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      How a Russian Oligarch May Have Recruited the F.B.I. Agent Who Investigated Him

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      The bureau tried to court Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate, as an informant. Instead, one of its own top agents may have ended up working for him.The Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to recruit Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, as an informant around 2014, hoping he might shed light on organized crime and, later, possible interference in the presidential election.A decade later, Mr. Deripaska may have turned the tables on the F.B.I.: Prosecutors say the oligarch recruited one of the bureau’s top spy catchers, just as he entered retirement, to carry out work that they say violated U.S. sanctions.The charges unsealed this week against Charles McGonigal — who ran the counterintelligence unit at the bureau’s New York field office and investigated Russian oligarchs, including Mr. Deripaska, according to the indictment — showed the extent of the oligarch’s reach into the highest levels of U.S. power.There is no indication in the Manhattan indictment that Mr. McGonigal was working for Mr. Deripaska while still employed by the F.B.I. Still, the case — and a parallel indictment in Washington that charged Mr. McGonigal with receiving at least $225,000 in secret payments from a former employee of an Albanian intelligence service while still at the agency — has raised questions about how compromised he may have been.Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate, had been on the radar of U.S. authorities for years and remains under sanctions. He was known to be an ally of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. The Treasury Department had reported that he had ties to organized crime.“Deripaska is a well-known man to anybody who follows Russia,” said Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and a former State Department official who helped craft sanctions against Russia. “I wouldn’t have accepted a luncheon invitation from the guy,” he added.The implications of the allegations against Mr. McGonigal are alarming, Mr. Fried said. “In a broader sense, it does seem to suggest that the corrupting influence of the Russian oligarchs, the money, is real.”In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska, Larisa Belyaeva, said that he did not hire Mr. McGonigal for any purpose and that he had never been close to Mr. Putin. A lawyer for Mr. McGonigal declined to comment.For years, Mr. Deripaska, 55, has employed a small army of lobbyists, lawyers, consultants and fixers to protect his business and personal interests and smooth his access to Western countries.In recent months, though, federal prosecutors in New York have charged several of those representatives in indictments that accuse them of a range of sanctions violations.Mr. Deripaska was himself indicted last fall, with authorities saying he schemed to have his girlfriend give birth to their child in the United States. At the time, American authorities said he had not been arrested and was considered a fugitive.Mr. Deripaska became rich by prevailing over rivals and partners in the 1990s, when well-connected Russians competed for control over state resources in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He earned a reputation for being ruthless and litigious.He also made connections to powerful figures, particularly in Britain. He spent years trying to buy respect and credibility in the United States, London and elsewhere — hosting parties at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, hiring former senior U.S. officials as lobbyists and courting powerful British political figures.He had worked in the past with the U.S. government, including on a failed effort to rescue an F.B.I. agent who had been captured in Iran, for which Mr. Deripaska spent as much as $25 million of his own money.Still, successive administrations in Washington sought to limit his ability to travel to the United States, despite personal intercessions from Mr. Putin. The F.B.I. searched multimillion-dollar homes linked to Mr. Deripaska in 2021 as part of the investigation into whether he had violated the sanctions imposed on him.Mr. Deripaska came to broader public attention in the United States around the 2016 election, because he had employed Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, as an adviser.From roughly 2014 to 2016, the F.B.I. tried to court Mr. Deripaska as a potential informant, seeking information on Russian organized crime and on possible Russian aid to Mr. Trump’s campaign, The New York Times reported in 2018. At one point, The Times reported, agents appeared at Mr. Deripaska’s home in New York and pressed him about Mr. Manafort and whether he had served as a link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. (He told them the theory was “preposterous.”)According to the indictment, in 2018, Mr. McGonigal reviewed a “then-classified list of oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin” who were being considered for sanctions.“Since at least 2016, Russia has been a central counterintelligence focus of the F.B.I. and U.S. government,” said Brandon L. Van Grack, a lawyer in private practice who was a prosecutor for Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. “This former agent was as acutely aware of that concern as anyone at the F.B.I.”In April 2018, the Trump administration announced sanctions on seven oligarchs and companies they owned or controlled as punishment for Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the 2014 annexation of Crimea and other acts.Mr. Deripaska and his company, Rusal, were among them. In its announcement of the sanctions, U.S. Treasury officials cited Mr. Deripaska’s connections to a senior Russian official and his work in Russia’s energy sector. The authorities said he had been investigated for money laundering and had been accused of threatening business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official and taking part in extortion and racketeering. They also cited allegations that Mr. Deripaska had bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman and had links to Russian organized crime.Mr. Deripaska denied the allegations, which his allies have said were punishment for refusing to cooperate with U.S. authorities. (In 2019, the Trump administration lifted sanctions against Mr. Deripaska’s companies under an agreement intended to reduce his control and ownership, though a confidential document showed the deal may have been less punitive than advertised.)For Mr. Deripaska, the sanctions represented not just an existential threat to his business, but a rejection of the cosmopolitan power broker image he had long sought to project in the West.Mr. Deripaska fought back, seeking to undo the sanctions or lessen their potentially lethal effect on his businesses. The Times reported in late 2018 that a secret lobbying effort by his team of lawyers, consultants, bankers and well-connected allies had made “substantial headway,” including winning postponements on the sanctions.“One of the risks and hazards of sanctioning wealthy people is they are better positioned to fight back,” said Carlton Greene, a sanctions and international money laundering expert.It is not clear from the indictment how Mr. McGonigal got onto Mr. Deripaska’s radar.According to the indictment against Mr. McGonigal, while he was still working for the bureau in 2018, Sergey Shestakov — a former Soviet and Russian diplomat and translator who was also charged in the case — introduced Mr. McGonigal by email to an employee of Mr. Deripaska. That person was identified in the charges as Agent-1 and described as a former Soviet and Russian Federation diplomat.Mr. Shestakov asked Mr. McGonigal to help Agent-1’s daughter, a college student, get an internship with the New York Police Department in counterterrorism, intelligence gathering or “international liaisoning,” according to the indictment. Mr. McGonigal told an F.B.I. subordinate that he wanted to recruit Agent-1, whom he described as a Russian intelligence officer, the indictment says.The indictment says Mr. McGonigal agreed to help the daughter, and with help from a contact at the Police Department he secured a meeting for her with a police sergeant.In 2019, after his retirement, Mr. McGonigal introduced Mr. Deripaska’s agent to an international law firm in Manhattan to help Mr. Deripaska have the sanctions removed, according to the indictment. During the negotiations, McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska in London and Vienna, prosecutors said. When Mr. Deripaska signed with the firm, it brought on Mr. McGonigal as a consultant and investigator.In the spring of 2021, Agent-1 began negotiating with Mr. McGonigal to work directly for Mr. Deripaska, without the law firm. He wanted Mr. McGonigal to investigate a business rival, according to the indictment.Between August and November 2021, prosecutors say, Mr. Deripaska made payments to Mr. Shestakov and Mr. McGonigal from a Russian bank through accounts in Cyprus and New Jersey. In October of that year, F.B.I. agents searched homes linked to Mr. Deripaska in New York City and Washington.On Nov. 21, 2021, F.B.I. agents seized Mr. Shestakov’s and Mr. McGonigal’s electronic devices. More

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      Michael Cohen Meets With Prosecutors About Hush Money Paid to Stormy Daniels

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      The Manhattan prosecutors’ meeting with Michael D. Cohen could presage a flurry of activity as the district attorney’s investigation into the former president is revitalized.The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Tuesday took a significant step forward in its investigation of Donald J. Trump, meeting with his former personal lawyer about hush money paid to a porn star who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.The questioning of the lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, offered the clearest sign yet that the district attorney’s office was ramping up its investigation into Mr. Trump’s role in the $130,000 hush money deal. Mr. Cohen has said publicly that Mr. Trump directed him, in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, to buy the silence of Stephanie Clifford, the actress known as Stormy Daniels.While the hush money was an impetus for the district attorney’s investigation, which began in 2018, prosecutors had shifted in recent years to a broader examination of Mr. Trump’s business practices. In recent months, however, the prosecutors returned to the payments, seeking to breathe new life into the investigation, The New York Times reported in November.There is no indication that prosecutors are close to making a decision about whether to seek charges against the former president, but the interview of Mr. Cohen could portend a flurry of investigative steps.Keith Davidson, the lawyer who represented Ms. Clifford and helped arrange the deal, was also contacted by the Manhattan prosecutors in recent weeks, but has not been interviewed, a person with knowledge of the matter said. And Mr. Cohen is expected to return for additional meetings in the coming weeks.In a brief interview after the meeting, Mr. Cohen credited the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, with assembling a group of prosecutors who had a “depth of knowledge of the case.” He added, “I don’t believe they would have called me in at this stage if this was merely for show.”He said he could not reveal the focus of the interview, citing a request from prosecutors not to discuss the investigation.Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, declined to discuss the questions asked by the prosecutors during the two-hour meeting but said, “I was impressed with the seriousness of their investigation and the professionalism of the prosecutors in the room.”A lawyer for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The meeting, first reported by CNN, came a week after Mr. Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, was sentenced to five months in the Rikers Island jail complex for orchestrating a tax fraud scheme at the Trump Organization. Mr. Weisselberg had pleaded guilty and testified against the Trump Organization last year, helping Mr. Bragg’s office secure the company’s conviction in the tax case. Last week, a judge imposed a $1.6 million criminal penalty on the company, the maximum punishment under the law.Mr. Trump was not accused of wrongdoing in the tax case, which was focused on off-the-books perks that the company doled out to Mr. Weisselberg and a few other executives.But Mr. Weisselberg’s plea — and the company’s conviction — appear to have emboldened Mr. Bragg and his prosecutors in their investigation of Mr. Trump, which seemed to have reached a dead end early in Mr. Bragg’s tenure.Under his predecessor as district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., prosecutors were beginning to present evidence to a grand jury about Mr. Trump’s businesses, focusing on whether he lied about the value of his assets to secure loans and other financial benefits. Soon after taking office in January of last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about establishing Mr. Trump’s intent to break the law, a key element of proving a case against him.In February, Mr. Bragg declined to proceed with the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the inquiry.Mr. Bragg said the investigation was continuing, and by late summer, prosecutors had retuned to their original focus: the hush money.The possibility of charges stemming from the payments had resurfaced within the district attorney’s office with such regularity in recent years that prosecutors came to refer to it as the “zombie theory” — an idea that just wouldn’t die.After Mr. Cohen helped arrange and made the $130,000 hush money payment, Mr. Trump and his company reimbursed Mr. Cohen, a move that is a potential area of focus for Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors. They are expected to scrutinize whether the company falsely accounted for the reimbursements as a legal expense in violation of a New York law that prohibits the falsifying of business records.That can be charged as a misdemeanor in New York. To make it a felony, prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the records reflecting the payment to help commit or conceal a second crime. It is possible, legal experts told The Times last year, that a violation of a New York State election law might underpin such a charge.In 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges stemming from his role in the hush money payments. In court and in congressional testimony, he pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, saying the payout was done “in coordination with, and at the direction of” the president, whom federal prosecutors identified in court papers only as “Individual 1.”After Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea, the federal prosecutors explored whether to charge Mr. Trump or others with violations related to the hush money, but eventually told a federal judge that the U.S. attorney’s office had “effectively concluded its investigation” into who else might have been involved and criminally liable for the same crimes.Michael Rothfeld More

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      A Times Square Hotel Was Set To Become Affordable Housing. Then the Union Stepped In.

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      At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Paramount Hotel, sitting empty in Times Square, was on the verge of turning into a residential building, offering a rare opportunity to create affordable housing in Midtown Manhattan.A nonprofit was planning to convert the hotel into apartments for people facing homelessness. But after 18 months of negotiations, the plan collapsed this year when a powerful political player intervened: the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the union representing about 35,000 hotel and casino workers in New York and New Jersey.The union blocked the conversion, which threatened the jobs of the workers waiting to return to the 597-room hotel. Under the union’s contract, the deal could not proceed without its consent.The Paramount reopened as a hotel this fall, an illustration of how the union has wielded its outsized political power to steer economic development projects at a critical juncture in New York City’s recovery.The pandemic presented a devastating crisis for the city’s hotel workers, more than 90 percent of whom were laid off. But as the union has fought harder to protect them, its political muscle has also drawn the ire of hotel operators and housing advocates, who say the group’s interests can be at odds with broader economic goals.After the conversion failed, the Paramount reopened this fall, saving about 160 hotel jobs.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesThe union’s impact ripples throughout New York. It can block or facilitate the conversion of large hotels into housing and homeless shelters, a consequential role in a year when homelessness in the city reached a record high of about 64,000 people. The union pushed for the accelerated expansion of casinos, which could transform the neighborhoods of the winning bids. And it was a driving force behind a new hotel regulation that some officials warned could cost the city billions in tax revenue.The union’s influence stems from its loyal membership and its deep pockets, both of which it puts to strategic use in local elections. Its political strength has resulted in more leverage over hotel owners, leading to stronger contracts and higher wages for workers.In this year’s New York governor’s race, the union was the first major labor group to endorse Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose winning campaign received about $440,000 from groups tied to the union. The group was also an early backer of Eric Adams, whose mayoral campaign was managed by the union’s former political director.“H.T.C. is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers,” said Chris Coffey, a Democratic political strategist, referring to the union’s more common name, the Hotel Trades Council. “They’re just operating on a higher playing field.”Origins of the union’s powerHistorically, the Hotel Trades Council avoided politics until its former president, Peter Ward, started a political operation around 2008.Mr. Ward and the union’s first political director, Neal Kwatra, built a database with information about where members lived and worshiped and the languages they spoke. This allowed the union to quickly deploy Spanish speakers, for instance, to canvass in Latino neighborhoods during campaigns.Candidates noticed when the Hotel Trades Council, a relatively small union, would send 100 members to a campaign event while larger unions would send only a handful, Mr. Kwatra said.The Aftermath of New York’s Midterms ElectionsWho’s at Fault?: As New York Democrats sought to spread blame for their dismal performance in the elections, a fair share was directed toward Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.Hochul’s New Challenges: Gov. Kathy Hochul managed to repel late momentum by Representative Lee Zeldin. Now she must govern over a fractured New York electorate.How Maloney Lost: Democrats won tough races across the country. But Sean Patrick Maloney, a party leader and a five-term congressman, lost his Hudson Valley seat. What happened?A Weak Link: If Democrats lose the House, they may have New York to blame. Republicans flipped four seats in the state, the most of any state in the country.To recruit members into political activism, the union hosted seminars explaining why success in local elections would lead to better job protections. Afterward, members voted to increase their dues to support the union’s political fights, building a robust fund for campaign contributions. Rich Maroko, the president of the Hotel Trades Council, said the union’s “first, second and third priority is our members.”Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesThe Hotel Trades Council ranked among the top independent spenders in the election cycle of 2017, when all 26 City Council candidates endorsed by the union won. Some of these officials ended up on powerful land use and zoning committees, giving the union influence over important building decisions in New York.In a huge victory before the pandemic, the union fought the expansion of Airbnb in New York, successfully pressuring local officials to curb short-term rentals, which the union saw as a threat to hotel jobs.Mr. Ward stepped down in August 2020, making way for the union’s current president and longtime general counsel, Rich Maroko, who earned about $394,000 last year in total salary, according to federal filings.The union’s sway has continued to grow. Some hotel owners, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say they are fearful of crossing the union, which has a $22 million fund that can compensate workers during strikes. In an interview, Mr. Maroko pointed out that the hotel industry is particularly vulnerable to boycotts.“The customer has to walk through that picket line,” he said, “and then they have to try to get a good night’s rest while there are people chanting in front of the building.”The Hotel Trades Council’s contract is the strongest for hotel workers nationwide, labor experts say. In New York City, where the minimum wage is $15 an hour, housekeepers in the union earn about $37 an hour. Union members pay almost nothing for health care and can get up to 45 paid days off.During the pandemic, the union negotiated health care benefits for laid-off workers, suspended their union dues and offered $1,000 payments to the landlords of workers facing eviction.Along the way, the union has become known for its take-no-prisoners approach to politics, willing to ally with progressives or conservatives, with developers or nonprofits — as long as they support the union’s goals.“There may be no union which has more discrete asks of city government on behalf of its members,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, who was endorsed by the union. “You can’t placate them with nice rhetoric. To be a partner with them, you really need to produce.”Political wins during the pandemicLast year, the union scored a victory it had sought for more than a decade, successfully lobbying city officials to require a special permit for any new hotel in New York City.The new regulation allows community members, including the union, to have a bigger say over which hotels get built. The move is expected to restrict the construction of new hotels, which are often nonunion and long viewed by the Hotel Trades Council as the biggest threat to its bargaining power.Budget officials warned that the regulation could cost the city billions in future tax revenue, and some developers and city planners criticized the rule as a political payback from Mayor Bill de Blasio in the waning months of his administration after the union endorsed his short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. Mr. de Blasio, who did not return a request for comment, has previously denied that the union influenced his position.In the next mayoral race, the union made a big early bet on Mr. Adams, spending more than $1 million from its super PAC to boost his campaign. Jason Ortiz, a consultant for the union, helped to manage a separate super PAC to support Mr. Adams that spent $6.9 million.Mr. Ortiz is now a lobbyist for the super PAC’s biggest contributor, Steven Cohen, the New York Mets owner who is expected to bid for a casino in Queens.The union, which shares many of the same lobbyists and consultants with gambling companies, will play an important role in the upcoming application process for casino licenses in the New York City area. State law requires that casinos enter “labor peace” agreements, effectively ensuring that new casino workers will be part of the union.A new threatDuring the pandemic, as tourism stalled, there was growing pressure to repurpose vacant hotels. With New York rents soaring, advocates pointed to hotel conversions as a relatively fast and inexpensive way to house low-income residents.But the union’s contract, which covers about 70 percent of hotels citywide, presented an obstacle. A hotel that is sold or repurposed must maintain the contract and keep its workers — or offer a severance package that often exceeds tens of millions of dollars, a steep cost that only for-profit developers can typically afford.A plan to convert a Best Western hotel in Chinatown into a homeless drop-in center was scuttled by city officials after the effort failed to win the union’s endorsement.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesEarlier this year, Housing Works, a social services nonprofit, planned to convert a vacant Best Western hotel in Chinatown into a homeless drop-in center. There was opposition from Chinatown residents, but city officials signed off on the deal. It was set to open in May.Right before then, however, the Hotel Trades Council learned of the plan and argued that it violated the union’s contract.Soon, the same city officials withdrew their support, said Charles King, the chief executive of Housing Works. He said they told him that Mr. Adams would not approve it without the union’s endorsement. Mr. King was stunned.“Clearly they have the mayor’s ear,” Mr. King said, “and he gave them the power to veto.”A spokesman for the mayor said the city “decided to re-evaluate this shelter capacity to an area with fewer services,” declining to comment on whether the union influenced the decision.The Chinatown hotel remains empty.An obstacle to affordable housingIn the spring of 2021, state legislators rallied behind a bill that would incentivize nonprofit groups to buy distressed hotels and convert them into affordable housing. They sought the Hotel Trades Council’s input early, recognizing that the group had the clout to push then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to oppose the bill, according to people involved in the discussions.The union supported the conversions, but only if they targeted nonunion hotels outside Manhattan. Housing groups have said that, unlike large Midtown hotels, nonunion hotels are not ideal candidates for housing because they tend to be much smaller and inaccessible to public transit.As a compromise to gain the union’s support, the bill allowed the Hotel Trades Council to veto any conversions of union hotels.“While we certainly support the vision of finding shelters and supportive housing for the people that need it,” Mr. Maroko said, “our first, second and third priority is our members.”One housing advocate involved in the legislation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she warned elected officials that the veto provision would diminish the law’s effectiveness.The law, which passed last year, came with $200 million for conversions. Housing experts criticized the legislation for not sufficiently loosening zoning restrictions, prompting another law this spring that made conversions easier.Still, no hotels have been converted under the new law.Now, with tourism rebounding, housing nonprofits say the window of opportunity has largely passed.“It’s not like hotel owners are clamoring to sell the way they were two years ago,” said Paul Woody, vice president of real estate at Project Renewal, a homeless services nonprofit.How the Paramount deal endedIn the fall of 2020, the owners of the Paramount Hotel began discussing a plan to sell the property at a discount to Breaking Ground, a nonprofit developer that wanted to turn it into rent-stabilized apartments for people facing homelessness.But as the deal neared the finish line, Breaking Ground failed to anticipate pushback from the Hotel Trades Council. In a series of meetings last year, the union said its obligation was to fight for every hotel job and it proposed a range of solutions, including keeping union employees as housekeepers for residents. Breaking Ground, however, said the cost was too high.The nonprofit even asked Mr. Ward, the union’s former president, to help facilitate the conversion. Mr. Ward said he agreed to call Mr. Maroko to gauge his interest in Breaking Ground’s severance offer.This spring, lobbying records show, union representatives met with Jessica Katz, Mr. Adams’s chief housing officer, and other officials about the Paramount. Soon after, Ms. Katz called Breaking Ground and said city officials would not be able to make the conversion happen, according to a person familiar with the conversation. A spokesman for the mayor said the city “cannot choose between creating the housing the city needs and bringing back our tourism economy,” declining to comment on whether the union swayed the decision on the Paramount.The failed conversion saved about 160 hotel jobs, and the Paramount reopened to guests in September.It was a relief for workers like Sheena Jobe-Davis, who lost her job there in March 2020 as a front-desk attendant. She temporarily worked at a nonunion Manhattan hotel, making $20 less per hour than at the Paramount. She was ecstatic to get her old job back.“It is something I prayed and prayed for daily,” she said. More

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      Running Against Hochul, Lee Zeldin Finds Another Target: Alvin Bragg

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      When he was running in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney in 2021, Alvin L. Bragg made a promise for his first day: He would stop prosecuting low-level crimes and incarcerate only people accused of the most serious offenses.Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor in 2022, has made his own Day 1 promise: If elected, he will inform Mr. Bragg that he is being removed from office for refusing to enforce the law.Mr. Zeldin has made that pledge repeatedly throughout his campaign, turning a local prosecutor into the unlikely focal point of a race for the state’s highest office, which has tightened in recent weeks. He used a debate Tuesday night against his Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, to attack Mr. Bragg for what he said was a failure to do the job of district attorney.But there is little that suggests that Mr. Bragg’s approach to serious crime differs significantly from that of other city prosecutors, including his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and the Brooklyn District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez. Murders and shootings are down in Manhattan this year; though some other major crimes are up, including robbery, burglary and grand larceny, those trends are broadly in line with crime trends citywide.Mr. Zeldin’s promise to remove Mr. Bragg, the first Black Manhattan district attorney, is representative of a dynamic informing races all over the country: As some types of crime have risen in cities nationwide, Republicans have sought to capitalize on some voters’ unease with calls from progressive Democrats to overhaul the criminal justice system.Mr. Zeldin would not simply be able to show Mr. Bragg the door. New York’s Constitution grants the governor the power to remove certain public officers, but it calls for those facing removal to be given the charges against them and an opportunity to defend themselves. Mr. Bragg’s office can be expected to fight any removal effort.The Republican candidate’s attack on the district attorney’s office has placed Mr. Bragg in an unusual position. Just a year ago, he was elected with 84 percent of the vote against his Republican opponent.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Mr. Zeldin’s pledge to push him out “is an authoritarian move,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government advocacy group. “If the voters recall a D.A., that’s the will of the voters. But for some other entity to override the will of the voters is antithetical to our system of governance.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin’s campaign did not return phone calls or respond to emails with questions about the pledge, including whether the candidate saw something uniquely improper about Mr. Bragg’s tenure. In an appearance on Fox News in July, Mr. Zeldin said that Mr. Bragg had been refusing to enforce the law since taking office, declining to prosecute some crimes while prosecuting others as lesser offenses.“Lee Zeldin is attempting to overturn the will of Manhattan voters one year after a local election that Alvin Bragg — a career prosecutor — won in a landslide,” said Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg. “This pledge, which is grounded in blatant fearmongering while deliberately ignoring facts and reality, is a direct attack on democracy.”Mr. Bragg’s campaign promise and the “Day 1 memo” that implemented it helped lock in public perception of his tenure, although he soon revised his policies to clarify that his prosecutors had the final authority when it came to decisions about charging and bail. But the memo has continued to define him in the eyes of skeptics, particularly after the Police Department commissioner, Keechant Sewell, sent an email to officers saying that she was concerned about the policies’ implications for public safety, officer safety and justice for victims of crimes.Mr. Zeldin, already a candidate, sent his first tweet calling for Mr. Bragg to be fired the day after Ms. Sewell sent her email and has since made the call a staple of his campaign.Until recently, he had promised to remove the district attorney on his first day in the governor’s office. During a Tuesday debate against his Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, he amended that, saying instead, “I’m going to remove him as soon as I can.”Lee Zeldin was already running for governor when Mr. Bragg took office, and pounced on an early memo that outlined the new district attorney’s vision.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesQuestions about his motivation may also complicate his plans: Mr. Bragg’s office is currently trying a criminal case against the family business of Donald J. Trump, an ally of Mr. Zeldin’s, and the district attorney’s investigation into the former president himself is “active and ongoing,” Mr. Bragg said last month.A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin, who has been a fervent backer of the former president, did not respond to a question about how the trial and investigation influenced his promise.There is precedent in New York for the removal of district attorneys. In 1874, and then again in 1900, a governor forced a New York City district attorney from office. And in the first half of the 20th century, several were either elbowed out of the way on specific cases or subject to hearings about whether they should be removed.Mr. Bragg, however, would be one of few to have his position challenged in the past 50 years.In 1973, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller began proceedings to remove the Queens district attorney after the prosecutor was indicted on charges of covering up a criminal investigation. (The district attorney resigned before the process ran its course.) In the 1990s, Gov. George Pataki removed the Bronx district attorney from a specific prosecution in a fight that reached New York’s highest court, which decided in favor of Mr. Pataki.The power to remove public officers is delineated briefly in New York’s state Constitution and elaborated on in the state’s public officers law. The measure appears to give the governor broad discretion in determining the process, outside of the hearing mandated by the Constitution. When past governors ordered removals, the process in most cases took several months, with a hearing involving witnesses, an accusation of wrongdoing and a defense.Prosecutors who share Mr. Bragg’s values say it is no coincidence that Mr. Zeldin has opted to challenge him.“Alvin’s a Harvard graduate, an accomplished lawyer, and now the city’s chief law enforcement officer, but he’s also a Black man from Harlem,” said Jarvis Idowu, a former Manhattan prosecutor. “That means, like Willie Horton and countless others, he’s easy fodder for this kind of dog-whistle scare tactic.”Victim rights advocates and others have said that Mr. Zeldin is well within his rights to remove Mr. Bragg — and that other sitting district attorneys should take note.“I’m in full agreement with it,” said Jennifer Harrison, the founder of Victims Rights NY, of Mr. Zeldin’s pledge. “Any district attorney that refuses to enforce the law or do their job should get their act together and be on notice if he gets elected.”Mr. Bragg is part of a movement of recently elected prosecutors who have pledged to adapt more lenient policies, saying that the impact of prosecution has fallen disproportionately on Black and brown people and arguing that harshly prosecuting petty crime is counterproductive. When Mr. Bragg announced his campaign in the summer of 2019, those candidates had won in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.Many have since been challenged, either in recall elections or by other elected officials who disagree with their policies. In San Francisco, the district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled in June by a coalition of moderate voters incensed by the rise in property and quality-of-life crimes during the pandemic. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, suspended Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County state’s attorney in August, citing statements that Mr. Warren had made declining to prosecute those who sought abortions or gender-affirming health care.And on Wednesday, Republicans in the Pennsylvania House filed articles of impeachment against the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, accusing him of failing to uphold the law.In an interview, Mr. Boudin said that Mr. Zeldin’s pledge and the other challenges to elected prosecutors all sprang from the same playbook.Republicans and police unions, he said, were “very intentionally deploying policies and practices to weaken and undermine and distract elected district attorneys who are part of a reform movement.”He added that he saw the trend as “intertwined with the Trump election-denying movement, that doesn’t care or respect the outcome of elections.”Michael Gold More

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      Ex-U.S. Attorney’s Book Addresses Pressure to Help Trump Causes

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      Geoffrey S. Berman, who headed the Manhattan office, says in a book the Justice Department pushed cases, against John Kerry and others, to help Mr. Trump.A book by a former top federal prosecutor offers new details about how the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump sought to use the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics — even pushing the office to open a criminal investigation of former secretary of state John Kerry.The prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for two and a half years until June 2020, when Mr. Trump fired him after he refused a request to resign by Attorney General William P. Barr, who sought to replace him with an administration ally.A copy of Mr. Berman’s book, “Holding the Line,” was obtained by The New York Times before its scheduled publication Tuesday.The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District declined to act.The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.And in September 2018, Mr. Berman writes, two months before the November midterms, a senior department official called Mr. Berman’s deputy, cited the Southern District’s recent prosecutions of two prominent Trump loyalists, and bluntly asserted that the office, which had been investigating Gregory B. Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, should charge him — and should do so before Election Day.“It’s time for you guys to even things out,” the official said, according to Mr. Berman.The book comes as Mr. Trump and his supporters have accused the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland of using the Justice Department as a weapon after a judge authorized FBI agents to search his Florida house for missing classified records. Mr. Trump, who is a likely presidential candidate in 2024, has suggested without evidence that President Biden is playing a role in that investigation.However, Mr. Berman’s book says that during Mr. Trump’s presidency, department officials made “overtly political” demands, choosing targets that would directly further Mr. Trump’s desires for revenge and advantage. Mr. Berman wrote that the pressure was clearly inspired by the president’s openly professed wants.In the book, Mr. Berman, who as U.S. attorney did not give news interviews, offers new details about the high-profile prosecutions of defendants like Mr. Cohen; Chris Collins, a Republican congressman from New York; Michael Avenatti, the celebrity attorney and Trump antagonist; and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.He says there were cases his office pursued without pressure from Washington, but in others, he makes clear his greatest challenges did not always have to do with the law.“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Mr. Berman, 62, writes, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”“I walked this tightrope for two and a half years,” writes Mr. Berman, who is now in private practice. “Eventually, the rope snapped.”Geoffrey S. Berman, fired as U.S. attorney, said he was naïve about President Trump’s fierce desire to pursue his critics. Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Berman, who in the book describes himself as a Rockefeller Republican, had been a federal prosecutor in the Manhattan office from 1990 to 1994, and went on to become a co-managing partner of the New Jersey office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsNumerous inquiries. More

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      What Two Primaries Reveal About the Decline of Working-Class Democrats

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      The results of the Democratic congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday give us a hint of just how far the working-class liberalism once associated with city politics has declined. The winners of two races in particular, Jerrold Nadler and Daniel Goldman, who will almost surely represent much of Manhattan (and a bit of Brooklyn) in the House, emerged as the victors of complicated congressional primaries in districts that were redrawn to reflect national shifts in population.They represent different kinds of New York City Democrats — Mr. Nadler, a longtime congressman, has deep roots in the old grass-roots liberalism of the Upper West Side, while Mr. Goldman is a political newcomer whose star has risen through his association with opposition to Donald Trump — but their shared success nonetheless highlights socioeconomic divisions in Manhattan that have a long history.The primaries reflected the tensions and divisions within contemporary liberalism itself and raise the question of how (or whether) Democrats can effectively represent such radically different constituencies.The changes in the city districts were a result of math — subtraction, to be specific. New York State lost a seat in the House because its population came up short by 89 people in a census conducted in 2020, at the height of Covid in New York. Indeed, if so many New Yorkers had not died in the early months of the pandemic, these contests — particularly the one that pitted Mr. Nadler against his House colleague Carolyn Maloney — would almost certainly not have taken place.Beyond the numbers, though, the primaries were part of a continuing story of class divisions in New York City. In the mid-1930s, the Columbia University sociologist Caroline Ware wrote a study of Greenwich Village that focused on the Irish and Italian immigrants who moved there in the late 19th century and whose Catholic churches still dot the neighborhood.Some at the time saw the Village as a success story of immigrant assimilation. But Professor Ware had a different interpretation. The people of the Village, she suggested, lived side by side but had little contact with one another. They were left to navigate a complicated city as “isolated individuals rather than as part of coherent social wholes.”The national Democratic Party faces a similar class divide between highly educated urbanites and the working-class voters for whom it often claims to speak. It’s no secret that the party has moved away from the fiercely pro-union New Deal politics of the mid-20th century. For much of the 20th century, New York State’s congressional delegation included more than 40 representatives (compared with 27 today), a voting bloc that generally collaborated in support of an expansive social welfare state and working-class interests. New York representatives included many of the country’s most left-leaning politicians (like the Upper West Side’s Bella Abzug).Mr. Nadler and Mr. Goldman come from different backgrounds, politically and economically. Mr. Nadler grew up in the city and got active in politics opposing the Vietnam War. Mr. Goldman is a Washington native who attended Sidwell Friends, Yale, Stanford; he served as assistant U.S. attorney with Preet Bharara in the Southern District of New York.For Mr. Nadler, despite his victory on Tuesday night, the political world he emerged from no longer exists as a vital force. This is in part because of transformations within Democratic politics.Mr. Nadler’s political career was forged at a pivotal moment in the aftermath of New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. He was first elected to the State Assembly in 1976. In the following years, Democratic city officials were forced to increase subway fares, close public hospitals, charge tuition at CUNY and cease to embrace a politically ambitious role for local government. Mr. Nadler was elected to Congress in the early 1990s, when Democratic leaders like Bill Clinton proclaimed the end of the era of big government and were most optimistic about free trade and deregulation despite its impact on cities like New York.He has supported many measures over his long career that would aid working-class people, but at the same time the Democrats have generally backed away from politics that would more forcefully address inequality and the economic divide.Meanwhile, the economic fortunes of Manhattan were also changing — as part of an effort to secure a steadier tax base in the aftermath of the collapse of manufacturing, the city under Ed Koch began to reorient its economy toward Wall Street and real estate development.As Wall Street became an engine of the city’s economy in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan’s demographics began moving in largely the opposite direction from the city as a whole. From 2010 to 2020, the white and Asian share of the borough’s population grew, while the Black and Latino share fell.Today, the institutions that had once helped to stitch together constituencies from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, like unions, are far weaker in the city and nationally than they once were. People confront the problems of living in New York through the lens of personal ambition — as “isolated individuals,” as Professor Ware put it — rather than through collective efforts to improve the city’s life.The narrow victory of Mr. Goldman illustrates even more sharply the political crisis of working-class New York. In addition to being an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune, Mr. Goldman is a type well known to denizens of Lower Manhattan, a successful lawyer who was able to self-fund his campaign. He is clearly a candidate whose political appeal was strongest for the new leaders of the Village and Lower Manhattan, the professional upper classes who work in law firms and investment banks, who fund their children’s schools’ parent-teacher associations and the park conservancies.This is a social world that has little meaningful overlap with the working-class population, often Asian and Latino, that still dwells here but lacks the confident political organization and alliances with the middle class that it once possessed.Mr. Goldman’s political fortunes rose with his role as lead counsel in the first impeachment suit against Mr. Trump; his path to the House was largely paved by this rather than any deep engagement with the kinds of material issues that affect the lives of working- or even middle-class New Yorkers.Mr. Goldman’s race was very close — he won by roughly 1,300 votes. The runner-up, Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman, ran a campaign whose rhetoric focused on class appeals, but unions and progressive groups proved unable to act in a coordinated way to support any single candidate in a crowded field.Despite their different backgrounds, both Mr. Goldman and Mr. Nadler embody a Manhattan that has shifted in ways that affect not only its own politics but those of the country at large. Their careers point to the divides that Professor Ware pointed out decades ago.In her account, the Village — and New York, and America as a whole — faced the problem of how to respond to the collective problems of a modern industrial society through the lens of a political culture that had been shaped by ruthless individual acquisition. The particular problems have changed, and yet Lower Manhattan remains home to a population that, as dense as it is, is intensely divided by class and ethnicity, that is characterized (as Professor Ware put it) by “an almost complete lack of community integration.”The bitter politics of the August primaries, which reveal yet again the declining power of New York’s liberalism, are the result.Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics” and “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Jerry Nadler Routs Carolyn Maloney in Hard-Fought Matchup of Allies

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      Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the powerful West Side Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, handily won a bruising primary contest on Tuesday, defeating his longtime congressional neighbor, Carolyn B. Maloney, according to The Associated Press.The highly charged summertime skirmish in the heart of Manhattan was unlike any New York City had seen in a generation and rivaled any intraparty House battle in recent memory. It pitted two committee chairs who have served side by side for three decades against each other and compelled some party faithful to pick sides.The star-crossed matchup emerged from a state court ruling that unexpectedly combined their districts this spring. Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney ultimately chose to run against each other in her 12th District, as talks to have one of them seek a neighboring seat went nowhere.Oddsmakers initially rated the contest a tossup, and Ms. Maloney doggedly trawled the district for votes. But Mr. Nadler quietly managed to assemble an enviable roster of endorsements, while capitalizing on his notoriety as a leading antagonist of former President Donald J. Trump in ways that proved impossible for his opponent to overcome.“Here’s the thing: I’m a New Yorker, just like Bella Abzug, Ted Weiss and Bill Fitts Ryan,” Mr. Nadler told supporters after his victory, referencing liberal lions who represented New York in Congress. “We New Yorkers just don’t know how to surrender.”He was winning the contest with a commanding 56 percent of the vote, compared with Ms. Maloney’s 24 percent, with 90 percent of the vote counted. A third candidate, Suraj Patel, earned 19 percent, siphoning crucial votes away from Ms. Maloney, whom he nearly beat two years ago.An old-school progressive first elected in 1992, Mr. Nadler, 75, is expected to easily win a 16th full term this fall in the overwhelmingly Democratic district. But with his advancing age and noticeably halting debate performances, questions are likely to accelerate about who might succeed him in representing one of the nation’s wealthiest congressional seats.Given those uncertainties and the ideological similarities between Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney, the outcome offers relatively little insight into the future direction of the Democratic Party.For Ms. Maloney, 76, the defeat is likely to spell a painful end to a pathbreaking career in elected office. A former teacher and legislative aide, she first won a seat on the City Council from East Harlem in 1982 and a seat in Congress representing the East Side’s famed “Silk Stocking” district a decade later, eventually rising to become the first woman to lead the House Oversight and Reform Committee.In the shadow of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ms. Maloney campaigned aggressively on her record of fighting for feminist causes. She pointedly accused Mr. Nadler of trying to take credit for her legislative priorities, like the Second Avenue Subway, and ran a television ad for weeks telling New Yorkers, “You cannot send a man to do a woman’s job.” And as she veered toward defeat in recent days, her campaign fanned questions about Mr. Nadler’s physical health and mental acuity.A third candidate, Suraj Patel, 38, tried to make the race about generational change, arguing that the Democratic Party needed fresh leaders rather than failed “1990s politicians” like Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney.Neither frame ultimately proved persuasive to voters, though, or at least not enough to overcome the enthusiastic base of support that turned out for Mr. Nadler on the Upper West Side.On the campaign trail, the congressman cast himself as a consistent warrior for civil rights and civil liberties whose experience is needed as the former president and his acolytes shake some of the foundations of American government.Mr. Nadler sought to galvanize voters in what may be the most Jewish district in the country around his status as the last remaining Jewish congressman in New York City. As the race stretched on, he also went on the attack against Ms. Maloney, accusing her of poor judgment when she voted for the Iraq War (he voted against) and when she helped amplify questions about debunked ties between vaccines for children and autism. A shadowy super PAC that has yet to disclose its donors picked up on the attack and spent more than $200,000 on television ads driving it home.But above all, Mr. Nadler played a deft inside game, calling on decades-long relationships to build a stable of powerful supporters, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, New York’s Working Families Party and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who was the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to wade into the race. More

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      Where Are All the Manhattan Voters in August? Try the Hamptons.

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      A late August congressional primary in New York has candidates scrambling to find far-flung voters who tend to summer in places like the Hamptons.AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — In the lush town green here one recent morning, waiting to get her nails done, sat just the kind of Manhattan Democrat whose coveted vote could tip the balance in Tuesday’s blockbuster primary involving two lions of Congress, Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney.Only the woman in question, Judith Segall, said she was in absolutely no rush to leave this exclusive bastion of sand dunes, $10 heirloom tomatoes and seasonal city transplants, and return to her Upper East Side home.“I’m not coming in to vote. That’s the problem: Nobody here is going to come in just to vote,” said Ms. Segall, a retired accountant with a city accent who spends her summers out here, and likes Mr. Nadler. “It’s insane. What’s this voting in August?”New York City may be a center of the political universe this summer, as Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney, two powerful longtime allies, face off in a newly reconfigured Manhattan district, and a dozen other Democrats scramble to claim a rare open seat connecting Lower Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn.But in a twist befitting two of the wealthiest districts in the United States, the races could well be won or lost miles outside the city, in places like the Hudson Valley, the Berkshires and, above all, the sandy coast of eastern Long Island, where otherwise reliable voters like Ms. Segall decamp in droves each August to spend the final weeks of summer in second homes and vacation rentals.That reality has prompted an unusual and expensive shadow campaign — complete with beach-themed mailers, sophisticated geolocation tracking for tailored ads targeting second homes and at least one Hamptons swing by Ms. Maloney — to see who can prod more of their would-be supporters off their beach chairs and back to the city, or at least the local post office.With low turnout predicted, political operatives say as few as a thousand lost votes could be the difference between a narrow victory and a loss.The exodus is most glaring in the 12th District, where Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney were drawn together after three decades serving side by side and are now fighting (alongside a third candidate, Suraj Patel) over uptown voters who like them both.Some 35,000 Democrats in the 12th District in Manhattan have received mail-in ballots for the primary contest pitting Representative Carolyn Maloney, above, center right, against Representative Jerrold Nadler, below.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesAnna Watts for The New York TimesSome 35,000 Democrats have received mail-in ballots there so far, according to the New York City Board of Elections, a large proportion of them people over 65, and many Upper East and West Siders who flee their apartments when the weather warms. By comparison, the board said that just 7,500 mail-in ballots were distributed for all of Manhattan during the 2018 midterm primaries, which were held in June.Another 21,000 Democrats have received absentee ballots for the primary in the neighboring 10th District, far more than any other district but the 12th. The 10th includes wealthy areas like Greenwich Village, Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights — as well as Orthodox Jewish communities in Borough Park — whose residents also tend to skip town.“The last two weeks of August, this is actually where many people are,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic political strategist, who is among a torrent of temporary city transplants who have slipped away to the Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck.He had a word of advice to Democratic vote hunters, particularly Ms. Maloney, whose East Side base even relocates some of its favorite restaurants out to Long Island for “the season.”“As opposed to pounding the pavement around the 86th Street and Lexington Avenue subway stop, Carolyn Maloney may be better served campaigning outside the entrance to Sagg Main Beach or along Jobs Lane in Southampton,” he said, only partially in jest.Hamptonites are already accustomed to national politicians descending each summer for ritzy fund-raisers and seafood raw bars: Vice President Kamala Harris; Beto O’Rourke, a Texas Democratic candidate for governor; and New York’s candidates for governor were all here recently. But given the timing of the Aug. 23 congressional primaries, they appear to be relishing their moment of heightened electoral influence.“If they are serious about wanting to be re-elected, they should be out here,” said Gordon Herr, the chairman of the Southampton Town Democratic Committee and a former city resident who moved out east full time 16 years ago. He said many city residents he’s spoken to “are very conflicted” over who to vote for and could use the extra nudge.The state’s court-ordered redistricting process led to two separate primary dates, including a rare late August primary for the House and State Senate.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesNew York almost never holds elections in August. But that changed this year after the state’s highest court tossed out newly drawn maps favoring Democrats as unconstitutional, and a rural judge decided to split that state’s primary calendar in two to allow time for a court-appointed expert to draw new, neutral lines.The result put Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney on a collision course and opened a fresh seat next door; it also means New Yorkers are being asked to go to the polls twice in two months.Voters who will be in the city on Election Day undoubtedly remain the majority, and the campaigns’ chief focus. But tracking those headed outside New York has been an uncommonly high priority, particularly for Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney. More