested that Mr. Trump’s insistence on asserting executive privilege is evidence that he was “personally involved” in the plot to overturn the election on Jan. 6.“Today,” she noted, “the former president suggested that the violence was justified.”Ms. Cheney was one of nine Republicans to join House Democrats in voting to find Mr. Bannon in criminal contempt. The others were Representatives Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, the other Republican member of the panel; Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio; John Katko of New York; Nancy Mace of South Carolina; Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington; Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; and Fred Upton and Peter Meijer, both of Michigan.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More