More stories

  • in

    Orban Urges Hungary’s Parliament to Back Sweden’s NATO Bid

    In a post on social media, the Hungarian leader said he would urge Parliament, as he has done in the past, to vote in favor of Sweden’s admission to the security alliance.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary said on Wednesday that he would “continue to urge” Hungarian legislators to vote in favor of accepting Sweden as a member of NATO, a day after Turkey, the only other holdout, endorsed the Nordic nation’s entry to the military alliance. The Turkish decision left Hungary isolated as the last country that has not yet approved NATO’s expansion. The Hungarian Parliament, which voted to accept Finland into the alliance last spring but left Sweden in limbo, is in winter recess and not currently scheduled to reconvene until Feb. 15.It was unclear whether Mr. Orban’s remarks, posted on the social media platform X after a conversation with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, meant that the Parliament would swiftly vote on Sweden’s membership. He has often said in the past that he wanted Sweden to join NATO but that legislators were “not enthusiastic,” blaming Hungary’s repeated delays in accepting Sweden on the right of legislators to make their own decisions. Most analysts questioned that explanation, noting that Mr. Orban has a tight grip on the governing Fidesz party and that its members, who constitute a large majority in Parliament, invariably follows the prime minister’s instructions. He said on Wednesday that he wanted Parliament to vote in favor of Sweden’s membership “at the first possible opportunity,” but gave no indication of when that might be.Mr. Orban stood alone last month against other European leaders to torpedo an aid package for Ukraine worth $52 billion. Leaders will take another run at convincing Mr. Orban to fall into line when they reconvene on Feb. 1 for an extraordinary summit in Brussels. More

  • in

    What You Need to Know About the 2024 New Hampshire Primary: The Run Up

    Listen to and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | AmazonSupporters of former President Donald Trump cheer during a campaign rally on January 19 in Concord, N.H.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesWarning: this episode contains strong language.On Sunday, after a disappointing finish in the Iowa caucuses and with just two days to go before the New Hampshire primary, Ron DeSantis ended his campaign for president.His decision made it official: The race for the Republican nomination is now a head-to-head contest between two wildly different candidates, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump.And now, the famously independent New Hampshire voters are going to determine how serious a contest it is.We’re looking for three big things.First, how Haley’s recent change in tone and sharpening attacks on Trump will play with independents. Second, whether Trump is as dominant here as he was in Iowa. And third, what the Democrats are up to — since there’s a contest here on that side too.About ‘The Run-Up’“The Run-Up” is your guide to understanding the 2024 election. Through on-the-ground reporting and conversations with colleagues from The New York Times, newsmakers and voters across the country, our host, Astead W. Herndon, takes us beyond the horse race to explore how we came to this unprecedented moment in American politics. New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

  • in

    New Hampshire Street Signs Tell the Story of the Republican Primary

    This street corner tells the tale of the Republican primary.If you want to understand the New Hampshire primary, stand at the corner of West Broadway and Valley Street in Derry, N.H.There are two huge yard signs — one for Nikki Haley and one for Donald Trump — on adjacent houses. Perhaps a neighbor-on-neighbor feud?Not exactly: When my colleague Michael Bender headed there recently, neighbors told him that the pro-Haley house had been vacant for years, and that political campaigns often planted their signs there. And the pro-Trump house was actually owned by an absentee landlord who lives in Florida.It felt like one big metaphor for this campaign. The race looks like a real contest, with yard signs and all the usual campaign events. Yet when you dig a little deeper, there’s far less going on than it may seem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    DeSantis Bows Out, and So Does This Winter Freeze

    The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about five minutes.The Florida governor, who once appeared to be Donald Trump’s most daunting challenger, ran a costly and turbulent campaign that failed to catch on with Republican voters.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Ron DeSantis Ends Campaign for President, by Nicholas Nehamas, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Shane GoldmacherAs U.S. and Militias Engage, White House Worries About a Tipping Point, by Peter BakerAt Least 72 Deaths in U.S. Are Connected to Severe Winter Weather, by Jacey Fortin and Colbi EdmondsF.A.A. Tells Airlines to Check Panels on a Second Boeing Plane, by Mark WalkerDiabetes Is Fueling an Amputation Crisis for Men in San Antonio, by Edgar SandovalNicholas Nehamas and Jessica Metzger and More

  • in

    How Nikki Haley’s Lean Years Led Her Into an Ethical Thicket

    From her earliest days in South Carolina politics, Ms. Haley’s public service paid personal financial dividends.Nikki Haley had been serving in the South Carolina legislature for less than two years when she applied for a job in late 2006 as an accounting clerk at Wilbur Smith Associates, an engineering and design firm with state contracts.She needed work. Her parents’ clothing business, where she and her husband, Michael Haley, had both worked, was winding down. Ms. Haley was earning a salary of just $22,000 as a part-time state legislator. And her husband’s own enterprise, involving businesses swapping goods and services, was losing money.Wilbur Smith executives regarded Ms. Haley as overqualified for the accounting job. But because of her wide-ranging network, they would later say, they put Ms. Haley on a retainer, asking her to scout out potential new business. She never found any, a top executive later said. Over the next two years, the firm paid her $48,000 for a job the executive described as “a passive position.”That contract, and a subsequent, much more lucrative one as a fund-raiser for a prominent hospital in her home county, allowed Ms. Haley to triple her income in just three years. But they also led her into an ethical gray area that tarnished her first term as South Carolina’s governor.Ms. Haley did not disclose her Wilbur Smith contract until 2010, keeping it secret for more than three years. She also pushed for the hospital’s top priority — a new heart-surgery center — at the same time she was on its payroll. And Ms. Haley raised money for the hospital’s charitable foundation from lobbyists and businesses who may have had reason to curry favor with her.The donations, one lobbyist wrote, were a way of “sucking up” to a rising political player.The blurry line between Ms. Haley’s personal and public interests became the subject of a State House ethics investigation in 2012. The Republican-led committee concluded that Ms. Haley, by then the governor, had not violated any state ethics rules. But ethics experts and even some of her past supporters say the outcome was more an indictment of the lax rules and cozy ties between lawmakers and special interests than a vindication of her actions.“Was Nikki Haley acting unethically? Maybe,” said Scott English, who was chief of staff to former Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican and Ms. Haley’s predecessor. “Was she acting unethically according to the jungle rules of South Carolina politics at the time? Not at all.”Ms. Haley’s early ethics controversy is a far cry from the legal morass entangling her top rival for the Republican nomination, former President Donald J. Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges, including obstruction of justice and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Mr. Trump is also facing civil penalties for a yearslong fraud scheme involving his real estate business.Yet Ms. Haley’s actions broke ethical norms, according to Kedric Payne, who directs the ethics program for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. In most states, at least some of her conduct would have been out of bounds, he said, because it created the appearance of a conflict of interest.A core principle of most state ethics laws is that “you cannot have outside employment that could in any way conflict with your official duties,” Mr. Payne said.In South Carolina, the ethics investigation of Ms. Haley undermined her image as a broom-sweeping crusader working to shake up the political establishment — a persona she is still cultivating. Campaigning in New Hampshire on Saturday, Ms. Haley dismissed her lack of endorsements from politicians in her home state and in Washington as a result of her stances on transparency and ethics.“I’ve called elected officials out because accountability matters,” she said.The questions about Ms. Haley’s potential conflicts revealed how her work in politics had produced financial dividends almost from the beginning of her career in public life.In recent years, Ms. Haley has made millions from consulting fees, paid speeches, stock and seats on corporate boards. In the year leading up to her presidential bid, she made around $2.5 million in income on speaking engagements alone, according to her financial disclosures.This account of Ms. Haley’s early ethics troubles is drawn from testimony, filings and exhibits released by the South Carolina House in response to a public information request from The New York Times, as well as other documents, interviews and media accounts.Ms. Haley’s presidential campaign did not respond to questions about the controversy. She said at the time that she had followed the existing rules and cast the episode as an attempt by her political enemies to keep her from fighting South Carolina’s pay-to-play culture.“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” she told the ethics committee in 2012.Yet when she campaigned for a second term as governor, Ms. Haley worked to rehabilitate her image and ran on a promise to reform the state’s ethics rules. Once re-elected, she signed a law that outlawed secret sources of income like her Wilbur Smith contract.The lean yearsIn 2010, prodded by her opponent in her first run for governor, Ms. Haley disclosed six years of her joint tax returns with her husband, Michael Haley. They showed a stretch of modest earnings, thousands of dollars in penalties and interest for late tax payments, and close to $21,000 in business losses from Mr. Haley’s brief business venture, according to published accounts and summaries of the tax returns given to House ethics committee investigators.(Although Ms. Haley has repeatedly said that candidates for president should release their tax returns, she has not released her own, nor have her opponents in the Republican primary race.)Michael and Nikki Haley in New York in 2012. In 2010, she released six years of joint income tax returns showing a stretch of modest earnings.Uli Seit for The New York TimesAs young adults, both Ms. Haley and her husband had worked for her parents’ clothing business, Exotica International, she as the firm’s chief financial officer, he in charge of men’s wear. But the Haleys’ income from the store petered out in 2006, two years before it closed. The couple, who then were both in their mid-30s, had two children. Ms. Haley’s legislative job was only a part-time position. Mr. Haley joined the South Carolina National Guard that fall, but initially earned little.The Wilbur Smith contract helped fill in the financial gaps. The tax documents suggest that the engineering firm’s retainer amounted to nearly half of her family’s income of $64,000 in 2007.A top executive at the firm testified that he could recall only one or two meetings with Ms. Haley and that they never discussed state contracts. Ms. Haley said a House lawyer had advised her that she was not required to report the payments. She recused herself from a vote on one of the firm’s projects out of an abundance of caution, but voted on a second bill that canceled the project. She testified she didn’t see a conflict in that vote.Wilbur Smith ended her retainer in late 2008.Wearing two hatsBy then, Ms. Haley was onto something new. That summer, she asked Michael J. Biediger, then the chief executive of Lexington Medical Center, to hire her.Ms. Haley said her parents were either losing or selling their business, Mr. Biediger testified. Her job application listed her salary at Exotica as $125,000 and requested the same amount. But her tax returns indicated she never earned more than $47,000 a year from the clothing firm.Ms. Haley did not fill out or sign the application, a top aide told reporters, although the application stated that her typed name constituted a signature.Mr. Biediger created a $110,000-a-year position for Ms. Haley as a fund-raiser for the hospital’s foundation, a subsidiary of the hospital. At the time, she was a member of the powerful House Labor, Commerce and Industry committee and was also majority whip.He told the ethics committee he had hired her for her networking skills and personality and relied on a consulting firm’s recommendation to set her salary. A survey by the state’s Association of Nonprofit Organizations found that her salary was two and a half times as high as the average for similar organizations.The job came with inherent ethical dilemmas. Legislators were prohibited from serving as lobbyists, but now Ms. Haley was wearing two hats: as a lawmaker trying to help the hospital win state approval to open the heart-surgery center, and as a paid employee of a hospital subsidiary.Ms. Haley continued to work with other lawmakers on a plan to build support for the heart-surgery center, according to emails. She also spoke with an official on the state board with decision-making authority over the center, and communicated with hospital officials about the proposed project.Asked about her dual roles, Ms. Haley, who disclosed her hospital work on her financial disclosures, told the ethics committee she had kept her jobs separate.“I never had a legislative conversation in any way mixed with a foundation conversation,” she said.Ms. Haley also brushed off concerns that her fund-raising job opened up a potential avenue for special interests that might want to influence her. She solicited donations from various corporate interests, including an association of financial services firms and Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina.To contact Blue Cross executives, Ms. Haley first reached out to a prominent lobbyist, Larry Marchant, she testified. Mr. Marchant told her that if the company contributed, “You are going to owe me,” she said, and she replied, “You know I don’t work like that.”The health insurer’s donations grew from $1,000 in 2007, the year before Ms. Haley joined the foundation, to $20,000 in 2010.In January of that year, as Ms. Haley was running for governor, Mr. Marchant advised the firm not to lower its donation, writing to one company official: “I’m still sucking up to Nikki in the event she comes on strong in the primary.”Blue Cross officials told the ethics committee they had conducted an internal investigation and determined that the donations were not an attempt to influence Ms. Haley, but a typical effort to build good will with the community.‘The people deserved to know’Ms. Haley and Lexington Medical cut ties during her campaign. As governor, she attacked the House ethics inquiry as a distraction engineered by Democrats. A surprise witness in her own defense, Ms. Haley accused the influential Republican lawyer who had filed the initial ethics complaint, John Rainey, of being a “racist, sexist bigot” and of suggesting that her family was related to terrorists. Mr. Rainey later said that Ms. Haley, whose parents are Indian immigrants, had misconstrued the remark.The Republican-led committee dismissed each of the charges with little explanation. Democrats argued that the lawmakers never fully investigated the allegations because they were loath to go up against a sitting governor.In South Carolina, the episode was soon overshadowed by a barrage of other corruption scandals. John Crangle, the former head of South Carolina’s chapter of Common Cause, said that Ms. Haley’s conduct didn’t “smell good,” but that it paled in comparison to the convictions of half a dozen legislators, including the Speaker of the House, of crimes involving misuse of campaign funds and payments from lobbyists.Ms. Haley promoting a plan for ethics reform in 2012, shortly after a state ethics investigation into her work on behalf of a hospital.Steve Jessmore/The Sun News, via Associated PressThe Center for Public Integrity, in a state-by-state survey of ethics rules, gave South Carolina an F rating in 2012, saying the state’s loopholes were “large enough to dock a Confederate submarine.”Soon after the ethics investigation, Ms. Haley went on a whistle-stop tour of the state promoting an ethics overhaul. In 2016, she signed two bills that required lawmakers to disclose the sources, but not the amounts, of private income, and revamped the process for reviewing allegations.Mr. Crangle said the changes did not go far enough.“Special interests want to invest large amounts of money to buy legislation and legislators, and Nikki never really challenged that institutional system of corruption,” he said.In her own retelling of her political rise, Ms. Haley made no mention of her ethics issues. In a 2012 memoir, she wrote that she believed that letting lawmakers hide the sources of their income — as she herself had done — was wrong.“It breeds conflicts of interest,” she wrote. “The people deserved to know who paid us.”Kitty Bennett More

  • in

    Election Fraud Is Rare. Except, Maybe, in Bridgeport, Conn.

    Voters say that campaigns in Connecticut’s largest city routinely rely on absentee ballots — collected illegally — to win elections. Now, the city faces a mayoral primary redo.Two months ago, Joe Ganim received the most votes in the race for mayor of Bridgeport, Conn. This week, the city will vote again — to decide if he should even be the Democratic candidate.The unlikely and confusing situation arose after a judge ruled that there was enough evidence of misconduct in the Democratic primary in September to throw its result — a victory by Mayor Ganim — into doubt. The judge pointed to videos showing “partisans” repeatedly stuffing absentee ballots into drop boxes.The footage provided a particularly lurid illustration of ballot tampering, though experts say election fraud is rare in the United States and often accidental when it occurs.But in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, ballot manipulation has undermined elections for years.In interviews and in court testimony, residents of the city’s low-income housing complexes described people sweeping through their apartment buildings, often pressuring them to apply for absentee ballots they were not legally entitled to.Sometimes, residents say, campaigners fill out the applications or return the ballots for them — all of which is illegal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    New Haley Ad to Play Up Her Foreign Policy Expertise, and Subtly Hit Trump

    A 3-minute commercial set to run on Monday features a mother whose son died just after his release from North Korea. It may remind voters of Donald Trump’s friendliness toward the country’s dictator.Nikki Haley’s closing argument to New Hampshire primary voters will include a three-minute ad featuring the emotional story of the mother of a college student who died shortly after North Korea released him from captivity in 2017, and whose cause Ms. Haley championed as United Nations ambassador.The ad, which the Haley campaign said would run across the state on Monday, is narrated by Cynthia Warmbier, the mother of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia honors student from Cincinnati who was imprisoned in North Korea after visiting the country on an organized tour.“He was taken hostage, tortured and murdered by the government of North Korea,” Ms. Warmbier, who spoke at Ms. Haley’s campaign kickoff event last year, is shown telling the crowd there. “When we were begging the Obama administration for help, they told us to be quiet and be patient. Nikki told us the opposite. She told me it’s OK to be afraid, like I am now, but I had to push through the fear.”Ms. Warmbier describes Ms. Haley as a fighter on the world stage and a leader with strength and compassion.The ad appears geared toward attracting, among other voters, the suburban women who have left the Republican Party in recent years and are a key constituency in New Hampshire and beyond.In portraying North Korea as evil and responsible for the young man’s death, the ad may also remind voters of former President Donald J. Trump’s frequent boasts about his friendly relationship with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.Ms. Haley has portrayed Mr. Trump as a destabilizing force in international relations who cozied up to dictators and terrorists.Ms. Warmbier and her son’s story played a recurring bit part in the Trump administration.During Mr. Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address, Ms. Warmbier and her husband, Fred, stood and wept as Mr. Trump described the “menace” of North Korea and paid tribute to Otto.It was later reported that North Korea had billed the United States $2 million for Otto’s medical treatment before releasing him, though Mr. Trump denied paying the country anything.The Warmbiers later released a blistering statement after Mr. Trump met with the North Korean leader and said he believed Mr. Kim’s claim that he did not know what happened to Mr. Warmbier while he was in captivity.“Some really bad things happened to Otto — some really, really bad things. But he tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word,” Mr. Trump said.But Ms. Haley said otherwise: “Americans know the cruelty that was placed on Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime,” she wrote on social media. More

  • in

    Can Nikki Haley Beat Trump? A Look at the ‘Electability’ Question

    “Don’t you want someone who can win?” she asks in a new ad.A long time ago, in a Republican Party far, far away, a seasoned former governor suggested a theory for winning the 2016 election.The nominee must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general,” Jeb Bush advised, alluding to the tension between the demands of primary voters and the broader electorate. His adage didn’t hold up in that campaign: Bush did indeed lose the primary in 2016 to Donald Trump, badly, but then Trump rode a nativist, populist and grievance-laced message all the way to the White House.Eight years later, Trump has only strengthened his grip on the Republican base, despite, or because of, his litany of legal troubles. His 30-point win in the Iowa caucuses this week signaled how fully he has remade the party in his image.But to a dwindling number of Republicans willing to criticize Trump out loud, the tension Bush described rings more true than ever: Even as Trump has inspired extraordinary loyalty among the Republican base, the party lost the House, Senate and White House during his time in office.In the final days before the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, it’s an argument Nikki Haley and her supporters are explicitly making in her uphill bid for the nomination.“Don’t you want someone who can win?” asks a new video from the Haley team titled “Haley wins, Trump loses.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More