Presidential Election of 2016

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      Bret Stephens: I Was Wrong About Trump Voters

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      Sean DongThe worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”No wonder they were angry.Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both. But that didn’t mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target.Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax — there’s just no other word for it — that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6?Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.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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      No One Is Above the Law, and That Starts With Donald Trump

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      In a 2019 ruling requiring the former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify at a congressional hearing about former President Donald Trump’s alleged abuses of power, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declared that “presidents are not kings.” If we take that admonition from our next Supreme Court justice seriously and look at the evidence amassed so far by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, we can — and in fact must — conclude that the prosecution of Mr. Trump is not only permissible but required for the sake of American democracy.This week’s hearings showed us that Mr. Trump acted as if he thought he was a king, not a president subject to the same rules as the rest of us. The hearings featured extraordinary testimony about the relentless pressure to subvert the 2020 election that the former president and his allies brought against at least 31 state and local officials in states he lost, like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. He or his allies twisted the arm of everyone from top personnel at the U.S. Department of Justice to lower-level election workers.The evidence and the testimony offered demonstrates why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department should convene a grand jury now, if it hasn’t already, to consider indicting Mr. Trump for crimes related to his attempt to overturn the results of the election, before he declares his candidacy for president in 2024, perhaps as early as this summer.Although a Trump prosecution is far from certain to succeed, too much focus has been put on the risks of prosecuting him and too little on the risks of not doing so. The consequences of a failure to act for the future of democratic elections are enormous.There’s no denying that prosecuting Mr. Trump is fraught with legal difficulties. To the extent that charges like obstructing an official proceeding or conspiring to defraud the United States turn on Mr. Trump’s state of mind — an issue on which there is significant debate — it may be tough to get to the bottom of what he actually believed, given his history of lying and doubling down when confronted with contrary facts. And Mr. Trump could try to shift blame by claiming that he was relying on his lawyers — including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — who amplified the phony claims of fraud and who concocted faulty legal arguments to overturn the results of the election. Mr. Trump could avoid conviction if there’s even one juror who believes his repeated lies about the 2020 election.And yes, there are political difficulties too. The “Lock her up!” chants against Hillary Clinton at 2016 Trump rallies for her use of a personal email server while she was secretary of state were so pernicious because threatening to jail political enemies can lead to a deterioration of democratic values. If each presidential administration is investigating and prosecuting the last, respect for both the electoral process and the legal process may be undermined.That concern is real, but if there has ever been a case extreme enough to warrant indicting a president, then this is the case, and Mr. Trump is the person. This is not just because of what he will do if he is elected again after not being indicted (and after not being convicted following a pair of impeachments, one for the very conduct under discussion), but also because of the message it sends for the future.Leaving Mr. Trump unprosecuted would be saying it was fine to call federal, state and local officials, including many who have sworn constitutional oaths, and ask or even demand of them that they do his personal and political bidding.The testimony from the hearings reveals a coordinated and extensive plot to overturn the will of the people and install Mr. Trump as president despite Joe Biden winning the election by 74 Electoral College votes (not to mention a margin of about seven million in the popular vote). There was political pressure, and sometimes threats of violence, across the board. Mr. Trump and his cronies hounded poll workers and election officials to admit to nonexistent fraud or to recount votes and change vote totals.Wandrea Moss, known as Shaye, a former Georgia election worker, testified Tuesday about the harassment and violent threats she faced after Trump allies accused her and her mother of election fraud. As The Associated Press reported, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Giuliani, pointed to surveillance video of the two women working on ballot counting and “said the footage showed the women ‘surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.’” The “USB ports” turned out to be ginger mints.It is no wonder that election workers and election officials are leaving their offices in fear of violence and harassment.Former top Department of Justice officials in the Trump administration testified on Thursday about pressure from Mr. Trump, in collusion with a lower-level department official named Jeffrey Clark, to issue a letter falsely claiming evidence of significant fraud in the elections. We heard in Thursday’s hearing that Mr. Trump, in a meeting that echoed his earlier role as boss on the television show “The Apprentice,” almost fired the attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to replace him with Mr. Clark, who had no experience in either criminal law or election law.The confirmation by the Department of Justice under Mr. Clark of this “fraud” would have served as a predicate for state legislators, also pressured by Mr. Trump and his allies, to “decertify” Biden electors and conjure up a new slate of electors supporting Mr. Trump.The pressure did not stop there. An earlier committee hearing recounted severe pressure from Mr. Trump on Vice President Mike Pence to manipulate the rules for Congress to count electoral votes, a plan that depended on members of Congress supporting spurious objections to the Electoral College votes in states that Mr. Biden won.Mr. Trump also whipped up the Jan. 6 crowd for “wild” protests and encouraged it to join him in pressuring Mr. Pence to violate his constitutional oath and manipulate the Electoral College count.In his testimony on Tuesday before the Jan. 6 committee, the speaker of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, described the intense barrage coming at him from calls from Mr. Trump and his allies, and from Trump supporters who protested outside his house and threatened his neighbor with violence. But Mr. Bowers compared the Trump crew to the book “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” because they failed to come forward with a plausible plan to overturn the election results in Arizona or elsewhere.Seeing the group as bumbling, though, minimizes the danger of what Mr. Trump and his allies attempted and downplays how deadly serious this was: As Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, noted, the country “barely” survived Mr. Trump’s attempt at election subversion, which could have worked despite the legal and factual weaknesses in the fraud claims.What if people of less fortitude than Mr. Bowers and others caved? Consider Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, who also testified on Tuesday about pressure from the Trump team. He described a direct phone call from a man who was then the sitting president prodding him to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Georgia from Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump. What if, instead of rebuffing Mr. Trump, Mr. Raffensperger declared that he felt there were enough questions about the vote count in Democratic counties in Georgia to warrant the legislature’s appointment of new electors, as Mr. Trump had urged?If even one of these officials had cooperated, the dikes could have broken, and claims in state after state could have proliferated.There’s no question that Mr. Trump tried to steal the election. Richard Donoghue, a top official at the Department of Justice serving during the postelection period, testified on Thursday that he knocked down with extensive evidence every cockamamie theory of voter fraud that Mr. Trump and his allies raised, but to no avail. He testified that there were nothing but “isolated” instances of fraud, the same conclusion reached by the former attorney general, Bill Barr.Mr. Bowers testified that when he demanded evidence from Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Giuliani said he had theories, but no evidence. The president appears to have known it too. According to Mr. Donoghue’s handwritten notes of his conversation with Mr. Trump, when confronted with the lack of evidence of fraud, the former president said, “Just say the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me” and the Republican congressmen. The president even talked about having the federal government seize voting machines, perhaps in an attempt to rerun the election.The longer Mr. Garland waits to bring charges against Mr. Trump, the harder it will be, especially if Mr. Trump has already declared for president and can say that the prosecution is politically motivated to help Democrats win in 2024. The fact that federal investigators conducted a search for evidence at the home of Mr. Clark shows that the department is working its way ever closer to the former president.What Mr. Trump did in its totality and in many individual instances was criminal. If Mr. Garland fails to act, it will only embolden Mr. Trump or someone like him to try again if he loses, this time aided by a brainwashed and cowered army of elected and election officials who stand ready to steal the election next time.Mr. Trump was the 45th president, not the first American king, but if we don’t deter conduct like this, the next head of state may come closer to claiming the kind of absolute power that is antithetical to everything the United States stands for.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen), who will join the University of California, Los Angeles, as a professor of law in July, is the author of “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It.” In 2020, he proposed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.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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      Ginni Thomas Has a Lot of Explaining to Do

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      Again and again, during the years that Donald Trump was in the White House, liberals would ask themselves a single question: “Can you imagine if Barack Obama had done this?”“This,” of course, was any one of the antics or misdeeds that marked Trump’s time in office: the lies, the insults, the cruelty and the criminality. Imagine if Obama had gone out of his way to excuse the equivalent of a white supremacist mob; imagine if Obama had gone to the site of a natural disaster and tossed out paper towels like so many footballs; imagine if he had railed against “shithole countries” or tried to pressure a foreign leader into turning over information to undermine his political opponents.Imagine what would have happened if Barack Obama had plotted to subvert and overturn a presidential election that he had lost.Republicans would have lost their minds. Having whipped themselves into a lather over fake scandals and manufactured controversies during the actual Obama administration, they would have exploded into paroxysms of partisan rage over any one of these misdeeds. The Benghazi hearings would have looked like a sober-minded investigation compared with what Republicans would have unleashed if the shoe had been on the other foot.The point of this mental exercise, for liberals, was to highlight the hypocrisy of the Republican Party under Trump. Tucked into this attempt to condemn Republican behavior, however, is an important observation about the value of political theater. All this conservative hysteria did not defeat Barack Obama at the ballot box, but it may have helped to put his party at a disadvantage.The main effect of these years of Republican scandal mongering was to produce a cloud of suspicion and mistrust that helped to undermine Obama’s preferred successor as president, as well as to shield Trump, as the 2016 Republican nominee, from the kind of scrutiny that might have made him more vulnerable.Democrats do not need to mimic Republican behavior in all of its deranged glory, but they would do well to heed the lesson that for many voters, where there is smoke, there must be fire.It is with this knowledge in mind that Democrats in Washington should do something about Ginni Thomas, who has just been asked to testify before the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. The reason is straightforward. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, worked with allies of Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Thomas quickly let it be known that she was looking “forward to talking to” the committee and couldn’t wait “to clear up misconceptions.”)Earlier this year, we learned that Thomas exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in the weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. We also learned, last month, that she urged Arizona Republicans to discard the results of the election and choose a “clean slate of Electors” for Trump.And we’ve learned this week from the Jan. 6 committee that Thomas also sent messages directly to John Eastman, the conservative lawyer (and former law clerk for Justice Thomas) who essentially devised the plan to try to overturn the 2020 presidential results.Eastman spoke at the “stop the steal” rally before the attack and even requested a pardon by way of Rudy Giuliani for his activities leading up to the insurrection: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”“Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known,” The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Eastman, for his part, claimed to have known of a “heated” dispute among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the 2020 election. “So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” he is said to have written in an email to another lawyer. (On Thursday, Eastman posted a rebuttal on Substack asserting that he’d heard about the “heated fight” from news reports and that he could “categorically confirm that at no time did I discuss with Mrs. Thomas or Justice Thomas any matters pending or likely to come before the Court.”)But if the first revelation, of Thomas’s correspondence with Meadows, was shocking, then these revelations of Thomas’s contact with Eastman are explosive. And it raises key questions, not just about what Ginni Thomas knew, but about what Clarence Thomas knew as well. How, exactly, did Eastman know of tensions on the court? And why did he predict to Greg Jacobs, chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, that the Supreme Court would rule 7-2 in support of his legal theory about the Electoral College certification process before conceding that in fact that might not be the case?So while the committee is rightly seeking testimony from Ginni Thomas, Democrats should say something too. They shouldn’t just say something, they should scream something.Not only did Ginni Thomas try to make herself a part of the effort to overthrow the government, but Justice Thomas was the only member of the court to vote in favor of Donald Trump’s attempt to shield his communications from congressional investigators, communications that would have included the messages between Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas.There is something suspect happening with the Supreme Court, and other constitutional officers have every right to criticize it. Democratic leaders in Congress should begin an investigation into Ginni Thomas’s activities and announce that they intend to speak to her husband as well. President Biden should tell the press that he supports that investigation and hopes to see answers. Rank-and-file Democrats should make a stink about potential corruption on the court whenever they have the opportunity. Impeachment should be on the table.This probably won’t win votes. It could, however, capture the attention of the media and even put Republicans on the defensive. It is true that politics are unpredictable and that there’s no way to say exactly how a given choice will play out in the real world. But if the much maligned (and politically successful) investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails are any indication, real pressure might turn additional revelations into genuine liabilities for the Republican Party.The easiest thing for Democrats to do, of course, is nothing — to steer away from open conflict and leave the controversy (and the questions) to the select committee. But if Democrats choose instead to act like a political party should, they would do well to remember that if the tables were turned, their opponents would not hesitate to use every argument, and every tool, at their disposal.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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      Sussmann Acquittal Raises Question: What Is Durham Actually Trying to Do?

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      Supporters of the Trump-era prosecutor are lauding his work as a success in unearthing politically charged information, even though his first case to go to trial ended in failure.WASHINGTON — Even before 12 jurors voted to acquit Michael Sussmann of lying to the F.B.I. in a rebuke of the Trump-era special counsel, John H. Durham, supporters of Donald J. Trump were already laying the groundwork to declare that the prosecutor won despite losing in court.What really mattered, they essentially claimed, was that Mr. Durham had succeeded in exposing how Hillary Clinton framed Mr. Trump for the “Russia collusion hoax,” an argument that ricocheted across the right-wing news media.Indeed, Mr. Durham did show that associates of the 2016 Clinton campaign — a victim of Russian hacking — wanted reporters to write about the allegations that played a role in the case, an obscure theory about the possibility of a covert communications channel between Mr. Trump and Russia. But most news outlets were skeptical, and the F.B.I. swiftly discounted the matter.Still, that Mr. Durham’s cheerleaders have embraced this explanation for Mr. Durham’s actions is striking. Stephen Gillers, a New York University professor of legal ethics, said the case was “incredibly weak” and he doubted a prosecutor pursuing normal law enforcement goals would have brought it.“The case wasn’t a nothing-burger, but it was very thin, and it’s hard to understand why it was brought other than to support Trump’s allegation that the Clinton campaign falsely alleged a Trump-Russia connection,” he said. “That motive is unacceptable. The government’s only legitimate goal in bringing this case was conviction.”A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment. But in a pretrial filing in the Sussmann case in April, the Durham team denied any suggestion it was “a political actor when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.”When Attorney General William P. Barr assigned Mr. Durham in May 2019 to investigate the Russia investigation, he did not have a reputation for pursuing iffy cases or for using law enforcement power to publicize politically fraught information.A longtime career prosecutor before becoming a United States attorney under Mr. Trump, Mr. Durham was best known for investigating the C.I.A.’s post-Sept. 11 torture of detainees. He had brought no charges, then fought a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to avoid disclosing his findings and witness interview records.Mr. Barr’s assignment was likely to be the last major act in Mr. Durham’s career. It portended difficulties.For starters, he appeared largely redundant: Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, was already scrutinizing the origins of the investigation into possible ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.Mr. Durham seemed to begin by searching for signs of political bias among F.B.I. officials Mr. Horowitz had already scrutinized and by hunting for wrongdoing among intelligence agencies outside Mr. Horowitz’s jurisdiction. No charges resulted.In December 2019, Mr. Horowitz issued his report uncovering serious flaws with certain wiretap applications but debunking Trump supporters’ baseless theory that the overall investigation was a “deep state” conspiracy. The F.B.I. officials had sufficient legal basis to open it, he found.In a break with his earlier silence toward his investigative work, Mr. Durham issued a statement disagreeing that there was an adequate basis for the investigation and suggesting that he had access to more information. He has yet to disclose what that is.Mr. Horowitz also uncovered that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email used in preparation for wiretap applications, referring the matter for prosecution. While Mr. Durham’s team had not developed the case, it negotiated a plea agreement that resulted in no prison time. That is its only conviction to date.Mr. Trump and his supporters expressed frustration that Mr. Durham failed to charge any deep state conspiracy before the 2020 election.But Mr. Durham’s reputation with Trump supporters began to reverse course last fall, when he charged Mr. Sussmann in connection with telling the F.B.I. about the suspected covert communications channel, involving a server for Russia’s Alfa Bank.Soon after, he indicted a researcher for the Steele dossier — a discredited compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia links compiled for an opposition research firm funded by Democrats — for lying to the F.B.I. about some sources.John H. Durham’s court filings have become fodder for the conservative news media.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesIn both cases, Mr. Durham festooned the narrow charges with copious information, heavy with insinuations that there had been a conspiracy to trick people into thinking Mr. Trump colluded with Russia — not by “deep state” officials, but by associates of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.This narrative was not the original hope of Trump supporters, but has nevertheless provided them with new material to continue relitigating the events of 2016 and the Russia investigation.Mr. Durham’s court filings have become fodder for the conservative news media to express outrage about purported wrongdoing to Mr. Trump, typically conflating the Alfa Bank and Steele dossier matters with the official investigation.When Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, testified at the trial that she approved efforts to get reporters to write about Alfa Bank, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial headlined “Hillary Clinton Did It,” subtitled “Her 2016 campaign manager says she approved a plan to plant a false Russia claim with a reporter.”The piece offered no basis for implying that Mrs. Clinton believed the allegations were false. It also inaccurately stated the campaign had “created” the allegations, and made no mention of the most important news if the charge was what mattered: The campaign neither authorized nor wanted Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I., he testified, undermining Mr. Durham’s narrative that Mr. Sussmann represented the campaign at a key meeting.Some of the most explosive Durham filings themselves have proved to be misleading or tangential to the case.The indictment of Mr. Sussmann selectively quoted from emails among the researchers who developed the Alfa Bank suspicions, fostering an impression that they did not believe their own analysis. But the full emails included passages in which the researchers expressed enthusiastic belief in their final handiwork.Moreover, the material seemed extraneous to a mere false-statement indictment because Mr. Sussmann was not part of those conversations. Indeed, the judge ruled nearly all that evidence inadmissible at the trial.In a pretrial filing in February, prosecutors added a few ambiguous sentences about separate concerns the researchers developed regarding data suggesting that Russian smartphones had been connecting to sensitive networks, including Trump Tower and the White House.Singling those out, the conservative news media erupted in a furor, inaccurately informing readers that Mr. Durham had evidence that the Clinton campaign paid to spy on the network of the Trump White House.Mr. Durham’s filing had not actually said that. The campaign did not pay the cybersecurity researchers, and the White House network data they had sifted for signs of possible Russian infiltration came from Barack Obama’s presidency. Mr. Durham disavowed responsibility for “misinterpreted facts.”Whatever his motives, Mr. Durham’s investigation has demonstrably functioned as a kind of fun-house mirror image of aspects of the work of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation.Some liberal commentators once seemed to routinely suggest that developments in Mr. Mueller’s investigation meant the walls were closing in on Mr. Trump. But while Mr. Mueller’s March 2019 report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” he charged no Trump associate with conspiring with Russia.Similarly, pro-Trump commentators have repeatedly stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would soon charge some of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies with a conspiracy to do him wrong. But after more than three years, he has offered only insinuations.There are limits to any equivalence. The F.B.I., as Mr. Horowitz indicated, had a sound factual basis to open the Russia investigation; Mr. Barr’s mandate to Mr. Durham appears to have been to investigate a series of conspiracy theories.Mr. Mueller’s team also charged or obtained guilty pleas from about three dozen people and companies and wrote a lengthy report in less time than Mr. Durham has taken to develop only two indicted cases, the first of which just ended in failure. After the verdict on Tuesday, the jury forewoman told reporters the case should not have been prosecuted.But on the night of the acquittal, Sean Hannity of Fox News said Mr. Sussmann was “just a small player in this whole case,” and dismissed the verdict as nothing more than political bias among a jury pool drawn from a heavily Democratic district.The trial, he assured his millions of viewers, was just a “preview of coming attractions.” More

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      Michael Sussmann Is Acquitted in Case Brought by Trump-Era Prosecutor

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      The Democratic-linked lawyer was accused of lying to the F.B.I. about his clients when he passed on a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.WASHINGTON — Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on Tuesday of lying to the F.B.I. in 2016 when he shared a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The verdict was a significant blow to the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.But Mr. Durham has yet to fulfill expectations from Mr. Trump and his supporters that he would uncover and prosecute a “deep state” conspiracy against the former president. Instead, he has developed only two cases that led to charges: the one against Mr. Sussmann and another against a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier, whose trial is set for later this year.Both consist of simple charges of making false statements, rather than a more sweeping charge like conspiracy to defraud the government. And both involve thin or dubious allegations about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia that were put forward not by government officials, but by outside investigators.The case against Mr. Sussmann centered on odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers discovered in 2016 after it became public that Russia had hacked Democrats and Mr. Trump had encouraged the country to target Mrs. Clinton’s emails.The researchers said the data might reflect a covert communications channel using servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin. The F.B.I. briefly looked at the suspicions and dismissed them.On Sept. 19, 2016, Mr. Sussmann brought those suspicions to a senior F.B.I. official. In charging Mr. Sussmann with a felony, prosecutors contended that he falsely told the official that he was not there on behalf of any client, concealing that he was working for both Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and a technology executive who had given him the tip.Mr. Durham and prosecutors used court filings and trial testimony to describe how Mr. Sussmann, while working for a Democratic-linked law firm and logging his time to the Clinton campaign, had been trying to get reporters to write about the Alfa Bank suspicions.But trying to persuade reporters to write about such suspicions is not a crime. Mr. Sussmann’s guilt or innocence turned on a narrow issue: whether he made a false statement to the senior F.B.I. official at the 2016 meeting by saying he was sharing those suspicions on his own.Mr. Durham used the Sussmann case to put forward a larger conspiracy: that there was a joint enterprise to essentially frame Mr. Trump for collusion with Russia by getting the F.B.I. to investigate the suspicions so reporters would write about it. The scheme, Mr. Durham implied, involved the Clinton campaign; its opposition research firm, Fusion GPS; Mr. Sussmann; and the cybersecurity expert who had brought the odd data and analysis to him.That insinuation thrilled Mr. Trump’s supporters, who have embraced his claim that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and have sought to conflate the official inquiry with sometimes dubious accusations. In reality, the Alfa Bank matter was a sideshow: The F.B.I. had already opened its inquiry on other grounds before Mr. Sussmann passed on the tip; the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made no mention of the Alfa Bank suspicions.But the case Mr. Durham and his team used to float their broad insinuations was thin: one count of making a false statement in a meeting with no other witnesses. In a rebuke to Mr. Durham; the lead lawyer on the trial team, Andrew DeFilippis; and his colleagues, the 12 jurors voted unanimously to find Mr. Sussmann not guilty.Some supporters of Mr. Trump had been bracing for that outcome. They pointed to the District of Columbia’s reputation as a heavily Democratic area and suggested that a jury might be politically biased against a Trump-era prosecutor trying to convict a defendant who was working for the Clinton campaign.The judge had told the jurors that they were not to account for their political views when deciding the facts. The jury forewoman, who did not give her name, told reporters afterward that “politics were not a factor” and that she thought bringing the case had been unwise.Mr. Durham expressed disappointment in the verdict but said he respected the decision by the jury, which deliberated for about six hours.“I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case,” he said in a statement.Outside the courthouse, Mr. Sussmann read a brief statement to reporters, praising the jury, his defense team and those who supported him during what had been a difficult year.“I told the truth to the F.B.I., and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today,” he said, adding, “Despite being falsely accused, I am relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in this case.”During the trial, the defense had argued that Mr. Sussmann brought the matter to the F.B.I. only when he thought The New York Times was on the verge of writing an article about the matter, so that the bureau would not be caught flat-footed.Officials for the Clinton campaign testified that they had not told or authorized Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I. Doing so was against their interests because they did not trust the bureau, and it could slow down the publication of any article, they said.James Baker, as the F.B.I.’s general counsel in 2016, met with Mr. Sussmann that September. Mr. Baker testified that he had asked Eric Lichtblau, then a reporter at The Times working on the Alfa Bank matter, to slow down so the bureau could have time to investigate it.Mr. Sussmann’s defense team offered the jurors many potential paths to acquittal, contending that the prosecution had yet to prove multiple necessary elements beyond a reasonable doubt.His lawyers attacked as doubtful whether Mr. Sussmann actually uttered the words that he had no client at his meeting with the F.B.I. in September.That issue was complicated after a text message came to light in which Mr. Sussmann, arranging for the meeting a day earlier, indicated that he was reaching out on his own. But it was what, if anything, he said at the meeting itself that was at issue.Mr. Baker testified that he was “100 percent” certain that Mr. Sussmann repeated those words to his face. But defense lawyers pointed out that he had recalled the meeting differently on many other occasions.The defense team also argued that Mr. Sussmann was in fact not there on behalf of any client, even though he had clients with an interest in the topic. And they questioned whether it mattered, since the F.B.I. knew he represented the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign on other issues, and agents would have investigated the allegations regardless.Midmorning, the jury asked to see a trial exhibit meant to bolster the defense’s argument that Mr. Sussmann did not consider himself to be representing the Clinton campaign. It was a record of taxi rides Mr. Sussmann expensed for the Sept. 19 meeting at F.B.I. headquarters.He logged those rides to the firm rather than to the Clinton campaign or to the technology executive, Rodney Joffe, who had worked with the data scientists who developed the suspicions and brought them to Mr. Sussmann. Prosecutors asserted that Mr. Joffe was his other hidden client in the meeting.During the trial, prosecutors had made much of how Mr. Sussmann logged extensive hours on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign in law firm billing records — including phone calls and meetings with reporters and with his partner at the time, Marc Elias, the general counsel of the Clinton campaign.Defense lawyers acknowledged that the Clinton campaign had been Mr. Sussmann’s client for the purpose of trying to persuade reporters to write about the matter, but argued that he was not working for anyone when he brought the same materials to the F.B.I.In a statement, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, two of Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, criticized Mr. Durham for bringing the indictment.“Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place,” they said. “This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: Politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice.” More

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      Prosecutors and Defense Duel in Closing Arguments of Sussmann Trial

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      A verdict is expected as early as Tuesday in the case brought by a Trump-era special counsel against a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.WASHINGTON — Prosecutors and a defense lawyer put forward starkly opposing views on Friday in closing arguments for the politically charged trial of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.The case against Mr. Sussmann involves a narrow charge — an accusation of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting — but is freighted with partisan overtones. It is also a test of the special counsel who brought it, John H. Durham, because it is his first case to go to trial since he was appointed three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Two prosecutors told a jury that there was no doubt that Mr. Sussmann had lied to the F.B.I. to conceal his clients — including the Clinton campaign — at the September 2016 meeting, which focused on suspicious data that cybersecurity experts said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between Russia and someone close to Donald J. Trump.“It wasn’t about national security,” said one of the prosecutors, Jonathan Algor. “It was about promoting opposition research against the opposition candidate — Donald Trump.”But a defense lawyer, Sean M. Berkowitz, portrayed the case as riddled with uncertainties — including about what Mr. Sussmann actually said, whether it was false and whether it mattered if he was there on behalf of clients since the F.B.I. would have investigated the tip regardless. Each was a path to find reasonable doubt and vote to acquit, he said.“Mr. Sussmann’s liberty is at stake,” he said. “The time for political conspiracy theories is over. The time to talk about the evidence is now.”A verdict is expected as early as Tuesday.The case centers on odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers discovered in 2016 after it became public that Russia had hacked Democrats and Mr. Trump encouraged the country to hack Mrs. Clinton’s emails. The researchers said the data might reflect a covert communications channel using servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked bank.The researchers began working with Rodney Joffe, a technology executive who was an expert in the type of internet data they were scrutinizing. Mr. Joffe brought the suspicions to Mr. Sussmann, who at the time represented the Democratic National Committee on matters related to Russia’s hacking of its emails. A partner at Mr. Sussmann’s law firm, Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel.Mr. Sussmann and Mr. Joffe tried to get reporters — including Eric Lichtblau, then of The New York Times — to write about the matter, arguments in the trial showed. Mr. Sussmann continued to inform Mr. Elias about those efforts and discussed the matter with an opposition research firm the Clinton campaign had hired through Mr. Elias called Fusion GPS; the firm drafted a paper about Alfa Bank’s Kremlin ties that Mr. Sussmann later gave the F.B.I.Mr. Sussmann logged those efforts in law firm billing records as time spent working for the Clinton campaign, Mr. Durham discovered.On Sept. 18, 2016, soon after receiving an email claiming that Mr. Trump was upset about a Russia-related article that was soon to be published, Mr. Sussmann texted James A. Baker, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, and asked for a meeting the next day. He indicated that he was coming not on behalf of any client, but to help the F.B.I.The case is John H. Durham’s first to go to trial since he was appointed three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Julia Nikhinson/ReutersMr. Durham’s team has accused Mr. Sussmann of making the same claim when he met the next day with Mr. Baker. In reality, prosecutors argue, Mr. Sussmann was concealing two of his clients — Mr. Joffe and the Clinton campaign.Mr. Algor told the jury on Friday that the effort was a conspiracy to engineer an “October surprise,” meaning a game-changing revelation late in a campaign, by getting the F.B.I. to open an investigation so reporters would write about it.The F.B.I. — which had already opened its investigation scrutinizing possible ties between associates of Mr. Trump and Russia on other grounds — briefly looked at the Alfa Bank suspicions and quickly dismissed them.In late October, Slate published an article about the matter, but it did not mention any F.B.I. investigation. That same day, The Times published an article co-written by Mr. Lichtblau that mentioned the Alfa Bank suspicions but reported that the F.B.I. had so far found no conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.The closing arguments focused on whether Mr. Sussmann repeated what he had said in his text message to Mr. Baker at their meeting the next day — a crucial technicality, because he is charged only for what he purportedly said at the meeting itself.Mr. Algor and another prosecutor, Andrew DeFilippis, told the jury that the evidence left no doubt that Mr. Sussmann repeated to Mr. Baker’s face that he was not there on behalf of any client.But Mr. Berkowitz pointed to Mr. Baker’s varying recollections of that meeting. And he noted that Mr. Durham had been investigating Mr. Baker for an unrelated offense but did not charge him, insinuating that the witness had an incentive to remember what the prosecutor wanted to hear: “It’s no wonder he delivered on the stand.”The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. Two prosecutors told a jury that there was no doubt that Mr. Sussmann had lied to the bureau.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Berkowitz also argued that it was true that Mr. Sussmann was not there on behalf of any client. While Mr. Sussmann had two clients with an interest in Alfa Bank, the defense lawyer said, Mr. Sussmann was not advocating that the F.B.I. take some step on their behalf — or any step at all.Countering that idea, prosecutors emphasized that on Sept. 13, Mr. Sussmann purchased thumb drives at Staples that he later expensed to the Clinton campaign; at the Sept. 19 meeting, he gave thumb drives to the F.B.I. Mr. DeFilippis called that “damning evidence.”Mr. Berkowitz mocked that evidence — a Staples receipt, he noted — saying it was a time when Mr. Sussmann was doing all kinds of work for the campaign. He also emphasized that Mr. Sussmann had not expensed to the campaign his taxi rides for the F.B.I. meeting, nor had he logged an “F.B.I. meeting” in billing records, as was his practice for such meetings.And Mr. Berkowitz cited testimony by Mr. Elias and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, that they did not direct or authorize Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I. and did not see that step as in the interest of the campaign. They testified that they had just wanted The Times to publish an article; Mr. Baker testified that the F.B.I. asked Mr. Lichtblau to hold off on publishing anything so it could investigate first. More

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      Defense Team for Democratic-Linked Lawyer Won’t Call Ex-Times Reporter to Testify

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      Lawyers had argued that the reporter, Eric Lichtblau, should testify about his communications with their client, Michael Sussmann, who is accused of lying to the F.B.I.WASHINGTON — The defense team for Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has dropped its plans to call a former New York Times reporter to testify in a trial that centers on Mr. Sussmann’s motives in meeting with the F.B.I. in 2016.Testimony in the case has underlined the role the news media played during the bare-knuckle fight between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, particularly as suspicions about Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia grew.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers had argued that the former Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, should testify about his communications with Mr. Sussmann over odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers said could be covert communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-affiliated bank.A special counsel, John H. Durham, has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying to the F.B.I. about his reason for meeting with a top bureau official at the time, James Baker, to convey that information, by saying he was not there on behalf of any client. Prosecutors contend he was in fact representing the Clinton campaign and a technology executive who worked with the researchers.Defense lawyers have argued that Mr. Sussmann represented the campaign in efforts to get reporters to write articles about the Alfa Bank suspicions, but not when he approached the F.B.I. about the data and his belief that a news article about it would soon be published.In his testimony last week, Mr. Baker said that the prospect of an imminent article led him to fear that the F.B.I. would not have time to investigate the possibility of a secret channel before the participants read the news and shut it down. But a week later, when he asked Mr. Lichtblau to delay, he said the reporter indicated that an article was not yet ready to publish.The Times published an article that mentioned the Alfa Bank matter about six weeks later, but it said the F.B.I. “ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation.”Prosecutors have insinuated that Mr. Sussmann sought to prompt an F.B.I. investigation so reporters would write articles about it, while defense lawyers have argued that he went to the bureau only when he believed an article was imminent.“The defense’s theory is that the story was going to come out, or was likely to come out, or was close to coming out; and Mr. Sussmann wanted to give a heads-up,” Sean Berkowitz, Mr. Sussmann’s lawyer, told the court on Monday.Mr. Lichtblau’s testimony could have shed light on what he told Mr. Sussmann regarding how soon an article might be published before he sought the F.B.I. meeting.Mr. Lichtblau apparently consented to testify as a defense witness about the narrow topic of his interactions with Mr. Sussmann. But a dispute arose over whether prosecutors could ask him about other sources during cross-examination.Late Tuesday, Mr. Sussman’s defense team withdrew its subpoena for Mr. Lichtblau’s testimony without stating a reason. A lawyer for Mr. Lichtblau declined to comment.The Sussmann trial, which began on May 16, is the first case to be developed by Mr. Durham, a special counsel appointed during the Trump administration by Attorney General William P. Barr to examine the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between Mr. Trump and Russia.But the Alfa Bank matter was tangential to the official investigation. Trial testimony has shown that F.B.I. agents swiftly dismissed the suspicions as implausible.Mr. Durham’s prosecutors have accused Mr. Sussmann of trying to persuade the F.B.I. to investigate Mr. Trump over his ties with Russia, to facilitate negative coverage about Mrs. Clinton’s rival and disseminate unsubstantiated claims before the election.At the trial on Wednesday, prosecutors wrapped up their case by introducing a stack of written documents, including records from Mr. Sussmann’s law firm that showed he billed many hours on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign.Defense lawyers sought to raise doubts. They emphasized that Mr. Sussmann’s billing of several hours on apparent Alfa Bank matters the day of the F.B.I. meeting did not mention the F.B.I. or a meeting, as was his habit for other such meetings. They also pointed out that he when he expensed taxis for the meeting, he charged them to the firm, not any client. More

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      America’s Doug Mastriano Problem

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      If the Ohio Senate primary two weeks ago provided some clarity about the ideological divisions in the Republican Party, Tuesday’s primaries often seemed more like a showcase for the distinctive personalities that populate a Trumpified G.O.P.The Pennsylvania Senate race gave us an especially vivid mix: As of this writing, the Celebrity Doctor and the Hedge Fund Guy Pretending to Be a MAGA True Believer may be headed for a recount, after the Would-Be Media Personality With the Inspiring Back Story and the Unfortunate Twitter Feed faded back into the pack. In the governor’s race, Republican voters chose to nominate Doug Mastriano, a.k.a. the QAnon Dad. In North Carolina, they ended — for now — the political career of Representative Madison Cawthorn, the Obviously Suffering Grifter.On substance, as opposed to personality, though, the night’s stakes were relatively simple: Can Republicans prevent their party from becoming the party of constitutional crisis, with leaders tacitly committed to turning the next close presidential election into a legal-judicial-political train wreck?This is a distinctive version of a familiar political problem. Whenever a destabilizing populist rebellion is unleashed inside a democratic polity, there are generally two ways to bring back stability without some kind of crisis or rupture in the system.Sometimes the revolt can be quarantined within a minority coalition and defeated by a majority. This was the destiny, for instance, of William Jennings Bryan’s 1890s prairie-populist rebellion, which took over the Democratic Party but went down to multiple presidential defeats at the hands of the more establishmentarian Republicans. You can see a similar pattern, for now, in French politics, where the populism of Marine Le Pen keeps getting isolated and defeated by the widely disliked but grudgingly tolerated centrism of Emmanuel Macron.In the alternative path to stability, the party being reshaped by populism finds leaders who can absorb its energies, channel its grievances and claim its mantle — but also defeat or suppress its most extreme manifestations. This was arguably the path of New Deal liberalism in its relationship to Depression-era populism and radicalism: In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt was able to sustain support from voters who were also drawn to more demagogic characters, from Huey Long to Charles Coughlin. Two generations later, it was the path of Reaganite conservatism in its relationship to both George Wallace’s populism and the Goldwaterite New Right.The problem for America today is that neither stabilizing strategy is going particularly well. Part of the Never Trump movement has aspired to a Macron-style strategy, preaching establishment unity behind the Democratic Party. But the Democrats haven’t cooperated: They conspicuously failed to contain and defeat Trumpism in 2016, and there is no sign that the Biden-era variation on the party is equipped to hold on to the majority it won in 2020.Meanwhile, the Republican Party at the moment does have a provisional model for channeling but also restraining populism. Essentially it involves leaning into culture-war controversy and rhetorical pugilism to a degree that provokes constant liberal outrage and using that outrage to reassure populist voters that you’re on their side and they don’t need to throw you over for a conspiracy theorist or Jan. 6 marcher.This is the model, in different styles and contexts, of Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis. In Tuesday’s primaries it worked for Idaho’s conservative incumbent governor, Brad Little, who easily defeated his own lieutenant governor’s much-further-right campaign. Next week the same approach seems likely to help Brian Kemp defeat David Perdue for the governor’s nomination in Georgia. And it offers the party’s only chance, most likely via a DeSantis candidacy, to defeat Donald Trump in 2024.Unfortunately this model works best when you have a trusted figure, a known quantity, delivering the “I’ll be your warrior, I’ll defeat the left” message. The Cawthorn race, in which the toxic congressman was unseated by a member of the North Carolina State Senate, shows that this figure doesn’t have to be an incumbent to succeed, especially if other statewide leaders provide unified support. But if you have neither unity nor a figure with statewide prominence or incumbency as your champion — no Kemp, no Little — then you can get results like Mastriano’s victory last night in Pennsylvania: a Republican nominee for governor who cannot be trusted to carry out his constitutional duties should the presidential election be close in 2024.So now the obligation returns to the Democrats. Mastriano certainly deserves to lose the general election, and probably he will. But throughout the whole Trumpian experience, the Democratic Party has consistently failed its own tests of responsibility: It has talked constantly about the threat to democracy while moving leftward to a degree that makes it difficult to impossible to hold the center, and it has repeatedly cheered on unfit Republican candidates on the theory that they will be easier to beat.This happened conspicuously with Trump himself, and more unforgivably it happened again with Mastriano: Pennsylvania Democrats sent out mailers boosting his candidacy and ran a big ad buy, more than twice Mastriano’s own TV spending, calling him “one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters” — an “attack” line perfectly scripted to improve his primary support.Now they have him, as they had Trump in 2016. We’ll see if they can make the story end differently this time.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