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    Jury Rules Against Project Veritas in Lawsuit

    The conservative group was found to have violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic consulting firm, to which it was ordered to pay $120,000.WASHINGTON — A jury in a federal civil case on Thursday found that Project Veritas, a conservative group known for its deceptive tactics, had violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself as part of a lengthy sting operation against Democratic political consultants.The jury awarded the consulting firm, Democracy Partners, $120,000. The decision amounted to a sharp rebuke of the practices that Project Veritas and its founder, James O’Keefe, have relied on. During the trial, lawyers for Project Veritas portrayed the operation as news gathering and its employees as journalists following the facts.“Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations and publishing selectively edited, misleading videos in the future,” Robert Creamer, a co-founder of Democracy Partners, said in a statement after the jury had reached a verdict.Project Veritas said it would appeal the decision.In 2016, according to testimony and documents introduced at the trial, Project Veritas carried out a plan to infiltrate Democracy Partners, which worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through the Democratic National Committee.As part of the ruse, a Project Veritas operative posing as a wealthy donor named Charles Roth mentioned to Mr. Creamer that he wanted to make a $20,000 donation to a progressive group that was also a client of Mr. Creamer.Later, the man posing as Mr. Roth told Mr. Creamer that his niece was interested in continuing her work in Democratic circles. After the money was wired from an offshore account in Belize to the group, Mr. Creamer spoke with the woman playing the role of Mr. Roth’s niece and offered her an unpaid internship at Democracy Partners.The niece used a fake name and email account along with a bogus résumé. In his book, “American Pravda,” Mr. O’Keefe wrote that the “donation certainly greased the wheels.”The operative, whose real name is Allison Maass, secretly taped conversations and took documents while working at Democracy Partners. She then supplied the information to her superiors at Project Veritas, which edited the videos and made them public.The videos suggested that Mr. Creamer and another man, Scott Foval, were developing a plan to provoke violence by supporters of Donald J. Trump at his rallies. Mr. Creamer’s lawsuit said the “video was heavily edited and contained commentary by O’Keefe that drew false conclusions.” According to documents filed with the court in the case, the man playing Mr. Roth had proposed an “illegal voter registration scheme, and Creamer rejected it outright as illegal.”The lawsuit contended that Mr. Creamer had lost more than $500,000 worth of contracts because of the deceptions behind the Project Veritas operation..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Joseph E. Sandler, a lawyer for Democracy Partners, said during opening arguments last week that Mr. O’Keefe was a “strong supporter” of Mr. Trump and had tried to tip the scales in favor of him during the 2016 election. The operation, Mr. Sandler said, was “all carried out for the principal purpose of embarrassing Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump.”He described the elaborate operation as a “painstaking web of lies conjured up by Project Veritas.”According to a Project Veritas email and trial exhibit, Mr. O’Keefe offered cash bonuses to his employees to obtain incriminating statements, and $2,500 bonuses if Mr. Trump mentioned their videos in the presidential debates later that October. The email is marked “highly confidential.”At the trial, Mr. Sandler said Project Veritas was trying to “uncover what they themselves concocted.”Paul A. Calli, a lawyer for Project Veritas, argued that the videos were newsworthy and pointed out that media outlets had published stories about the undercover operation. He said the lawsuit was just “sour grapes.”In his closing statement, Mr. Calli said Project Veritas had engaged in “deceit, deception and dishonesty.” The group used those tactics, he said, so Project Veritas “can speak truth to power.”He said there was no evidence this was a political spying operation and that the lawsuit was an attack on journalism.“The sole purpose of the operation was journalism,” Mr. Calli said.Before the trial, a federal judge ruled that Democracy Partners could refer to Project Veritas’s conduct as a “political spying operation.”Project Veritas is facing legal fights on several fronts. In August, some of its former employees sued the group, depicting a “highly sexualized” work culture in which daytime drinking and drug use were common and employees worked additional hours without pay.That same month, two Florida residents pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to stealing a diary belonging to the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, and selling it to Project Veritas. According to court documents, prosecutors asserted that an employee of Project Veritas had directed the defendants to steal additional items to authenticate the diary and paid them additional money after receiving them.No charges have been filed against Project Veritas or any of its operatives in the Ashley Biden case, and the group never published the diary. But in a sign that the investigation into the group will continue, the authorities said one of the Florida residents had agreed to cooperate. As part of that investigation, F.B.I. agents conducted court-authorized searches last year at three homes of Project Veritas employees, including Mr. O’Keefe.Project Veritas was also ordered in August to pay Stanford University about $150,000 in legal fees after a federal judge tossed the defamation lawsuit the group filed in 2021.Project Veritas also has an ongoing defamation suit against The New York Times. More

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    Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Return to Center Stage. Their Own.

    After going dark during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative is back.After a six-year hiatus, the Clinton Global Initiative returned to New York City this week, bringing together leaders from the worlds of nonprofit, government and business, with a few celebrities sprinkled in for good measure. It has been an eventful few years since they last gathered in 2016.“The challenges we face are steep, but they pretty much have been steep for a long time now,” former President Bill Clinton said in his opening remarks at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan on Monday. “And CGI is always and has always been about what we can do and not what we can’t do.”The Clinton Global Initiative began in 2005 and quickly became something akin to a Davos-on-the-Hudson event, but one with a greater focus on philanthropy, nonprofits and corporate do-gooding. The way it differed from most conferences is that it required participants to make commitments, sometimes in dollars, other times in targets — such as for creating jobs or delivering clean water.Up to the hiatus in 2016, attendees announced more than 3,700 commitments, which by the organization’s own tally had helped more than 435 million people in over 180 countries.In many ways the early days were the high-water mark of the philanthrocapitalism era, when trust in the wealthy and celebrities to save the world ran high. In turn, many significant organizations modeled themselves after the Clintons’ endeavor.Then in 2016, in the heat of the general election campaign fight between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, with reporters asking a lot of questions about the foundation and its donors, Mr. Clinton announced that the 2016 meeting would be the final version of the initiative.Now, as world leaders gathered in New York for the first fully in-person United Nations General Assembly in three years, the goal is to recapture that old Clinton magic, and to see if there is still room in a field of thought-leading, pledge-making symposia crowding the city this week.Advisers to Mr. Clinton said that in the years since, he had longed to restart the event. “He would tell me regularly when we were just talking before a board meeting, ‘I was just out last night and someone was saying when are you going to start CGI again?’” said Robert Harrison, former chief executive of the Clinton Global Initiative, from 2007 to 2016, and a board member of the Clinton Foundation.“A year ago, 10 months ago, we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s try,’” Mr. Harrison recalled.The Clintons’ return to the world stage was heralded in March with a letter from Mr. Clinton that doubled as a call to arms. With the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the challenges to democracy at home and abroad, the world needed CGI back, according to Mr. Clinton.Judging from the names at the event, many old friends and allies answered the call, including the philanthropists Laurene Powell Jobs and Melinda French Gates, Secretary Xavier Becerra of the Department of Health and Human Services, state governors, corporate chief executives, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the director-general of the World Health Organization.This year the initiative tallied 144 commitments, which will result in more than 1.6 million jobs and the reduction of 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.Commitments ranged from a program to build soccer fields in underserved communities to one making bricks out of volcanic ash. Nine members committed to providing humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Mr. Clinton interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine via videoconference on Tuesday, with Mr. Zelensky in his trademark form-fitting T-shirt.From left, the CNN host Fareed Zakaria with Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados; the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; and the chef José Andrés at the Clinton Global Initiative event on Monday.Julia Nikhinson/Associated PressMilling in the halls at the event, Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and longtime denizen of Clinton world, brushed past, smartphone pressed to his face. Petra Nemcova, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model who survived the deadly 2004 tsunami in Thailand and now works in philanthropy, chatted with a Ukrainian official by the coffee urns, where the milk was all plant-based — soy, oat, almond — in a nod to Mr. Clinton’s veganism as well as the climate impact of cows. The meals were all plant-based, too.The mood between sessions was like that at a college reunion, with people embracing after years apart and speaking warmly and with nostalgia — convivial but not, perhaps, the most forward looking.“Why did they leave in the first place?” said Paloma Raggo, a philanthropy expert and professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa. “It wasn’t the right political climate for them to be at the forefront of things.”The Clintons shut down the initiative because of scrutiny during the campaign. And they kept it on ice for six years for a variety of reasons. First there was the recovery from Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in the presidential election. Then the #MeToo movement brought a harsh spotlight on past Clinton ties to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Later, people close to Bill and Hillary say, Covid protocols kept them away from large crowds.Still, to critical observers, the timing does not seem clear. “Is it because now there are issues that make it necessary, them coming here, or is it because at this point the political consequences or bad juju has dissolved a bit and they reappeared?” Ms. Raggo asked.Some former advisers say the Clinton Global Initiative’s moment has passed and the event should not be revived. Memberships, which cost $15,000 and $20,000 in past years, were just $5,000 for this year’s event, according to Mr. Harrison, the former chief executive. In addition to Mr. Clinton’s desire to return to the spotlight, some see the former first daughter as a motivating force.Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Clinton this month debuted a documentary series on AppleTV+ called “Gutsy,” in which mother and daughter talk to famous women and activists. Mrs. Clinton, who has also written or co-written four books, two with Chelsea, since the 2016 election, took the stage Monday afternoon to a standing ovation.“I don’t know about you, but when people ask me how I am these days, I often say: ‘Well, personally I’m great. I’m just worried about everything,’” Mrs. Clinton told the crowd.Shortly thereafter, on the same stage, Ms. French Gates announced a $50 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund scholarships at a health sciences university in Rwanda in the name of Dr. Paul Farmer, who died unexpectedly in February.“Someone else has stepped up who also appreciates, respects and understands the value of this work,” Mrs. Clinton then said. “One of Paul’s friend’s here in our CGI community has just told us about making a gift of $10 million more dollars.”The foundation started in 1997 as the charitable vehicle to pay for the design and construction of Mr. Clinton’s presidential library. It had its share of controversy pretty quickly, with the Marc Rich pardon and donations an issue as he left the White House. In 2002, the Clintons started the Clinton H.I.V./AIDS Initiative, with the goal of saving the lives of millions of people around the world living with the disease. Today it continues as the Clinton Health Access Initiative, though it spun off from the foundation in 2010.When the Clinton Global Initiative debuted in 2005, George W. Bush was president. Hillary Clinton was a New York senator and a likely presidential contender herself. Bill Clinton was a recent two-term president. Chelsea seemed poised to follow in her parents’ footsteps.Chelsea Clinton with her parents at the conference.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe first version of the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2005, was timed to the 60th anniversary of the United Nations. The currency of the initiative was the “commitment.” Attendees were encouraged to make commitments that were then tallied at $2.5 billion in pledges from 300 people, to a variety of causes including global poverty, conflict resolution and climate change.The September traffic jam of motorcades zipping between events during the United Nations General Assembly were the moment to extract these pledges.“I think CGI was the rocket fuel on all of this,” said John Prendergast, co-founder of the Sentry, who has appeared on several panels with heads of state there over the years. “He has this real nose for pulling these various communities together,” he said of Mr. Clinton.Now there are numerous other events competing for attention and attendance, including the Concordia Summit and the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers event.Donna Shalala, the former health and human services secretary and former president of the Clinton Foundation, said in an interview that they had ended the Clinton Global Initiative to avoid any potential conflict of interest with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.“It was painful,” she said. “Let me assure you the president loves CGI and the rest of us did. And the foundation was defined by CGI, it’s what everyone knew us for.”When the election ended and Mrs. Clinton lost, it was not a simple matter of cranking up the annual meeting again.“This is not just hitting pause on a song; it’s like shutting down a nuclear reactor, you don’t just keep flipping the switch on and off,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “Once you turn it off, there’s an energy and a ramp-up that’s involved and time consuming.”Even after a dormant period for the initiative, the foundation’s signature event, tax filings show that the foundation had net assets of over $300 million as of the 2020 tax year, the most recent available.For nonprofits, CGI can be a powerful place to raise funds and make connections.Gary White, the chief executive and a co-founder of Water.org, said he had met some of his most important donors at CGI, including the PepsiCo Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation and the Ikea Foundation.“Where the rubber meets the road is at CGI, where they are there to make commitments not just as a side show,” Mr. White said.He also met the actor Matt Damon at CGI, in 2008, when his organization was called Water Partners. Mr. Damon had his own group, known as H2O Africa. The next year they announced that they had merged their groups. This year, they made a commitment to deliver clean water and sanitation to 100 million people in need, a goal the group says it is nearly halfway to meeting.Mr. Clinton’s opening remarks at the conference came out a little quiet, a hint raspier than usual, a tiny bit slow.He made a reference to “someone who had no dog in the hunt,” and then quipped, “You must forgive me if I sometimes slip off into my colloquial past.” The audience laughed, relief palpable, as the old charm emerged.Toward the end of his first panel, Mr. Clinton told the participants, “I wish I could keep you here the rest of the day.”After that panel, Mr. Clinton leaned down from the stage to grasp hands, smile, pose for photographs and talk to the crowd. He beamed, campaign-trail muscle memory seeming to kick in. As the Secret Service tried to move him along, one had the distinct impression that the former president never wanted to leave the stage. More

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    Trial of Trump Adviser Tom Barrack Could Shed Light on Foreign Agents

    Thomas Barrack, a Los Angeles private equity executive, is accused of working secretly for the United Arab Emirates.The trial of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., an informal adviser to former President Donald J. Trump accused of acting as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates, could shed light on how foreign governments jockeyed for access to the Trump administration — efforts that may have created lucrative opportunities for businessmen close to the White House.Jury selection for the trial, which is expected to last into October, begins Monday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Barrack — a Los Angeles-based private-equity investor — of using his sway with Mr. Trump to advance the interests of the Emiratis and of serving as a secret back channel for communications without disclosing his efforts to the attorney general, as the government contends he should have.While Mr. Barrack served the Emirati government, prosecutors say, he was also seeking money from the rulers for investment funds, including one that would support projects to boost Mr. Trump’s agenda and benefit from his policies.In 2019, prosecutors say, Mr. Barrack repeatedly lied to the F.B.I. about his activities.Mr. Barrack has denied wrongdoing. In court filings, his lawyers have suggested that prosecutors delayed charging him until Mr. Trump left office and said the charges were not supported by facts. A spokesman for Mr. Barrack declined to comment.In all, Mr. Barrack faces seven counts, including acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, obstruction of justice and making false statements. He is to be tried alongside his former assistant, Matthew Grimes, who was charged only on the lobbying counts. Both were arrested in July 2021; prosecutors filed a second indictment in the case in May with additional details about Mr. Barrack’s efforts.Lawyers for Mr. Grimes did not respond to a request for comment. In a February motion to dismiss the indictment, they said there was no allegation that he ever agreed to be an agent for the U.A.E.Matthew Grimes, left, Mr. Barrack’s assistant, also faces lobbying charges.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesA third defendant, Rashid al-Malik, an Emirati businessman who left the United States in 2018 after federal agents interviewed him, remains at large, prosecutors said.Foreign governments have long sought favored status with U.S. presidential administrations. Wealthier nations, including the U.A.E., have tried to influence American politics and society through large donations to universities and think tanks, and through hiring armies of lobbyists to steer bills in Congress.But during the Trump administration, some Persian Gulf nations intensified efforts to gain access to the president and his top aides, many of whom had little foreign policy experience and were viewed as particularly susceptible to influence.According to the indictment, in May 2016, Mr. Barrack agreed to serve as a back channel between the Emiratis and the Trump campaign. Soon after, Mr. Barrack sent Mr. al-Malik a copy of a speech that he said he had personally drafted for Mr. Trump, in which he praised Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Emirati ruler who was at the time the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.“They loved it so much! This is great,” Mr. al-Malik responded, according to the indictment, which quotes extensively from email and text messages.As the speech went through revisions, Mr. Barrack worked with campaign officials to ensure the remarks kept a positive reference to Persian Gulf allies, according to the indictment. After the speech, a senior Emirati official emailed Mr. Barrack to say “everybody here are very happy with the results.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.During the Republican Party convention, Mr. Barrack worked with the Trump campaign to tailor parts of the platform with Emirati input, prosecutors said. He also praised the U.A.E. on television, according to the indictment; Mr. al-Malik pushed for the publicity and sent Mr. Barrack and Mr. Grimes talking points from a senior Emirati official.After Mr. Trump’s election, prosecutors said, Mr. Barrack communicated with senior Emirati officials about Mr. Trump’s transition and likely candidates for top posts. In December 2016, Mr. al-Malik gave Mr. Barrack a “wish list” of foreign policy moves, prosecutors said.Mr. al-Malik also encouraged Mr. Grimes to push the Trump administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, a longtime goal of the Emiratis. “Yes,” Mr. Grimes responded. “At your direction.” Weeks later, Mr. Grimes sent Mr. al-Malik a news article suggesting that the move was being considered.Mr. Barrack has contended in court filings that his contacts with Gulf leaders were no secret. His communications, his lawyers wrote this year, would show that “his activities were undertaken with the knowledge of the Trump campaign and administration.”His lawyers have also noted that Mr. Barrack, while seeking an official position with the Trump administration, submitted extensive information to the government about overseas contacts. And, starting in late 2017, he voluntarily met with investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, during the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.The inquiry by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn into Mr. Barrack’s ties with foreign leaders sprang from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.In 2019, Mr. Barrack learned he was being investigated by the F.B.I., although he has said he was not told he was the target, and arranged through his lawyers to meet agents. During that interview, prosecutors say, Mr. Barrack made false statements about his contacts with Mr. al-Malik and his role arranging contacts between the Trump administration and the U.A.E.In court papers, prosecutors have argued that Mr. Barrack stood to profit from his dealings, in part by soliciting U.A.E. money for his business ventures. According to the indictment, Mr. Barrack planned to pitch a proposed investment fund at a meeting with Sheikh bin Zayed, the Emirati ruler.There is no evidence that the proposed venture materialized or that Mr. Barrack met with the crown prince. But the indictment noted that in the following months, Emirati sovereign wealth funds invested a total of $374 million in two deals sponsored by the giant real estate company Mr. Barrack led, now known as DigitalBridge Group and formerly known as Colony Capital.Mr. Barrack is one of several associates of Mr. Trump to come under scrutiny for connections with foreign interests, in particular for lobbying U.S. officials on behalf of governments and other entities.In October 2020, Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser, pleaded guilty to conspiring to influence the administration for Chinese and Malaysian interests. Mr. Broidy was pardoned by Mr. Trump in his final days in office.Michael T. Flynn, who briefly was Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, admitted in 2017 to working as a foreign agent for a Turkish businessman. The admission was part of a plea deal — Mr. Flynn was never charged in connection with Turkey — and in November 2020 Mr. Trump also pardoned him.Some dealings raised questions about ethics, not legality. After leaving the White House, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, secured a $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabia investment fund, which some critics said created the appearance that Mr. Kushner was receiving payback for favorable White House actions.After Mr. Trump left office, his Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, solicited funds for his own private equity fund, ultimately getting $1 billion from the Saudis and $500 million more from the Emiratis.David D. Kirkpatrick More

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    How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step

    Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick.The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the nation’s history.But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback, but this was of a different magnitude. A question began to form in her mind: Do they really hate me that much?That morning, there were things going on that Ms. Sarsour could not imagine.More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one message performed better with audiences than any other.It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.Linda Sarsour, a leader of the initial Women’s March in January 2017. Within days, Russian trolls were targeting her online.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesOver the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Ms. Sarsour, whose activism made her a lightning rod for Mr. Trump’s base and also for some of his most ardent opposition.One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Ms. Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.Many people know the story about how the Women’s March movement fractured, leaving lasting scars on the American left.A fragile coalition to begin with, it headed into crisis over its co-chairs’ association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, who is widely condemned for his antisemitic statements. When this surfaced, progressive groups distanced themselves from Ms. Sarsour and her fellow march co-chairs, Carmen Perez, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland, and some called for them to step down.But there is also a story that has not been told, one that only emerged years later in academic research, of how Russia inserted itself into this moment.For more than a century, Russia and the Soviet Union sought to weaken their adversaries in the West by inflaming racial and ethnic tensions. In the 1960s, K.G.B. officers based in the United States paid agents to paint swastikas on synagogues and desecrate Jewish cemeteries. They forged racist letters, supposedly from white supremacists, to African diplomats.They did not invent these social divisions; America already had them. Ladislav Bittman, who worked for the secret police in Czechoslovakia before defecting to the United States, compared Soviet disinformation programs to an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”A decade ago, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, oversaw a revival of these tactics, seeking to undermine democracies around the world from the shadows.Social media now provided an easy way to feed ideas into American discourse, something that, for half a century, the K.G.B. had struggled to do. And the Russian government secretly funneled more than $300 million to political parties in more than two dozen countries in an effort to sway their policies in Moscow’s favor since 2014, according to a U.S. intelligence review made public last week.What effect these intrusions had on American democracy is a question that will be with us for years. It may be unanswerable. Already, social media was amplifying Americans’ political impulses, leaving behind a trail of damaged communities. Already, trust in institutions was declining, and rage was flaring up in public life. These things would have been true without Russian interference.But to trace the Russian intrusions over the months that followed that first Women’s March is to witness a persistent effort to make all of them worse.After the 2016 election, the Russian disinformation operation at the Internet Research Agency shifted focus from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to broader U.S. targets.James Hill for The New York Times‘Refrigerators and Nails’In early 2017, the trolling operation was in its imperial phase, swelling with confidence.Accounts at the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg and controlled by a Putin ally, had boasted of propelling Mr. Trump to victory. That year, the group’s budget nearly doubled, according to internal communications made public by U.S. prosecutors. More than a year would pass before social media platforms executed sweeping purges of Russian-backed sock-puppet accounts.For the trolls, it was a golden hour.Under these auspicious conditions, their goals shifted from electoral politics to something more general — the goal of deepening rifts in American society, said Alex Iftimie, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a 2018 case against an administrator at Project Lakhta, which oversaw the Internet Research Agency and other Russian trolling operations.“It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore,” said Mr. Iftimie, now a partner at Morrison Foerster. “It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.”There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.Artyom Baranov, who worked at one of Project Lakhta’s affiliates from 2018 to 2020, concluded that his co-workers were, for the most part, people who needed the money, indifferent to the themes they were asked to write on.“If they were assigned to write text about refrigerators, they would write about refrigerators, or, say, nails, they would write about nails,” said Mr. Baranov, one of a handful of former trolls who have spoken on the record about their activities. But instead of refrigerators and nails, it was “Putin, Putin, then Putin, and then about Navalny,” referring to Aleksei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader.The job was not to put forward arguments, but to prompt a visceral, emotional reaction, ideally one of “indignation,” said Mr. Baranov, a psychoanalyst by training, who was assigned to write posts on Russian politics. “The task is to make a kind of explosion, to cause controversy,” he said.When a post succeeded at enraging a reader, he said, a co-worker would sometimes remark, with satisfaction, Liberala razorvala. A liberal was torn apart. “It wasn’t on the level of discussing facts or giving new arguments,” he said. “It’s always a way of digging into dirty laundry.”Feminism was an obvious target, because it was viewed as a “Western agenda,” and hostile to the traditional values that Russia represented, said Mr. Baranov, who spoke about his work in hopes of warning the public to be more skeptical of material online. Already, for months, Russian accounts purporting to belong to Black women had been drilling down on racial rifts within American feminism:“White feminism seems to be the most stupid 2k16 trend”“Watch Muhammad Ali shut down a white feminist criticizing his arrogance”“Aint got time for your white feminist bullshit”“Why black feminists don’t owe Hillary Clinton their support”“A LIL LOUDER FOR THE WHITE FEMINISTS IN THE BACK”In January 2017, as the Women’s March drew nearer, they tested different approaches on different audiences, as they had during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. They posed as resentful trans women, poor women and anti-abortion women. They dismissed the marchers as pawns of the Jewish billionaire George Soros.And they derided the women who planned to participate, often in crudely sexual terms. In coordination, beginning on Jan. 19, 46 Russian accounts pumped out 459 original suggestions for #RenameMillionWomenMarch, a hashtag created by a right-wing podcaster from Indiana:The Why Doesn’t Anybody Love Me MarchThe Strong Women Constantly Playing the Victim MarchThe Lonely Cat Lady MarchThe Cramp CampThe Bearded Women ConventionBroken Broads BloviatingThe Liberal Trail of TearsCoyote Ugly BitchfestIn the meantime, another, far more effective line of messaging was developing.Ms. Sarsour recalled the overwhelming torrent of attacks. “I mean, just imagine,” she said, “every day that you woke up, you were a monster.”Brad Ogbonna/Redux‘It Was Like an Avalanche’As one of the four co-chairs of the Women’s March, Ms. Sarsour came with a track record — and with baggage.The daughter of a Palestinian American shopkeeper in Crown Heights, she had risen to prominence as a voice for the rights of Muslims after 9/11. In 2015, when she was 35, a New York Times profile anointed her — a “Brooklyn Homegirl in a Hijab” — as something rare, a potential Arab American candidate for elected office.In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders featured her at a campaign event, a stamp of approval from one of the country’s most influential progressives. That troubled pro-Israel politicians in New York, who pointed to her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to secure Palestinian rights by isolating Israel. Critics of the movement contend that it threatens Israel’s existence.Rory Lancman, then a city councilman from Queens, recalls his growing alarm as she began to appear regularly at events for left-wing causes unrelated to Israel, like fair wages, where, he felt, “her real agenda was trying to marry an anti-Israel agenda with different progressive causes.”The news that Ms. Sarsour was among the leaders of the Women’s March, said Mr. Lancman, a Democrat, struck him as “heartbreaking — that’s the word — that antisemitism is tolerated and rationalized in progressive spaces.”That was politics as usual, and Ms. Sarsour was accustomed to it: the long-running feud among Democrats over the implications of criticizing Israel.But forty-eight hours after the march, a shift of tone occurred online, with a surge of posts describing Ms. Sarsour as a radical jihadi who had infiltrated American feminism. Ms. Sarsour recalls this vividly, because she woke to a worried text message from a friend and glanced at Twitter to find that she was trending.Not all of this backlash was organic. That week, Russian amplifier accounts began circulating posts that focused on Ms. Sarsour, many of them inflammatory and based on falsehoods, claiming she was a radical Islamist, “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign.”Some of these posts found a large audience. At 7 p.m. on Jan. 21, an Internet Research Agency account posing as @TEN_GOP, a fictional right-wing American from the South, tweeted that Ms. Sarsour favored imposing Shariah law in the United States, playing into a popular anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had helped to popularize on the campaign trail.This message took hold, racking up 1,686 replies, 8,046 retweets and 6,256 likes. An hour later, @PrisonPlanet, an influential right-wing account, posted a tweet on the same theme. The following day, nearly simultaneously, a small army of 1,157 right-wing accounts picked up the narrative, publishing 1,659 posts on the subject, according to a reconstruction by Graphika, a social media monitoring company.Things were changing on the ground in New York. At the Arab American Association of New York, the nonprofit immigrant advocacy organization Ms. Sarsour ran in Bay Ridge, hate mail began to pour in — postcards, handwritten screeds on notebook paper, her photo printed out and defaced with red X’s.“This was an entirely new level, and it felt weird, because it was coming from all over the country,” said Kayla Santosuosso, then the nonprofit’s deputy director, who remembers bringing the mail to Ms. Sarsour in shoe boxes. Ms. Sarsour, worried that she had become “a liability,” stepped down from her position there that February.By the spring, the backlash against Ms. Sarsour had developed into a divisive political sideshow, one that easily drowned out the ideas behind the Women’s March. Every time she thought the attacks were quieting, they surged back. “It was like an avalanche,” she said. “Like I was swimming in it every day. It was like I never got out of it.”When she was invited to appear as a graduation speaker at the City University of New York’s graduate school of public health, the furor began weeks in advance. It caught the attention of the far-right polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos, who traveled to New York for a protest that attracted, as a Times reporter wrote, “a strange mix, including right-leaning Jews and Zionists, commentators like Pamela Geller, and some members of the alt-right.”“Linda Sarsour is a Shariah-loving, terrorist-embracing, Jew-hating, ticking time bomb of progressive horror,” Mr. Yiannopoulos told the crowd.Ms. Sarsour recalls the period leading up to the graduation speech as particularly stressful. As it approached, she had visions of a figure coming out of the shadows to kill her, “some poor, like, deranged person who was consumed by the dark corners of the internet, who would be fueled by hate.”Russian troll accounts were part of that clamor; beginning more than a month before her speech, a handful of amplifier accounts managed by Russia’s largest military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., circulated expressions of outrage at her being selected, often hashtagged #CancelSarsour.When Mr. Yiannopoulos spoke, @TEN_GOP tweeted the juiciest phrases — the “ticking time bomb of progressive horror” line — and racked up 3,954 retweets and 5,967 likes.Her graduation speech passed without incident. Then the trolls waited, it seems, for her to say or do something divisive. And that happened in early July, when, emboldened after her C.U.N.Y. appearance, she urged a Muslim audience outside Chicago to push back against unjust government policies, calling it “the best form of jihad.”In Islam, the word “jihad” can denote any virtuous struggle, but in the American political context it is inextricable from the concept of holy war. A more pragmatic politician might have avoided using it, but Ms. Sarsour was feeling like her old self. “That’s who I am in real life,” she said. “I’m from Brooklyn, and I’m Palestinian. It’s my personality.”To the Russian trolls, it was an opportunity.The following week, Russian accounts dramatically increased their volume of messaging about Ms. Sarsour, producing 184 posts on a single day, according to Advance Democracy Inc.Once again, the audience responded: When @TEN_GOP tweeted, “linda sarsour openly calls for muslims to wage jihad against trump, please look into this matter,” it received 6,222 retweets and 6,549 likes. The accounts sustained an intense focus on her through July, producing 894 posts over the next month and continuing into the autumn, the group found.And once again, the backlash spilled out from social media. Protesters camped outside the kosher barbecue restaurant where her brother, Mohammed, worked as a manager, demanding that he be fired. He left the job, and, eventually, New York.Her mother opened a package that arrived in the mail and screamed: It was a bizarre self-published book, titled “A Jihad Grows in Brooklyn,” that purported to be Ms. Sarsour’s autobiography and was illustrated with family photographs.“I mean, just imagine,” Ms. Sarsour said, “every day that you woke up, you were a monster.”Progressive groups distanced themselves from Ms. Sarsour, left, and her fellow march co-chairs Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez.Erin Scott/ReutersChasing GhostsIt is maddeningly difficult to say with any certainty what effect Russian influence operations have had on the United States, because when they took hold they piggybacked on real social divisions. Once pumped into American discourse, the Russian trace vanishes, like water that has been added to a swimming pool.This creates a conundrum for disinformation specialists, many of whom say the impact of Russian interventions has been overblown. After the 2016 presidential election, blaming unwelcome outcomes on Russia became “the emotional way out,” said Thomas Rid, author of “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.”“It’s playing a trick on you,” said Dr. Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “You become a useful idiot if you ignore effective info ops. But also if you talk it up by telling a story, if you make it more powerful than it is. It’s a trick.”The divisions within the Women’s March existed already.Internal disputes about identity and antisemitism had strained the group from its early days, when one of its organizers, Vanessa Wruble, who is Jewish, was pushed out after what she described as tense conversations with Ms. Perez and Ms. Mallory about the role of Jews in structural racism. Ms. Perez and Ms. Mallory have disputed that account.And discomfort with Ms. Sarsour had dampened enthusiasm among some Jewish progressives, said Rachel Timoner, the senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn.She recalled stepping up to defend Ms. Sarsour against “racist and Islamophobic” attacks, only to find, each time, that a new firestorm would arise, often resulting from something inflammatory and “ultimately indefensible” Ms. Sarsour had said.As the months wore on, Rabbi Timoner said, Jews began asking themselves whether they were being excluded from progressive movements.In 2018, a new internal crisis was triggered by Ms. Mallory’s attendance at Saviours’ Day, an annual gathering of the Nation of Islam led by Mr. Farrakhan.Ms. Mallory grew up in Harlem, where many viewed the Nation of Islam and its founder positively, as crusaders against urban violence. Pressured to disavow Mr. Farrakhan, she refused, though she said she did not share his antisemitic views. After her son’s father was murdered, she explained, “it was the women of the Nation of Islam who supported me.”“I have always held them close to my heart for that reason,” she said.After that, the fabric of the coalition tore, slowly and painfully. Ms. Sarsour and Ms. Perez stuck by Ms. Mallory, and before long, progressive groups began distancing themselves from all three. Under intense pressure to step down as the leaders, Ms. Sarsour, Ms. Perez, and a third co-chair, Bob Bland, did so in 2019, a move they say was long planned.Russian accounts boosted their output around Mr. Farrakhan and the Women’s March leaders that spring, posting 10 or 20 times a day, but there is no evidence that they were a primary driver of the conversation.Around this time, we largely lose our view into Russian messaging. In the summer of 2018, Twitter suspended 3,841 accounts traced to the Internet Research Agency, preserving 10 million of their tweets so they could be studied by researchers. A few months later, the platform suspended and preserved the work of 414 accounts produced by the G.R.U., the military intelligence agency.With that, a chorus of voices went silent — accounts that, for years, had helped shape American conversations about Black Lives Matter, the Mueller investigation and NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The record of the messaging around the Women’s March breaks off there, too, frozen in time.Russia’s exploitation of Ms. Sarsour as a wedge figure should be understood as part of the history of the Women’s March, said Shireen Mitchell, a technology analyst who has studied Russian interference in Black online discourse.Russian campaigns, she said, were adept at seeding ideas that flowed into mainstream discourse, after which, as she put it, they could “just sit and wait.”“It’s the priming of all that, starting from the beginning,” said Ms. Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women. “If those thousand tweets hit a division between the groups that matter, if they open and allow that division, it’s no longer a crack. It becomes a valley.”Others saw Russia’s role as marginal, tinkering around the edges of a necessary American discussion.“It’s a shame that Linda Sarsour damaged that movement by trying to inject into it noxious ideas that had no reason to be part of the Women’s March,” said Mr. Lancman, the former city councilman. “Unfortunately,” he added, Russians “seem very adept at exploiting these fissures.”Rabbi Timoner sounded sad, recalling all that had happened. The wounds that opened up between progressives that year have never quite healed, she said.“There is so much Jewish pain here,” she said. “Those Russian bots were poking at that pain.”The Women’s March continued under new leadership, but during the months of controversy, many women who had been galvanized by the first march drifted away.“I can’t remember all the negative stories, I just remember that there were so many of them,” said Jennifer Taylor-Skinner, a Seattle woman who, after the 2017 march, quit her job at Microsoft and founded “The Electorette,” a podcast geared toward progressive women. She hasn’t ever recaptured that feeling of unity.“Just thinking about it, I still feel a bit unmoored from any central movement,” she said. “There was a coalition possibly forming here that has been broken up.”An AftershockMs. Sarsour, 42, was back in her old office in Bay Ridge this past spring, five years after the first Women’s March, when she learned, from a reporter, that the Russian government had targeted her.She is seldom invited to national platforms these days, and when she is, protests often follow. Whatever buzz there was around her as a future political candidate has quieted. She knows how she is seen, as a polarizing figure. She has adjusted to this reality, and sees herself more as an activist, in the mold of Angela Davis.“I’m never going to get a real job,” at a major nonprofit or a corporation, she said. “That’s the kind of impact that these things have on our lives.”Data on Russian messaging around the Women’s March first appeared late last year in an academic journal, where Samantha R. Bradshaw, a disinformation expert at American University, reviewed state interference in feminist movements.She and her co-author, Amélie Henle, found a pattern of messaging by influential amplifier accounts that sought to demobilize civil society activism, by pumping up intersectional critiques of feminism and attacking organizers.Movements, Dr. Bradshaw argues, are fragile structures, often unprepared to weather well-resourced state-backed sabotage campaigns, especially when combined with algorithms that promote negative content. But healthy social movements are essential to democracies, she said.“We’re not going to have a robust public sphere if nobody wants to organize protests,” she said.Ms. Sarsour isn’t an academic, but she understood it well enough.“Lord have mercy,” she said, glancing over Dr. Bradshaw’s findings.Ms. Sarsour tried to get her head around it: All that time, the Russian government had been thinking about her. She had long had a sense of where her critics came from: the American right wing, and supporters of Israel. A foreign government — that was something that had never occurred to her.“To think that Russia is going to use me, it’s much more dangerous and sinister,” she said. “What does Russia get out of leveraging my identity, you know, to undermine movements that were anti-Trump in America — I guess —” she paused. “It’s just, wow.”Understanding what Russian trolls did would not change her position.Still, it helped her understand that time in her life, when she had been at the center of a storm. It wasn’t just her fellow countrymen hating her. It wasn’t just her allies disavowing her. That had happened. But it wasn’t the whole story.She placed a call to Ms. Mallory.“We weren’t crazy,” she said.Aaron Krolik More

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    The Run-Up: What Democrats and Republicans Got Wrong About Voters

    Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt’s March 2013. The G.O.P., in tatters, issues a scathing report blaming its electoral failures on an out-of-touch leadership that ignores minorities at its own peril. Just three years later, Donald Trump proves his party dead wrong. Today, how certain assumptions took hold of both parties — and what they’re still getting wrong — heading into the midterm elections.Photo Illustration: The New York Times. Photo by David McNew/ Getty ImagesOn today’s episodeAdam Nagourney, a New York Times reporter covering West coast culture. He served as the paper’s chief national political correspondent for eight years.Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016. She was the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign.Jennifer Medina, a national politics reporter at The Times, covering political attitudes and power, with a focus on the West.About ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is back. The host, Astead Herndon, will grapple with the big ideas animating the 2022 midterm election cycle — and explore how we got to this fraught moment in American politics.Elections are about more than who wins and who loses. New episodes on Thursdays.“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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    Britain 3, America 0

    Perhaps you didn’t notice, but back in November, Kamala Harris made history by becoming the first woman to hold presidential power.OK, it was only for an hour and a half. But still.Joe Biden temporarily — very temporarily — transferred executive power to his vice president when he was preparing for a colonoscopy. That involved being under anesthesia, and you do not want the country being run by a guy whose brain is asleep, even if we experienced four years of that in the very recent past.But really, people. This should at least be a reminder of how far we haven’t come. Our country is 246 years old, and that translates into something like 2,160,000 hours. One and a half of which have been under a woman’s direction.It’s a little embarrassing when we hear the news from London that Liz Truss just became the new prime minister. She’s the third woman chosen to run the government in Britain. In the United States the number is:A. One — Hillary really won! Really, she won!B. Two — I am counting that day with Kamala Harris, plus I think we could throw in that time in Salem when the head witches took over.C. Gee, guess we’re still waiting.The country doesn’t even seem all that comfortable with women governors. Right now, only nine of our states are headed by a female executive, and four of the women first stepped into the job after the guy who was elected resigned, for reasons ranging from an ambassadorship to, well, Andrew Cuomo.We’re not doing terrific on the legislative side, either: A quarter of our senators are women, and about 28 percent of the members of the House are. After the midterms that could get worse. “It looks like under most likely scenarios we’ll have fewer women in the House and Senate next year,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who’s been a hurricane of fund-raising action for Democratic candidates, told me.Still, American voters find it much easier to imagine a female member of Congress than a female chief executive. “The stereotypes about women’s leadership are more in line with legislatures,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women in Politics. The problem, Walsh suggested, is that women are seen as good at getting along with other people but not necessarily at running things.In Britain, where the prime minister is typically the leader of the majority party, the getting-along part is perhaps more valued. The two previous women in the job, like Truss, were Tories: Margaret Thatcher for 11 years, beginning in 1979, and Theresa May, who led the government from 2016 to 2019.Thatcher was known as “the Iron Lady” and remembered, among other things, for the conflict in the Falkland Islands, a lesson to all other heads of state that the best possible way to win a war is in less than 10 weeks.We do not dwell on May’s regime much, but it did include a campaign against illegal immigrants with ads warning them to “go home or face arrest” and an image of handcuffs.She also once wore a T-shirt that read, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Hmmm.Of course, nobody wants to see just any woman running the United States. But there are plenty of female politicians with just as much leadership potential as any man. And the fight for equality has to go on until they have an equal shot at the presidency.Breathe deep and let’s see what’s happened in our history so far. And ignore the fact that there are chapters in even the most stirring story that aren’t inspiring. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas was one of the first American women to be elected governor — in 1924 after her husband was impeached. She went on to make her mark by pardoning an average of 100 criminals a month during her first term, in what appeared to be a freedom-for-a-fee system.OK, back to the plus side: How about Margaret Chase Smith, who valiantly stood up to the crazed red-baiting of Joe McCarthy in the Senate when all her colleagues were quivering under their desks? In 1964 Smith held the very reasonable opinion that she’d make a better president than the likely Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. She also thought it was time to “break the barrier against women being seriously considered for the presidency.”Yeah, that was 58 years ago. Still waiting.Smith’s battle wasn’t a real test of how well a woman candidate could do, unless you presume said candidate could overcome minimal campaign funds, along with an unfortunate tendency to stress her recipe for blueberry muffins. But she’s definitely someone you’d like to think of as leading the way.And Hillary Clinton, who got the most votes in 2016, but was thwarted by our, um, unique Electoral College system, which presumes that every 193,000 people in Wyoming deserve the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.Gillibrand, who once made a brief try for the presidential nomination herself, is confident she’s going to see a woman in the White House during her lifetime. “There’d better be — I’m hoping in the next 10 years.”Me, too.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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    Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires

    The special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to examine the Russia investigation seems to be wrapping up its work with no further charges in store.WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald J. Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him.Now Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Mr. Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Durham and his team are working to complete a final report by the end of the year, they said, and one of the lead prosecutors on his team is leaving for a job with a prominent law firm.Over the course of his inquiry, Mr. Durham has developed cases against two people accused of lying to the F.B.I. in relation to outside efforts to investigate purported Trump-Russia ties, but he has not charged any conspiracy or put any high-level officials on trial. The recent developments suggest that the chances of any more indictments are remote.After Mr. Durham’s team completes its report, it will be up to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to decide whether to make its findings public. The report will be Mr. Durham’s opportunity to present any evidence or conclusions that challenge the Justice Department’s basis for opening the investigation in 2016 into the links between Mr. Trump and Russia.The Justice Department declined to comment. Mr. Durham and his team used a grand jury in Washington to indict Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Sussmann was indicted last year on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I. at a meeting in which he shared a tip about potential connections between computers associated with Mr. Trump and a Kremlin-linked Russian bank.Mr. Sussmann was acquitted of that charge at trial in May.A grand jury based in the Eastern District of Virginia last year indicted a Russia analyst who had worked with Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Mr. Trump. The dossier played no role in the F.B.I.’s decision to begin examining the ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. It was used in an application to obtain a warrant to surveil a Trump campaign associate.The analyst, Igor Danchenko, who is accused of lying to federal investigators, goes on trial next month in Alexandria, Va.In the third case, Mr. Durham’s team negotiated a plea deal with an F.B.I. lawyer whom an inspector general had accused of doctoring an email used in preparation for a wiretap renewal application. The plea deal resulted in no prison time.Mr. Trump and his allies have long hoped that Mr. Durham would prosecute former F.B.I. and intelligence officials responsible for the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane. Mr. Trump has described the investigation as a witch hunt and accused the F.B.I. of spying on his presidential campaign.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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    How We Think About Politics Changes What We Think About Politics

    When so many voters — a majority, in fact — say that they prefer consensus to conflict, why does polarization continue to intensify?In a paper that came out in June, “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980 — 2020,” Elizabeth Suhay and Mark Tenenbaum, political scientists at American University, and Austin Bartola, of Quadrant Strategies, provide insight into why so much discord permeates American politics:Scholars who research polarization have almost exclusively focused on the relationship between Americans’ policy opinions and their partisanship. In this article, we discuss a different type of partisan polarization underappreciated by scholars: “belief polarization,” or disagreements over what people perceive to be true.The concept of belief polarization has been defined in a number of ways.In their May 2021 paper, “Belief polarization in a complex world,” Alan Jern, Kai-min Kevin Chang and Charles Kemp — of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Melbourne — write: “Belief polarization occurs when two people with opposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same data.”There is, they continue, “ample evidence that people sustain different beliefs even when faced with the same information, and they interpret that information differently.” They also note that “stark differences in beliefs can arise and endure due to human limitations in interpreting complex information.”Kristoffer Nimark, an economist at Cornell, and Savitar Sundaresan, of Imperial College London, describe belief polarization this way: “The beliefs of ex ante identical agents over time can cluster in two distinct groups at opposite ends of the belief space.”Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, professors of philosophy at Vanderbilt, argue in their 2019 paper, “How Does Belief Polarization Work”:Part of what makes belief polarization so disconcerting is its ubiquity. It has been extensively studied for more than 50 years and found to be operative within groups of all kinds, formal and informal. Furthermore, belief polarization does not discriminate between different kinds of belief. Like-minded groups polarize regardless of whether they are discussing banal matters of fact, matters of personal taste, or questions about value. What’s more, the phenomenon operates regardless of the explicit point of the group’s discussion. Like-minded groups polarize when they are trying to decide an action that the group will take; and they polarize also when there is no specific decision to be reached. Finally, the phenomenon is prevalent regardless of group members’ nationality, race, gender, religion, economic status, and level of education.Talisse, writing separately, observes:The social environment itself can trigger extremity shifts. These prompts need not be verbal, explicit, or literal; they can be merely implicit signals to group members that some belief is prevalent among them — hats, pins, campaign signs, logos, and gestures are all potential initiators of belief polarization. Further, as corroboration is really a matter of numbers, those with the power to present the appearance of widespread acceptance among a particular social group of some idea thereby have the power to induce extremity shifts among those who identify with that group.Perhaps the most salient recent illustration of belief polarization is the diametrically opposed views of Trump loyalists and of their Democratic adversaries over the legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump supporters are convinced it was stolen; Democrats and independents are certain that Joe Biden is the legitimate president.Similarly, politicians on the right — and Fox News — are treating the F.B.I. raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago on Monday as a corrupt politicization of federal investigative authority, while liberals — and CNN — counter that the raid demonstrates that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.Suhay and her colleagues expand the scope of belief polarization to look at the differences between Republicans and Democrats over the causes of inequality:We illustrate large, and increasing, partisan divides in beliefs regarding whether an unequal society, or unequal behavior, is the cause of socioeconomic inequality. Republican politicians and citizens are optimistic about the American dream and pessimistic about poor people’s behavior; Democratic politicians and citizens are pessimistic about the dream and optimistic about poor people’s ability to succeed if given the chance.These patterns, Suhay and her collaborators continue,hold for beliefs about economic inequality along both class and race lines. Variation in societal versus individual blame is consistently associated with views on social welfare, taxation, and affirmative action. We conclude that Americans’ beliefs about the fairness of the economy represent a crucial component of a redistributive versus anti-redistributive ideology that is increasingly associated with the two political parties.Suhay writes:The Democratic Party has long justified its left-leaning economic policies with two central claims: significant economic inequality exists between individuals and social groups, and these great inequalities are unfair because society, not individuals, are to blame for them. The latter proposition is especially important. It is difficult to deny that many harsh inequalities exist in the United States. Exorbitant wealth as well as homelessness are plain to see. However, such inequalities might be tolerated if they are viewed as the outcome of a meritocratic system. Democrats argue instead that “the American dream” — success via hard work — is not a reality for many. Thus, low-income people deserve government assistance.Conversely, Suhay continues, Republicans emphasizeaggregate economic growth and downplay the extent of inequality. Second, Republicans argue that existing inequalities are fair — successful people have achieved success via hard work or ingenuity, and those facing difficult economic circumstances are to blame for them. Third, in response to Democrats’ instinct to use government to combat inequality, Republicans argue government efforts to intervene in business affairs, redistribute wealth, and assist those in need often do more harm than good, depressing the economic output of both firms and individuals. These narratives justify Republicans’ conservative economic agenda by insisting that the status quo is fine: inequality is minimal; inequalities that do exist are “just deserts”; and, even if one wished to help, government intervention in fact undermines individual and aggregate prosperity.Suhay, Tenenbaum and Bartola cite data from American National Election Studies and the Pew Research Center to track the increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats on various questions, which require respondents to agree or disagree with statements like these: “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance”; “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard”; and “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”In 1997, 68 percent of Republican and 43 percent of Democratic survey respondents chose “have it easy,” a 25-point difference. By 2017, 73 percent of Republicans said the poor “have it easy,” while 19 percent of Democrats shared that view, a 54-point difference.In an email, Suhay noted thatmany social scientists today are focused on misinformed and extreme beliefs in the Republican Party, including Republicans’ greater likelihood of rejecting climate science and Covid-19 vaccination and their embrace of Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election.But, Suhay wrote, many of those same scholars “are missing growing extremity on the political left. It may be more benign or even beneficial in some cases, but it is still a phenomenon worth study.” In addition to “a surge of claims on the left that the economy is extremely unequal and that this is because our country does not provide equal opportunity to all of its inhabitants,” there has been a parallel surge among liberals on the issue of “racial justice — in both the economic and criminal justice arena.”A third development on the left, Suhay added, and onewhere we have seen the most rapid change, is around gender identity. Democrats increasingly say society ought to protect the rights of transgender people and the expression of transgender identity because gender fluidity is a natural part of the human condition and trying to curb its expression causes people harm. The popularity of each of these views has surged on the left recently.There is further evidence that even people who are knowledgeable about complex issues are sharply polarized along partisan lines.Nathan Lee at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter and D.J. Flynn at IE University in Madrid argue in their paper “More Accurate, but No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public” that while “political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public,” the “increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policymaking.”Lee, Nyhan, Reifler and Flynn assessed the views of elites through a survey in 2017 of 743 “elected policymakers, legislative staffers, and top administrative positions in local and state government in the United States.” Three-quarters of the sample held elective office. The survey tested belief accuracy by partisanship and elite status on eight issues including health care, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, climate change and voter fraud.Their conclusions run counter to assumptions that elites are less polarized than the general public because “they tend to be more knowledgeable, which is associated with greater belief accuracy” and because they “possess domain expertise in politics and public policy that could reduce the influence of cognitive biases.”In fact, Lee and colleagues counter, “belief polarization can be unchanged or widen when belief accuracy increases.”I asked Nyhan about the consequences of the findings and he wrote back by email:The most important contribution of our study is to challenge the assumption that we will disagree less about the facts if we know more. Elites are better informed than the public on average but Democrats and Republicans still are still deeply divided in their beliefs about those facts. In some ways, the conclusion of our study is optimistic — government officials are better informed than the public. That’s what most of us would hope to be true. But the findings do suggest we should avoid thinking that people becoming more informed will make the factual divides in our society go away. Belief polarization is a reality that is not easily overcome.One theme that emerges repeatedly in looking at belief polarization is the role race plays as a central factor:Peter K. Enns and Ashley Jardina, political scientists at Cornell and Duke, make the case in their October 2021 paper, “Complicating the role of White racial attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” thatMost of the research on the relationship between white racial attitudes and Trump support is part of a tradition that assumes that racial attitudes are fairly stable predispositions that form early in life and then later become important for political reasoning. Implied in this line of research is that politicians or political campaigns do not change levels of prejudice, but they can prime these attitudes, or make them more or less salient and therefore more or less politically relevant.Enns and Jardina write that in contrast to this view, over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign “many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton.”To test their argument, the authors used “a unique panel data set from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign.” From that study, they found:The strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump’s as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites’ immigration opinions.They found, for example, that from January 2016 to August 2016, the percentage of Trump supporters voicing strong opposition to Black Lives Matter grew by roughly 15 percentage points.In an email, Enns contended thatregardless of the precise underlying mechanisms (and multiple mechanisms could be at work), the evidence suggests that Trump’s rhetoric had a meaningful effect on the views his supporters expressed about these issues. We are definitely arguing that the attitudes individuals express can be changed by what candidates they support say and do. Although we cannot observe actual beliefs, to the extent that expressing previously unexpressed beliefs has a reinforcing effect, that would also provide evidence of a deepening or potential changing of racial attitudes.The strong association between Trump support and whites’ views on racial issues, Enns and Jardina argue in their paper,was not merely a result of Trump attracting racist whites by way of his own racist rhetoric or a reflection of partisan racial sorting that had already occurred; it was also a result of white Trump supporters changing their views to be more in line with Trump’s over the course of his presidential campaign. In other words, Trump not only attracted whites with more conservative views on race; he also made his white supporters more likely to espouse increasingly extreme views on issues related to immigration and on issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police killings of African Americans.Andrew M. Engelhardt, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, developed a similar line of analysis in his January 2020 paper, “Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens.”In an email, Engelhardt wrote:Part of the reason White Democrats and White Republicans hold increasingly different views about Black Americans is due to their partisanship. It’s not just that Democrats with negative views became Republicans, or Republicans with more positive views became Democrats. Rather, people are changing their attitudes, and part of this, I argue, is due to how politicians talk about Black Americans. Republicans, for instance, could have internalized Trump’s negative rhetoric, and increasingly held more negative views. Democrats, similarly, hear Trump say these negative things and they move opposite, holding more positive views.In his paper, Engelhardt wrote that undergirding past studies of the role of race in politics and policymakingis an assumption that racial animus feeds political conflict. I turn this conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that political conflict can shape racial attitudes — people’s views and beliefs about groups understood to be racial. Political scientists have failed to examine this possibility, perhaps because racial attitudes are seen as persistent and influential predispositions that form during childhood, long before most Americans become political animals. According to this line of reasoning, individuals use these early formed attitudes to make sense of politics; racial attitudes lead to partisanship.The ever-growing divide between left and right extends well beyond racial issues and attitudes. In his email, Engelhardt wrote that his results are “suggestive of partisanship motivating changes in other orientations which we might presumably see as more stable and core to individuals.” He cited research showing that “partisanship influences religiosity and religious affiliation” and other studies linking “political concerns to changes in racial self-identification.” Engelhardt added that he has “some unpublished results where I find partisanship leads Democrats to hold more positive views of gay men and lesbians, transgender individuals, and feminists, over time, with Republicans holding more negative views of these groups in the same period (data range 2016-2020).”In their January 2022 paper, “The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties,” Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas Valentino, political scientists at the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, make an interesting argument that, in effect, “Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts.”Zhirkov and Valentino continue:Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic candidates in presidential elections started to attract large shares of nonwhite voters whereas Republicans increasingly relied on votes of racially conservative whites. Over the same period, voters’ positions on seemingly nonracial political issues have gradually become more intertwined with racial resentment.Overall, the two scholars write,the growing racial gap between the Democratic and Republican support bases leads to formation of racialized stereotypes about the two parties. Specifically, a non-trivial share of American electorate currently views the Democratic Party as nonwhite and the Republican Party as white, though in reality whites continue to be a majority of both parties.This “imagined racial coalition of each party,” in the view of Zhirkov and Valentino,carries profound implications for the ongoing discussion in the discipline about affective polarization in American politics: whites feel colder toward the Democratic Party when they imagine its coalition to be more heavily made up on nonwhites and feel warmer toward the Republican Party when they perceive it to be dominated by their racial group. As a consequence, rather than a cause, they may then come to accept a more conservative issue package advocated by the modern Republican Party.Racial attitudes, the authors argue persuasively, “are now important predictors of opinions about electoral fairness, gun control, policing, international trade and health care.”There are, Zhirkov and Valentino note, long-range implications for the future of democracy here:As soon as ethnic parties start to compete for political power, winning — rather than implementing a certain policy — becomes the goal in and of itself due to associated boost in group status and self-esteem of its members. Moreover, comparative evidence suggests that U.S. plurality-based electoral system contributes to politicization of ethnic cleavages rather than mitigates them. Therefore, the racialization of American parties is likely to continue, and the intensity of political conflict in the United States is likely to grow.I asked the authors how they would characterize the importance of race in contemporary American politics. In a jointly written email, they replied that in research to be published in the future, “we show that race is at least as strong, and often stronger, than cleavages such as religion, ideology, and class.”The pessimistic outlook for the prospect of a return to less divisive politics revealed in many of the papers cited here, and the key role of racial conflict in driving polarization, suggest that the ability of the United States to come to terms with its increasingly multiracial, multiethnic population remains in question. This country has been a full-fledged democracy for less than 60 years — since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the changes wrought by three additional revolutions: in civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. These developments — or upheavals — and especially the reaction to them have tested the viability of our democracy and suggest, at the very least, an uphill climb ahead.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