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      Thomas Barrack, Trump Fund-Raiser, Is Indicted on Lobbying Charge

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      Mr. Barrack, the chairman of Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, was accused of failing to register as a lobbyist for the United Arab Emirates, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.WASHINGTON — Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a close friend of former President Donald J. Trump’s and one of his top 2016 campaign fund-raisers, was arrested in California on Tuesday on federal charges of failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.A seven-count indictment accused Mr. Barrack, 74, of using his access to Mr. Trump to advance the foreign policy goals of the United Arab Emirates and then repeatedly misleading federal agents about his activities during a June 2019 interview.Federal prosecutors said Mr. Barrack used his position as an outside adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign to publicly promote the Emirates’ agenda while soliciting direction, feedback and talking points from senior Emirati officials.Once Mr. Trump was elected, they said, Mr. Barrack invited senior Emirati officials to give him a “wish list” of foreign policy moves they wanted Washington to take within the first 100 days, first six months, first year and by the end of Mr. Trump’s term, prosecutors said.Among other key Emirati objectives, Mr. Barrack pushed for the Trump administration not to hold a summit with Qatar, a rival Persian Gulf power that was under a blockade that the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, an Emirati ally, had organized, they said.Mr. Barrack is latest in a long string of former Trump aides, fund-raisers and associates to face criminal charges. The former president’s company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer were indicted this month on state fraud and tax charges. Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, pleaded guilty in a hush-money scandal.Mr. Trump pardoned his 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who had been convicted in the special counsel’s investigation, and his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who had been under federal indictment on charges that he misused money he helped raise for a group backing Mr. Trump’s border wall.Authorities have scrutinized a number of Trump aides and associates over suspicions that they improperly provided governments or other foreign interests access to Mr. Trump, his campaign or his administration. The indictment portrayed Mr. Barrack as a flagrant example of abusing such influence.“The defendant is charged with extremely serious offenses based on conduct that strikes at the very heart of our democracy,” the prosecutors in the case wrote to a federal judge in Los Angeles, asking her to detain Mr. Barrack pending his removal to New York for a bail hearing. “The defendant is charged with acting under the direction or control of the most senior leaders of the U.A.E. over a course of years.”Matt Herrington, a lawyer for Mr. Barrack, said: “Tom Barrack has made himself voluntarily available to investigators from the outset. He is not guilty and will be pleading not guilty.”Two other men were also charged with acting as Emirati agents without registering with the Justice Department, as required: Matthew Grimes, a former top executive at Mr. Barrack’s company, and Rashid al-Malik Alshahhi, an Emirati businessman who is close to the Emirates’ rulers.Mr. Grimes, 27, was arrested on Tuesday. Authorities were unable to arrest Mr. al-Malik, 43. An Emirati citizen, he had long lived primarily in California, prosecutors said. But three years ago, after the F.B.I. interviewed him, he left the country and has not returned, prosecutors said in court papers. Lawyers or representatives for the two men could not reached for comment.Prosecutors said Mr. Trump was among those betrayed by Mr. Barrack’s hidden allegiance to a foreign government from early 2016 to early 2018. And Mr. Barrack’s hopes to influence Mr. Trump or his aides were sometimes dashed.For example, Mr. Barrack had hoped that Mr. Trump would name him to be a Middle East envoy or an ambassador to the Emirates. Prosecutors said that Mr. Barrack advised Mr. al-Malik that such posts would empower the Emirates, and that Mr. al-Malik agreed Mr. Barrack could “deliver more” in such roles.But Mr. Trump did not give Mr. Barrack either job, and he remained an outside adviser to the administration.The indictment suggests that Mr. Barrack was working in direct cooperation with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the Emirates and ostensibly one of Washington’s closest partners in the region. That could have implications for current U.S. policy.The indictment does not explicitly name Crown Prince Mohammed, but appears to clearly refer to him as “Emirati Official 1.” For instance, it states that “Emirati Official 1” met with Mr. Trump at the White House on May 15, 2017, the same day Crown Prince Mohammed met with the president. Other descriptions also match that of Crown Prince Mohammed, often referred to by American officials as M.B.Z.The indictment said that “Emirati Official 1” worked with Mr. Barrack to help scuttle U.S. plans for a conference at Camp David, Md., to press the Emirates to mend the rift with Qatar, another American partner.The indictment also referred to Mr. Barrack’s work with “Emirati Official 5,” who appears to fit the description of the Emirates’ influential ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba. The indictment said that early in the Trump transition, the official wrote to Mr. Barrack to ask if he had insight into the new administration’s foreign policy appointments.“I do, and we are working through them in real time and I have our regional interest in high profile,” Mr. Barrack wrote back, according to the indictment.Mr. Barrack’s real estate and private equity firm, Colony Capital, profited from substantial investments from the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, countries that are closely aligned. In the three years after Mr. Trump became the Republican Party’s nominee for president in July 2016, Colony Capital received about $1.5 billion from those two Persian Gulf countries through investments or other transactions. Of that, about $474 million came from sovereign wealth funds controlled by their governments.Mr. Barrack stepped down as Colony Capital’s executive chairman in March. The firm was recently renamed DigitalBridge. According to a filing this month with Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Barrack owns 10 percent of that firm and is one of its directors.Mr. Barrack has been friends with Mr. Trump since the 1980s. He helped raise money for Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign and ran his transition team after Mr. Trump won. He was perhaps best known for leading Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, which raised $107 million — the most money ever collected and spent to celebrate an inauguration.Critics claimed the committee became a hub for peddling access to foreign officials or business leaders, or those acting on their behalf, but investigations by several local jurisdictions into the committee’s activities petered out with no charges filed.The federal inquiry into Mr. Barrack’s ties with foreign leaders was an outgrowth of the investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.The special counsel’s work put a spotlight on violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA, and led to a greater effort by the Justice Department to enforce it. The law requires those who work for foreign governments, political parties or other entities to influence American policy or public opinion to disclose their activities to the department.Several former Trump aides who were charged by the special counsel acknowledged violating the statute in guilty pleas, including Mr. Manafort, the 2016 campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, the deputy chairman. Mr. Mueller referred Mr. Barrack’s case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, apparently because the allegations went beyond his investigative mandate.According to the indictment, Mr. al-Malik was a key intermediary between Mr. Barrack and the Emirati leadership. In court papers, prosecutors said Mr. Barrack told State Department officials in 2017 that he did not know where Mr. al-Malik was from or whether he was affiliated with any foreign government. But privately, prosecutors said, Mr. Barrack repeatedly referred to Mr. al-Malik as the Emirates’ “secret weapon” to advance its foreign policy agenda with the Trump campaign and administration.After one media appearance, Mr. Barrack emailed Mr. al-Malik, boasting that he had “nailed it” for the “home team” — meaning the Emirates, the indictment said. The two men repeatedly met personally with high-level leaders of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, including in May, August and December of 2016, court papers say. Late Tuesday, a federal magistrate detained Mr. Barrack and Mr. Grimes, pending a bail hearing on Monday. Prosecutors had described Mr. Barrack as a flight risk, citing his wealth, Lebanese citizenship, private jet and deep ties to the Emirates and other Persian Gulf countries.The indictment comes at a delicate moment for U.S. diplomacy in the region because the Emirates is waiting for the Biden administration to finalize approval of a $23 billion sale of high-tech weaponry agreed upon under Mr. Trump — including 50 F-35 fighter jets, as well as sophisticated drones.Sharon LaFraniere More

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      Justice Dept. Sues Georgia Over Voting Restrictions Law

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      The lawsuit came after Republicans blocked ambitious federal legislation this week to protect voting rights.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued Georgia on Friday over a sweeping voting law passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature, the first significant move by the Biden administration to challenge state-level ballot restrictions enacted since the 2020 election.“The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a news conference at the Justice Department. “They are the rights from which all other rights ultimately flow.”The complaint accuses the Georgia law of effectively discriminating against Black voters and seeks to show that state lawmakers intended to violate their rights. It says that several of the law’s provisions “were passed with a discriminatory purpose,” Kristen Clarke, the head of the department’s civil rights division, said at the news conference.The lawsuit, particularly its attempt to prove lawmakers’ intent, is among the most aggressive efforts to expand or preserve voter protections in years. The Supreme Court in 2013 had overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had allowed the Justice Department to stop states from passing laws viewed as facilitating voter discrimination.It comes days after congressional Republicans blocked the most ambitious federal voting rights legislation in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ efforts to preserve voting rights. President Biden and Democratic leaders pledged to continue working to steer federal voting rights legislation into law and to escalate pressure on states and Republicans, with Mr. Biden planning speeches in key states warning against a threat to the democratic process he has compared to Jim Crow.The complaint also shows that the Biden administration intends to invoke the remaining tools the Justice Department has to aggressively fight state actions that it sees as potentially disenfranchising minority voters. “The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said on Friday in a news conference at the Justice Department on Friday.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images“This lawsuit is the first of many steps we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted and that every voter has access to accurate information,” Mr. Garland said, calling on Congress to give the department more help.The Justice Department is also moving to stem increased threats to election officials and poll workers, he said, including creating a task force to investigate and prosecute such cases.The voting lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, will almost certainly take years to resolve, while Republican-led state legislatures continue to seek new voting restrictions.Republicans in Georgia cast the suit as political. “The D.O.J. lawsuit announced today is legally and constitutionally dead wrong,” Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said on Friday in a news conference in Savannah, Ga. “Their false and baseless accusations are quite honestly disgusting,”Georgia was the center of President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong effort to overturn the election results. He seized on false conspiracy theories about the outcome there, insisting falsely that it was rife with fraud even as three recounts and audits — including one conducted by hand — reaffirmed the tally.Mr. Kemp, who is trying to stave off a Republican primary challenger after refusing to acquiesce to Mr. Trump’s demands to overturn the election results, tried to use the lawsuit to animate the Republican base.“They are coming for you next,” he said. “They’re coming for your state, your ballgame, your election laws, your business and your way of life.”Some voting rights experts expressed confidence in the Justice Department’s chances of rolling back Georgia’s voting restrictions, noting its strong record on cases that focus on lawmakers’ intent.“When the Department of Justice undertakes a case of this nature, it’s done its homework and is familiar with facts that are not even usually publicly reported,” said Chad Dunn, the legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. “So I believe when the Department of Justice brings a case like this, it has what it needs to meet its evidentiary burden.”But others expressed caution, pointing to the current conservative makeup of the federal judiciary.“It will be an uphill battle,” said Allison Riggs, the director of the voting rights program at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “But I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s a no-go because I think the Georgia bill was bad and there is less justification than ever before for some of these changes.”Passed in March, the Georgia law ushered in a raft of restrictions to voting access and gave the state legislature more power over election administration. It sought to place strict constraints on ballot drop boxes, bar election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to voters, reduce the time to request absentee ballots and add identification requirements for voting by mail.A ballot recount of Fulton County in Atlanta in November. President Donald J. Trump seized on numerous false conspiracy theories about the election results in Georgia.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIt followed an election in which Georgia, a once reliably conservative state, turned blue for the second time in 40 years in the presidential race and in runoffs that flipped its Senate seats from Republican to Democratic. The law changed elements of voting that had contributed to those Democratic victories: All were close victories attributable in part to Black voter turnout and the state’s voting options. The law has an outsize effect on Black voters, who make up about one-third of Georgia’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.“These legislative actions occurred at a time when the Black population in Georgia continues to steadily increase, and after a historic election that saw record voter turnout across the state, particularly for absentee voting, which Black voters are now more likely to use than white voters,” Ms. Clarke said.Critics denounced the law as rooted in Mr. Trump’s falsehoods and accused state Republicans of seeking to undo the Democratic wave in Georgia. Mr. Biden called it an “un-American” attack on voter rights that amounted to “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and had promised the Justice Department would examine it.Democrats in Washington are struggling to find an effective strategy for countering laws like Georgia’s that are advancing this year through more than a dozen Republican-led state legislatures. Party activists and policymakers have mostly pinned their hopes on narrow majorities in Congress, where Democratic leaders have insisted they will work through the summer to try to mass a meaningful expansion of voting rights and protections against election subversion tactics by partisan state officials.Democrats have framed the battle as existential, and progressives are plotting a pressure campaign this summer to try to persuade senators to eliminate the legislative filibuster to allow them to act without Republican support. In the meantime, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, plans to take her influential Rules Committee to Georgia in the coming weeks to convene a field hearing homing in on criticism of the new law there.A rally in Washington this week demanding the passage of ambitious federal voting rights legislation, known as the For the People Act. Republicans used the filibuster to block the measure.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThis fall, lawmakers also plan to push to pass federal legislation to strengthen the Voting Rights Act. It would reinstate the provision struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, which requires states with a history of discrimination to clear any voting changes with the Justice Department. The bill is likely to face opposition by congressional Republicans, who argue that discrimination is no longer a factor in voting..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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{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-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px 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;}The eventual resolution of the Justice Department lawsuit will likely also affect state lawmakers’ future attempts to pass new voting laws.“State legislatures may well take their cue based on what happens,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer.Mr. Greenbaum added that a wave of voter identification laws followed a Supreme Court decision in 2008 that upheld new identification requirements in Indiana. But while that law withstood a legal challenge, he said, similar efforts in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas initially wilted in court.The lawsuit reflects a Justice Department effort to push back on voter restrictions. It began in the spring under Mr. Garland; the associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta; and Pamela Karlan, who ran the civil rights division until Ms. Clarke was confirmed last month and is now the No. 2 official in that office.Mr. Garland also announced that the division was “taking proactive measures to help states understand federal law and best practices,” and that the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, will lead the task force aimed at protecting election workers.“Election officials must be permitted to do their jobs free from improper partisan influence, physical threats or any other conduct designed to intimidate,” she wrote in a memo to federal prosecutors and the F.B.I.According to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than 272,000 Georgians do not have on file with state election officials the kind of identification to vote that the new law requires. More than 55 percent of them are Black, while Black voters make up only about a third of the voting-age population in Georgia.The law also banned mobile voter units and put stricter requirements on provisional ballots, which are votes cast in person when there are open questions about a voter’s eligibility. The ballot ensures that if the questions are resolved, the vote can still be counted.Any provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct in Georgia before 5 p.m. on Election Day now requires the voter to instead travel to the correct one or risk being disenfranchised. Showing up at the wrong precinct was by far the most common reason for voting provisionally in 2020 in Georgia, accounting for about 44 percent of provisional ballots, according to the office of Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state. Of the 11,120 provisional ballots counted in the presidential election, Mr. Biden won 64 percent and Mr. Trump 34 percent.And in a section that Democrats, civil rights groups and voting rights groups described as simply cruel, the new law banned handing out food and water to voters waiting in line. Georgia has for years been notorious for its exceptionally long lines on Election Day, especially in communities of color. More

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      Justice Dept. to Sue Georgia Over Voting Law

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      The Justice Department is suing Georgia over a sweeping voting law passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature, a congressional official said on Friday, a major step by the Biden administration to confront state-level ballot restrictions enacted since the 2020 election.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was expected to announce the lawsuit later Friday morning.The lawsuit is among the highest-profile enforcement actions to be brought under the Voting Rights Act since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted a key provision that allowed the Justice Department to stop states from passing laws viewed as facilitating voter discrimination.The lawsuit shows that the Justice Department under the Biden administration intends to use the remaining tools at its disposal to aggressively fight state actions that it sees as potentially disenfranchising minority voters.Mr. Garland said earlier this month that the department would deploy all of its available tools to combat voter discrimination.The lawsuit comes days after congressional Republicans blocked the most ambitious federal voting rights legislation in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ efforts to preserve voting rights. President Biden and Democratic leaders pledged to continue working to steer federal voting rights legislation into law.The Justice Department lawsuit is expected to accuse the Georgia law of effectively discriminating against nonwhite voters and seeks to show that Georgia lawmakers intended to do so.The Georgia law ushered in a raft of new restrictions to voting access and dramatically altered the balance of power over election administration. The law followed an election that saw Georgia, a once reliably red state, turn blue for the first time in nearly 40 years in the presidential race, followed by two quick successive Senate seats flipping from Republican to Democratic.Georgia was the epicenter of former President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong effort to overturn the election results. He seized on numerous false conspiracy theories about the Georgia election, and continued to claim that it was rife with fraud despite three separate recounts and audits — including one conducted entirely by hand — reaffirming the results.Critics were quick to cry that the law was rooted in the former president’s falsehoods and was seeking to undo the Democratic wave in Georgia, taking aim at the state’s no excuse absentee voting provision, which had been passed by Republicans in 2005 but became the preferred method of voting for Democrats in the 2020 election amid the pandemic. More

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      Garland Says Watchdog Is Best Positioned to Review Trump-Era Justice Dept., Not Him

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      The attorney general said that various inspector general inquiries would help uncover any wrongdoing and that he wanted to avoid politicizing the work of career officials.WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland backed away on Tuesday from doing a broad review of Justice Department politicization during the Trump administration, noting that the department’s independent inspector general was already investigating related issues, including aggressive leak hunts and attempts to overturn the election.Democrats and some former Justice Department employees have pressed Mr. Garland to uncover any efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to wield the power of federal law enforcement to advance his personal agenda. Their calls for a full investigation grew louder after recent revelations that Mr. Trump pushed department officials to help him undo his election loss and that prosecutors took aggressive steps to root out leakers.Answering questions from reporters at the Justice Department on Tuesday, Mr. Garland said that reviewing the previous administration’s actions was “a complicated question.” He noted that managers typically sought to understand what previous leaders had done.“We always look at what happened before,” he said. But he stopped short of saying that he would undertake a comprehensive review of Trump era Justice Department officials and their actions, in part to keep career employees from concluding that their work would be judged through changing political views.“I don’t want the department’s career people to think that a new group comes in and immediately applies a political lens,” Mr. Garland said.He also invoked the investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, noting that they spoke to the question of whether Mr. Trump had improperly used the department’s powers to investigate and prosecute.“It’s his job to look at these things,” Mr. Garland said of Mr. Horowitz. “He’s very good at this — let us know when there are problems and what changes should be made, if they should be. I don’t want to prejudge anything. It’s just not fair to the current employees.”Mr. Horowitz said this month that he was investigating decisions by federal prosecutors to secretly seize reporters’ phone records in investigations of leaks of classified information to the press early in the Trump administration.Mr. Horowitz is also examining subpoenas to Apple for subscriber information that ultimately belonged to House Democrats, including Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Schiff had called on Mr. Garland last week to do a “top-to-bottom review of the degree to which the department was politicized during the previous administration and take corrective steps.”The inspector general is also examining whether current or former Justice Department officials improperly attempted to use the department to undo the election results, following reports that at least one former official pushed leaders to do so. And he is looking into whether Trump administration officials improperly pressured the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, to resign over his decision not to take actions that would cast doubt on the results of the election.Mr. Garland also said in a statement this month that the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, was looking for “potentially problematic matters deserving high-level review.” But he made clear that she was not undertaking the kind of full investigation that critics of the Trump administration have called for.Mr. Garland also told reporters that he planned to issue a memo on the federal death penalty in the coming weeks, which the Trump administration had revived after nearly two decades of disuse. President Biden has said he opposes the federal death penalty.“I have been personally reviewing the processes of the department,” Mr. Garland said. “I expect before too long to have a statement.” More

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      Trump Pressed Rosen to Wield Justice Dept. to Back 2020 Election Claims

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      The former president began pressuring his incoming acting attorney general even before announcing that his predecessor was stepping down, emails show.WASHINGTON — An hour before President Donald J. Trump announced in December that William P. Barr would step down as attorney general, the president began pressuring Mr. Barr’s eventual replacement to have the Justice Department take up his false claims of election fraud.Mr. Trump sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.Another email from Mr. Trump to Mr. Rosen followed two weeks later, again via the president’s assistant, that included a draft of a brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court. It argued, among other things, that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.The draft echoed claims in a lawsuit in Texas by the Trump-allied state attorney general that the justices had thrown out, and a lawyer who had helped on that effort later tried with increasing urgency to track down Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, saying he had been dispatched by Mr. Trump to speak with him.The emails, turned over by the Justice Department to investigators on the House Oversight Committee and obtained by The New York Times, show how Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Rosen to put the power of the Justice Department behind lawsuits that had already failed to try to prove his false claims that extensive voter fraud had affected the election results.They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s frenzied drive to subvert the election results in the final weeks of his presidency, including ratcheting up pressure on the Justice Department. And they show that Mr. Trump flouted an established anticorruption norm that the Justice Department acts independently of the White House on criminal investigations or law enforcement actions, a gap that steadily eroded during Mr. Trump’s term.The documents dovetail with emails around the same time from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, asking Mr. Rosen to examine unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, including one that claimed people associated with an Italian defense contractor were able to use satellite technology to tamper with U.S. voting equipment from Europe.Mr. Trump in June 2020. The president emailed Mr. Rosen via his assistant, sending documents that purported to show election fraud.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMuch of the correspondence also occurred during a tense week within the Justice Department, when Mr. Rosen and his top deputies realized that one of their peers had plotted with Mr. Trump to first oust Mr. Rosen and then to try to use federal law enforcement to force Georgia to overturn its election results. Mr. Trump nearly replaced Mr. Rosen with that colleague, Jeffrey Clark, then the acting head of the civil division.Mr. Rosen made clear to his top deputy in one message that he would have nothing to do with the Italy conspiracy theory, arrange a meeting between the F.B.I. and one of the proponents of the conspiracy, Brad Johnson, or speak about it with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.“I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as an ‘insult,’” Mr. Rosen wrote in the email. “Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”Mr. Rosen declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.The documents “show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who is the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.Ms. Maloney, whose committee is looking into the events leading up the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd protesting the election results, including Mr. Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department, said she has asked former Trump administration officials to sit for interviews, including Mr. Meadows, Mr. Clark and others. The House Oversight Committee requested the documents in May as part of the inquiry, and the Justice Department complied.The draft brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file before the Supreme Court mirrored a lawsuit that Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas had filed to the court, alleging that a handful of battleground states had used the pandemic to make unconstitutional changes to their election laws that affected the election outcome. The states argued in response that Texas lacked standing to file the suit, and the Supreme Court rejected the case.The version of the lawsuit that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file made similar claims, saying that officials in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania had used the pandemic to unconstitutionally revise or violate their own election laws and weaken election security.To try to prove its case, the lawsuit relied on descriptions of an election monitoring video that appeared similar to one that Republican officials in Georgia rejected as doctored, as well as the debunked notion, promoted by Mr. Trump, that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked.Eager to speak with Mr. Rosen about the draft Supreme Court lawsuit, a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, who had advised on Mr. Paxton’s effort, tried unsuccessfully to reach him multiple times, according to emails sent between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Dec. 29 and obtained by the House Oversight Committee investigators.Mr. Olsen first reached out to Jeffrey B. Wall, the acting solicitor general who would have argued the brief before the Supreme Court. “Last night the President directed me to meet with AG Rosen today to discuss a similar action to be brought by the United States,” Mr. Olsen wrote. “I have not been able to reach him despite multiple calls/texts. This is an urgent matter.”Mr. Rosen’s chief of staff, John S. Moran, told Mr. Olsen that the acting attorney general was busy with other business at the White House. About an hour later, Mr. Olsen drove from Maryland to Washington “in the hopes of meeting” with Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, the emails show.When Mr. Olsen could not get through to Mr. Rosen or Mr. Moran, he called an employee in the department’s antitrust division, according to the documents.The emails do not make clear whether Mr. Olsen met with Mr. Rosen, but a person who discussed the matter with Mr. Rosen said that a meeting never occurred. Rather, Mr. Olsen eventually cold-called the official’s private cellphone and was politely rebuffed, the person said, requesting anonymity because the matter is part of an ongoing investigation.Mr. Olsen provided more fodder for his case in an email sent later that night to Mr. Moran, saying that it was at Mr. Rosen’s request.On the day that Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Rosen would be the acting attorney general, he wanted him to look at materials about potential fraud in northern Michigan, according to an email obtained by the committee. That fraud claim had been the subject of a lawsuit filed by the former Trump adviser Sidney Powell, who argued that Dominion voting machines had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The state’s Republican clerk had said that human error was to blame for mistakes there that initially gave more votes to Mr. Biden, and a hand recount at the county level conducted in December confirmed that the machines had worked properly.A federal judge threw out Ms. Powell’s lawsuit on Jan. 7, saying that it was based on “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” She has been accused of defamation in a lawsuit by Dominion in part because of the Michigan claims.Mr. Rosen is in the process of negotiating to give a single interview with investigators from the House Oversight Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee and others who are looking into the final days of the Trump administration; and he has asked the Justice Department’s current leaders to sort what he can and cannot say about the core facts that involve meetings at the Oval Office with Mr. Trump, which could be privileged.Mr. Rosen met with department officials and spoke with Mr. Trump’s representatives within the last week to discuss these matters, according to a person briefed on the meetings. If the parties cannot come to an agreement, the issue could be thrown into court, where it most likely would languish for months, if not years. More

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      Where Biden’s Justice Department Isn’t Breaking From Trump

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      Democratic gripes are increasing, as some critics worry that the department is rubber-stamping Trump-era policies.The political news cycle hit home in rare fashion on Monday as the attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, met with newsroom leaders from The Times, CNN and The Washington Post to discuss how the administration was responding to revelations that Donald J. Trump’s Department of Justice had secretly sought information on reporters and their sources.When a Justice Department gets into the business of seizing reporters’ phone records and trying to track down leakers, while putting gag orders on the news organizations whose records it’s seizing, it’s hard not to wonder about the health of the First Amendment.So with the revelations now public, Mr. Garland vowed to act. Speaking to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee at a budget hearing last week, he pledged that he would institute new policies that were “the most protective of journalists’ ability to do their jobs in history.”In Monday’s meeting, the leaders of the news organizations pushed Mr. Garland to pursue accountability for the administration officials who had worked to target journalists and whistle-blowers; Mr. Garland’s responses were kept off the record.But legal watchdogs and advocates of criminal justice reform say this is far from the only area of concern. They are pointing to a few major areas in which Mr. Garland’s Justice Department has elected to defend Trump-era policies, particularly those orchestrated by former Attorney General William P. Barr.Mr. Garland has stepped up enforcement of civil rights laws, and he is leading investigations into some major municipal police departments suspected of systematic misconduct. He announced last week that he would take aggressive steps to protect voting rights.But on a range of other issues, there are gripes coming from within the president’s own party. Some critics have expressed worry that his Department of Justice was rubber-stamping policies that sought to expand the president’s legal immunities, turn back progressive action on racial justice and restrict immigrants’ ability to enter the country legally.Trump, E. Jean Carroll and presidential protectionsDuring Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Barr sought to help Mr. Trump try to fight off a sexual assault accusation from the journalist and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.After she publicly made the allegation, in 2019, Mr. Trump said in an interview from the Oval Office that Ms. Carroll was “not my type,” and that he’d never assaulted her. She then filed suit, accusing him of slandering her.Mr. Barr argued in court that Mr. Trump had been acting as an employee of the federal government when he made the comments, and was therefore shielded from charges of slander and libel.The case was still pending when President Biden took office. And this month, Mr. Garland’s Justice Department lamented Mr. Trump’s “crude and disrespectful” remarks, but it said that his administration had been right to argue that he could not be sued over them.Mueller’s findings and the ‘Barr memo’Prominent Democrats had also urged Mr. Garland not to fight a federal judge’s ruling demanding that a classified report that Mr. Barr had requested be made public. Known as the “Barr memo,” the document argues that he should tell the public that Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede the Russia investigation — as lain out in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — cannot be charged as obstruction of justice, and offers legal analysis in support of that claim.Mr. Trump’s foes scored a major victory last month, when, in a blistering decision, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington ordered the memo to be made public, accusing the Trump administration of “disingenuous” reasoning. In a public letter last month, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee asked Mr. Garland not to appeal Judge Jackson’s decision, “in order to help rebuild the nation’s trust” in the Justice Department.But Mr. Garland soon announced that he would indeed appeal it, seeking to keep secret most of the memo — the portion laying out the legal analysis for why none of potential obstruction episodes in the Mueller report rose to a chargeable crime — and citing “the irreparable harm that would be caused by the release of the redacted portions of the document.”Much like Barack Obama’s choice, in 2009, not to systematically pursue accountability for members of the Bush administration over their invasive surveillance policies, or the mistreatment of military prisoners during the war on terror, the Biden administration’s move on the Barr memo was seen as an attempt to protect the narrow institutional interests of the Justice Department and to move on.Gun prosecutions in D.C.Many proponents of racial justice were dismayed this spring when Mr. Garland’s Justice Department announced it would continue Mr. Trump’s policy of using the federal courts to prosecute gun crimes in the District of Columbia, not the city’s own justice system.That policy, enacted in 2019, had reversed decades of tradition in the nation’s capital, where the lead prosecutor is a federal appointee but most crimes are typically tried in city courts.At a moment when the D.C. Council had been passing laws to undo the effects of mass incarceration, the Trump administration’s move disproportionately affected African-American men, as Black people account for a vast majority of those brought up on gun charges in the nation’s capital. Average sentences for these crimes are roughly twice as high in the federal court system.“That’s why it’s so surprising that the administration stuck with it: because this is an issue that touches on mass incarceration, racial injustice and D.C. rights,” Andrew Crespo, a Harvard Law School professor who has been involved in the effort to roll back the Trump policy, said in an interview.A group of 87 former federal prosecutors signed a letter in May urging the Justice Department to abandon the practice, but so far it hasn’t changed its position.Immigration policiesMr. Garland’s Justice Department has also continued some Trump policies that prevent immigrants trying to enter the U.S. from having access to certain legal rights.One policy, which was enacted at the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency by the department’s immigration review office, concentrates decision-making power underneath a political appointee and can prevent immigrants seeking to remain in the U.S. from presenting certain evidence that could help them from being deported.Lawyers for Mr. Garland’s Justice Department have repeatedly argued to uphold the rule, resisting lawsuits from proponents of immigration rights in two separate district courts.Biden administration lawyers have also argued in court on behalf of a policy that prevents immigrants with temporary protected status from gaining green cards with the support of their employer. The Biden administration has also sought to end protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from El Salvador and other countries.Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, pointed to the fact that Mr. Garland’s Justice Department had agreed to defend former members of the Trump administration, including Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, in lawsuits seeking damages for harm caused by the family-separation policy.It is customary for former federal officials to have access to Justice Department representation, but Mr. Gelernt said that the family-separation policy went beyond the pale, and suggested a need to re-examine old precedent where some of the Trump administration’s policies are concerned.“For the Biden D.O.J. to choose to represent the people who did the family-separation practice is deeply troubling,” he said. A voting rights coalition urges corporations to stop funding ALEC, the conservative group.A coalition of more than 300 voting rights groups, civil rights advocates and labor leaders has written a letter to multiple major corporations in the U.S. demanding that they cease their financial support of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, an influential conservative group funded by businesses.The three-page letter accuses the group of engaging in partisan gerrymandering and of playing a central role in the crafting of legislation in states across the country that would introduce a raft of new voting restrictions.“Your continued financial support of ALEC is an active endorsement of these efforts to create more barriers to the freedom to vote and weaken representation for the American people in government,” the letter states. “Intended or not, the money your company is contributing to ALEC helps fund this modern Jim Crow effort.”The letter comes as multiple groups seeking to slow the attack on access to the ballot have sought to pressure major businesses to take a more proactive role in pushing back on new voting laws. In Georgia, a coalition of faith leaders called for a boycott of Home Depot after it did not actively oppose the state’s new voting law.But even as some businesses have spoken up, it has rarely had a significant impact. A broad coalition of major corporations last month called on Texas to expand voting access, only to see the state’s Legislature continue to work toward a final bill of voting restrictions.The letter on Monday focusing on funding for ALEC, a regular target of liberal groups, signals a broadening of the activism aimed at weakening or halting new voting bills, taking the battle beyond state legislatures and members of Congress and to the broader ecosystem that has been powering the monthslong push to enact new voting laws.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Apple Says It Turned Over Data on Donald McGahn in 2018

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      The company notified Donald F. McGahn II last month that it had been subpoenaed for his account information three years ago.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for information in February 2018 about an account that belonged to Donald F. McGahn II, President Donald J. Trump’s White House counsel at the time, and barred the company from telling him about it, according to two people briefed on the matter.Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple, the person said.It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were investigating, whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus or whether he was swept up in a larger net because he had communicated with someone who was under scrutiny. As the top lawyer for the 2016 Trump campaign and then the White House counsel, Mr. McGahn was in contact with numerous people who may have drawn attention either as part of the Russia investigation or a later leak inquiry.Still, the disclosure that agents had collected data of a sitting White House counsel, which they kept secret for years, is extraordinary.And it comes amid a political backlash after revelations that the Trump administration secretly seized the personal data of reporters and Democrats in Congress from phone and tech companies while investigating leaks.Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill on Sunday ratcheted up pressure on the Justice Department and former officials to provide a fuller accounting of events. They called on the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, John C. Demers, and the former deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to testify before Congress along with the former attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. McGahn. An Apple representative did not respond to a request for comment.Apple told Mr. McGahn that it had complied with the subpoena in a timely fashion but declined to tell him what it had provided the government, according to a person briefed on the matter. Under Justice Department policy, gag orders for subpoenas may be renewed for up to a year at a time, suggesting that prosecutors went to court several times to prevent Apple from notifying the McGahns earlier.In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject, and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.Apple told the McGahns that it had received the subpoena on Feb. 23, 2018, according to a person briefed on the matter.Under federal law, prosecutors generally need to obtain permission from a federal judge in order to compel a company like Apple to delay notifying people that their personal information has been subpoenaed, said Paul M. Rosen, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Crowell and Moring.“There is a lot here we don’t know, including the facts and circumstances surrounding the request for the delay and what was presented to the judge,” Mr. Rosen said. But, he added, prosecutors typically need to prove that either notifying the person “would endanger someone’s safety, risk the destruction of evidence or intimidation of witnesses, or seriously jeopardize an investigation.”The subpoena was issued by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, the other person familiar with the matter said.It is not clear why prosecutors obtained the subpoena. But several notable developments were unfolding around that time.The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia was the center of one part of the Russia inquiry led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that focused on Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.Because Mr. McGahn had been the top lawyer for the Trump campaign in 2016, it is possible that at some earlier point he had been among those in contact with someone whose account the Mueller team was scrutinizing in early 2018.Notably, Mr. Manafort had been hit with new fraud charges unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia the day before the subpoena. Subsequent developments revealed that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were closely scrutinizing some of his communications accounts in the following days.On the other hand, the Manafort case was largely handled in the District of Columbia, where he faced separate charges. Still, the Mueller team was also working with federal prosecutors in Virginia during that period on an unregistered foreign agent case related to Turkey and a business partner of Michael T. Flynn’s, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who had also advised him during the 2016 campaign.It was also around that time that Mr. McGahn was involved in another matter related to the Russia investigation, one that included a leak.In late January 2018, The New York Times reported, based on confidential sourcing, that Mr. Trump had ordered Mr. McGahn the previous June to have the Justice Department remove Mr. Mueller, but Mr. McGahn had refused to do so and threatened to resign. The Washington Post confirmed that account soon after in a follow-up article.The Mueller report — and Mr. McGahn in private testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this month — described Mr. Trump’s anger at Mr. McGahn after the Times article and how he had tried to persuade Mr. McGahn to make a statement falsely denying it. Mr. Trump told aides that Mr. McGahn was a “liar” and a “leaker,” according to former Trump administration officials. In his testimony, Mr. McGahn said that he had been a source for The Post’s follow-up to clarify a nuance — to whom he had conveyed his intentions to resign — but he had not been a source for the original Times article.There are reasons to doubt that Mr. McGahn was the target of any Justice Department leak investigation stemming from that episode, however. Information about Mr. Trump’s orders to dismiss Mr. Mueller, for example, would not appear to be a classified national-security secret of the sort that it can be a crime to disclose.Yet another roughly concurrent event was a Justice Department investigation into unauthorized disclosures of information about the Russia inquiry. As part of that investigation, prosecutors sent Apple a subpoena on Feb. 6, 2018, for data on congressional staff members, their families and at least two members of Congress. Apple only recently informed those targeted because it had been prohibited from disclosing the subpoena at the time.Among those whose data was seized were two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Representatives Eric Swalwell and Adam B. Schiff, both of California. Mr. Schiff, a sharp political adversary of Mr. Trump, is now the panel’s chairman. The Times first reported on that subpoena last week.Many questions remain unanswered about the events leading up to the subpoenas, including how high they were authorized in the Trump Justice Department and whether investigators anticipated or hoped that they were going to sweep in data on the politically prominent lawmakers. The subpoena sought data on 109 email addresses and phone numbers.In that case, the leak investigation appeared to have been primarily focused on Michael Bahar, then a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. People close to Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein, the top two Justice Department officials at the time, have said that neither knew that prosecutors had sought data about the accounts of lawmakers for that investigation.It remains unclear whether agents were pursuing a theory that Mr. Bahar had leaked on his own or whether they suspected him of talking to reporters with the approval of lawmakers. Either way, it appears they were unable to prove their suspicions that he was the source of any unauthorized disclosures; the case has been closed, and no charges were brought.Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday called for Mr. Barr, Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein to testify before Congress about the subpoenas. She said that what the Justice Department did under Mr. Trump went “even beyond Richard Nixon” but declined to say whether a congressional committee would compel their testimony.“Let’s hope they will want to honor the rule of law,” she said. “The Justice Department has been rogue under President Trump.”Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, called for anyone potentially involved in the subpoenas, including Mr. Demers, to testify before Congress. “The sins of the Trump administration just continue to pile up,” he said at a news conference in New York.“This was nothing less than a gross abuse of power, an assault on the separation of powers,” Mr. Schumer said, warning that if the men would not testify, lawmakers would subpoena them.He also called on Senate Republicans to join Democrats in voting for congressional subpoenas to compel testimony.On CBS, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, called the allegations “serious” but said only that she was backing an investigation into the matter by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general that was announced on Friday.Katie Benner More

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      Garland Pledges Renewed Efforts to Protect Voting Rights

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      The attorney general’s commitment served notice to Republican-led states imposing new voting restrictions, and included a vow to protect the voting rights of people of color.WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland laid out an expansive plan on Friday for protecting voting rights, announcing that the Justice Department would double enforcement staff on the issue, scrutinize new state laws that seek to curb voter access and take action if it sees a violation of federal law.In his first public speech on an issue that has provoked intense partisan conflict in statehouses and in Washington, Mr. Garland served notice to Republicans pushing a raft of restrictive voting laws that he was determined to ensure the right to vote for all Americans.Mr. Garland did not outline any investigations or specific actions the department might take against states. Nevertheless, his pledge is an about-face from the department’s near abdication of voting rights enforcement under the Trump administration. Over the past four years, the department did not file any new cases under the Voting Rights Act until May of last year, a rare period of silence for one of the most consequential arms for protecting voting rights in the country.“To meet the challenge of the current moment, we must rededicate the resources of the Department of Justice to a critical part of its original mission: enforcing federal law to protect the franchise for all eligible voters,” Mr. Garland said in an address at the department headquarters.Mr. Garland made a specific commitment to protect the voting rights of people of color, reflecting a return to the traditional role the Justice Department has played in preventing discrimination based on race. Voting rights groups and civil rights activists have argued that many of the new voting laws would have a disproportionate impact on voters of color, and President Biden described the restrictions Georgia passed in March as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.’’Without identifying specific states, Mr. Garland made an apparent allusion to the hourslong lines many Black voters faced last year in Georgia’s June primary elections, citing studies showing that “in some jurisdictions, nonwhite voters must wait in line substantially longer than white voters to cast their ballots.’’He also made a clear reference to Arizona’s Republican-led — and widely derided — recount of two million votes in Maricopa County, saying the department would scrutinize postelection audits “to ensure they abide by federal statutory requirements to protect election records and avoid the intimidation of voters.”In a statement Friday evening, the department said it had sent a letter to the Arizona Senate, expressing concern over, and explaining federal legal constraints on, the conduct of its continuing postelection audit.The drive to enact new voting laws has become a core mission of the Republican Party, as former President Donald J. Trump and his allies continue to peddle false claims about a rigged election and call for more states he lost to audit their results despite no evidence of fraud. Pledges to restrict access to voting under the banner of “election integrity” have become commonplace in fund-raising emails and campaign ads from G.O.P. candidates.Republican-led legislatures in several states including Georgia, Florida and Iowa have passed laws imposing new voting restrictions, and Texas, New Hampshire, Arizona and Michigan, among other states, are considering changes to their electoral systems. At the same time, hopes have dimmed on the left that Congress will pass two major election bills after Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said he would not support abolishing the filibuster to advance such measures.Mr. Garland has said that protecting the right to vote is one of his top priorities as attorney general, and his top lieutenants include high-profile voting rights advocates such as Vanita Gupta, the department’s No. 3 official, and Kristen Clarke, the head of the Civil Rights Division. The division currently has about a dozen employees on its enforcement staff, which is focused on protecting the right to vote, according to a department official familiar with the staff.Despite his pledge, Mr. Garland is still limited in what he can do unless Democrats in Congress somehow manage to pass new voter protection laws. He can sue states that are found to have violated any of the nation’s four major federal voting rights laws. He can notify state and local governments when he believes that their procedures violate federal law. And federal prosecutors can charge people who are found to have intimidated voters, a federal crime.The Justice Department’s most powerful tool, the Voting Rights Act, was significantly weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down pieces of the act forcing states with legacies of racial discrimination to receive Justice Department approval before they could change their voting laws.Now the department can only sue after a law has been passed and found to violate the act, meaning that a restrictive law could stand through multiple election cycles as litigation winds its way through the courts.Any new steps to protect voting rights are unlikely to move quickly, said Joanna Lydgate, a former deputy attorney general of Massachusetts who co-founded the States United Democracy Center. “People will need to be patient,” she said.Still, progressive groups praised the announcement, which is seen as an important bulwark against the new voting laws introduced in all but two states that have Republican-controlled legislatures. There are nearly 400 in total, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive public policy institute that is part of the New York University School of Law.As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the group.Democrats have filed lawsuits against some new voting laws, but that litigation could take years to wind its way through the courts and may have little power to stop those laws from affecting upcoming elections. And so far, the federal government has not joined the legal fight.“We need to make sure that the federal government is an active participant in protecting the right to vote,” said Tom Perez, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during President Barack Obama’s first term. “We can’t simply rely on private lawsuits.”Conservatives who have crafted and pushed for the new voting laws scoffed at Mr. Garland’s announcement.“Americans have been clear: they support laws making it easy to vote and hard to cheat in states across the country,” said Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, which helped write and then organized support for many of the new laws. “Despite the false narrative coming out of the White House and now the Department of Justice, Americans support secure, fair elections, even if the left does not.”The Justice Department’s curbed abilities to fight voter fraud were amplified under the Trump administration.“It was a really low point for voting rights enforcement,” said Wendy R. Weisser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center. “There’s a lot of ground to be made up obviously, and now there’s unprecedented challenges to voting rights.”During the 2020 election, the department publicly appeared to be more concerned with hunting for fraud than protecting voting rights. In September, then-Attorney General William P. Barr made numerous false statements about voting by mail in an interview with CNN, and amplified the importance of a minor ballot error in Luzerne County, Pa., making it appear as if it warranted a major fraud investigation.Mr. Garland expressed skepticism about the use of unorthodox postelection audits, saying they could undermine faith in the nation’s ability to host free and fair elections. He said that some jurisdictions had used disinformation to justify such audits.Assertions of material voter fraud in the 2020 election “have been refuted by the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, as well as by every court — federal and state — that has considered them,” Mr. Garland said.The Justice Department will publish guidance explaining the civil and criminal statutes that apply to postelection audits, as well as guidance on early voting and voting by mail, and will work with other agencies to combat disinformation, Mr. Garland said.Republicans have taken aim at specific pillars of voting access, particularly ones utilized during the 2020 election as voters sought safer options amid the coronavirus pandemic.In an effort to restrict voting by mail, they have sought to limit the number of drop boxes in multiple states, limit who can request mail ballots and add new identification requirements for absentee ballots.Republican legislatures are also seeking to greatly empower partisan poll watchers across the country. The role, which is meant to simply be an observational check granted to both political parties and all candidates, has grown increasingly controversial as party leaders, including Mr. Trump, have sometimes used militarist language to describe them.Mr. Garland said that the Justice Department had taken note of a sharp rise “in menacing and violent threats” against state and local election workers. Such threats, he said, undermined the electoral process and violated federal laws.Mr. Perez said the timing of the department’s involvement in voting laws was crucial. “The most important year in voting is always the year that ends in a 1,” he said. “That’s the year of redistricting, that’s the year in which there’s often a lot of change in state legislatures and that’s the year when you always have a dramatic increase in shenanigans.” More