Presidential Election of 2016

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Can’t Just Give the People What They Want

      by

      Over the 20-year period from 1970 to 1990, whites, especially those without college degrees, defected en masse from the Democratic Party. In those years, the percentage of white working class voters who identified with the Democratic Party fell to 40 percent from 60, Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote in “The Democrats and Working-Class Whites.”Now, three decades later, the Democratic Party continues to struggle to maintain not just a biracial but a multiracial and multiethnic coalition — keeping in mind that Democrats have not won a majority of white voters in a presidential election since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964.There have been seven Democratic and seven Republican presidents since the end of World War II. Obstacles notwithstanding, the Democratic coalition has adapted from its former incarnation as an overwhelmingly white party with a powerful southern segregationist wing to its current incarnation: roughly 59 percent white, 19 percent Black, 13 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent Asian American and other groups.William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard, put the liberal case for the importance of a such a political alliance eloquently in “Rising Inequality and the Case for Coalition Politics”:An organized national multiracial political constituency is needed for the development and implementation of policies that will help reverse the trends of the rising inequality and ease the burdens of ordinary families.Biden won with a multiracial coalition, but even in victory, there were signs of stress.In their May 21 analysis, “What Happened in 2020,” Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist, a liberal voter data analysis firm, and Jonathan Robinson, its director of research, found that Black support for the Democratic presidential nominee fell by 3 percentage points from 2016 to 2020, and Latino support fell by eight points over the same period, from 71 to 63 percent.At the same time, whites with college degrees continued their march into the Democratic Party: “The trends all point in the same direction, i.e., a substantial portion of this constituency moving solidly toward Democrats in the Trump era.” Among these well-educated whites, the percentage voting for the Democratic nominee rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 50 percent in 2016 to 54 percent in 2020. These gains were especially strong among women, according to Catalist: “White college-educated women in particular have shifted against Trump, moving from 50 percent Democratic support in 2012 to 58 percent in 2020.”In a separate June 2021 study, “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory,” by Ruth Igielnik, Scott Keeter and Hannah Hartig, Pew Research found thatEven as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall. There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters (41 percent vs. 30 percent).Biden, according to Pew, made significant gains both among all suburban voters and among white suburban voters: “In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45 percent supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54 percent for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among White voters: Trump narrowly won White suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51-47); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54-38).”Crucially. all these shifts reflect the continuing realignment of the electorate by level of educational attainment or so-called “learning skills,” with one big difference: Before 2020, education polarization was found almost exclusively among whites; last year it began to emerge among Hispanics and African Americans.Two Democratic strategists, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, both of whom publish their analyses at the Liberal Patriot website, have addressed this predicament.On Sept. 30 in “There Just Aren’t Enough College-Educated Voters!” Teixeira wrote:The perception that nonwhite working class voters are a lock for the Democrats is no longer tenable. In the 2020 election, working class nonwhites moved sharply toward Trump by 12 margin points, despite Democratic messaging that focused relentlessly on Trump’s animus toward nonwhites. According to Pew, Trump actually got 41 percent of the Hispanic working class vote in 2016. Since 2012, running against Trump twice, Democrats have lost 18 points off of their margin among nonwhite working class voters.In an effort to bring the argument down to earth, I asked Teixeira and Halpin three questions:1. Should Democrats support and defend gender and race-based affirmative action policies?2. If asked in a debate, what should a Democrat say about Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools?”3. How should a Democrat respond to questions concerning intergenerational poverty, nonmarital births and the issue of fatherlessness?In an email, Teixeira addressed affirmative action:Affirmative action in the sense of, say, racial preferences has always been unpopular and continues to be so. The latest evidence comes from the deep blue state of California which defeated an effort to reinstate race and gender preferences in public education, employment and contracting by an overwhelming 57-43 margin. As President Obama once put it: ‘We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more,’ There has always been a strong case for class-based affirmative action which is perhaps worth revisiting rather than doubling down on race-based affirmative action.Teixeira on Kendi’s arguments:It is remarkable how willing liberal elites have been to countenance Kendi’s extreme views which ascribe all racial disparities in American society to racism and a system of untrammeled white supremacy (and only that), insist that all policies/actions can only be racist or anti-racist in any context and advocate for a Department of Anti-Racism staffed by anti-racist “experts” who would have the power to nullify any and all local, state and federal legislation deemed not truly anti-racist (and therefore, by Kendi’s logic, racist). These ideas are dubious empirically, massively simplistic and completely impractical in real world terms. And to observe they are politically toxic is an understatement.The left, in Teixeira’s view,has paid a considerable price for abandoning universalism and for its increasingly strong linkage to Kendi-style views and militant identity politics in general. This has resulted in branding the party as focused on, or at least distracted by, issues of little relevance to most voters’ lives. Worse, the focus has led many working-class voters to believe that, unless they subscribe to this emerging worldview and are willing to speak its language, they will be condemned as reactionary, intolerant, and racist by those who purport to represent their interests. To some extent these voters are right: They really are looked down upon by elements of the left — typically younger, well-educated, and metropolitan — who embrace identity politics and the intersectional approach.In March, Halpin wrote an essay, “The Rise of the Neo-Universalists,” in which he argued thatthere is an emerging pool of political leaders, thinkers and citizens without an ideological home. They come from the left, right, and center but all share a common aversion to the sectarian, identity-based politics that dominates modern political discourse and the partisan and media institutions that set the public agenda.He calls this constituency “neo-universalists,” and says that they are united by “a vision of American citizenship based on the core belief in the equal dignity and rights of all people.” This means, he continued,not treating people differently based on their gender or their skin color, or where they were born or what they believe. This means employing collective resources to help provide for the ‘general welfare’ of all people in terms of jobs, housing, education, and health care. This means giving people a chance and not assuming the worst of them.How, then, would neo-universalism deal with gender and race-based affirmative action policies?“In terms of affirmative action, neo-universalism would agree with the original need and purpose of affirmative action following the legal dismantling of racial and gender discrimination,” Halpin wrote in an email:America needed a series of steps to overcome the legal and institutional hurdles to their advancement in education, the workplace, and wider life. Fifty years later, there has been tremendous progress on this front and we now face a situation where ongoing discrimination in favor of historically discriminated groups is hard to defend constitutionally and will likely hit a wall very soon. In order to continue ensuring that all people are integrated into society and life, neo-universalists would favor steps to offer additional assistance to people based on class- or place-based measures such as parental income or school profiles and disparities, in the case of education.What did Halpin think about Kendi’s views?A belief in equal dignity and rights for all, as expressed in neo-universalism and traditional liberalism, rejects the race-focused theories of Kendi and others, and particularly the concept that present discrimination based on race is required to overcome past discrimination based on race. There is no constitutional defense of this approach since you clearly cannot deprive people of due process and rights based on their race.In addition, theories like these, in Halpin’s view, foster “sectarian racial divisions and encourage people to view one another solely through the lens of race and perceptions of who is oppressed and who is privileged.” Liberals, Halpin continued, “spent the bulk of the 20th century trying to get society not to view people this way, so these contemporary critical theories are a huge step backward in terms of building wider coalitions and solidarity across racial, gender, and ethnic lines.”On the problem of intergenerational poverty, Halpin argued thatReducing and eradicating poverty is a critical focus for neo-universalists in the liberal tradition. Personal rights and freedom mean little if a person or family does not have a basic foundation of solid income and work, housing, education, and health care. Good jobs, safe neighborhoods, and stable two-parent families are proven to be critical components of building solid middle class life. Although the government cannot tell people how to organize their lives, and it must deal with the reality that not everyone lives or wants to live in a traditional family, the government can take steps to make family life more affordable and stable for everyone, particularly for those with children and low household income.Although the issue of racial and cultural tension within the Democratic coalition has been the subject of debate for decades, the current focus among Democratic strategists is on the well-educated party elite.David Shor, a Democratic data analyst, has emerged as a central figure on these matters. Shor’s approach was described by my colleague Ezra Klein last week. First, leaders need to recognize that “the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level” and then “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”How can Democrats defuse inevitable Republican attacks on contemporary liberalism’s “unpopular stuff” — to use Klein’s phrase — much of which involves issues related to race and immigration along with the disputes raised by identity politics on the left?Shor observes that “We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment’, ” before adding, “So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.”The result?“The joke is that the G.O.P. is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of,” Shor told Politico in an interview after the election in November.On Oct. 9, another of my colleagues, Jamelle Bouie, weighed in:My problem is that I don’t think Shor or his allies are being forthright about what it would actually take to stem the tide and reverse the trend. If anti-Black prejudice is as strong as this analysis implies, then it seems ludicrous to say that Democrats can solve their problem with a simple shift in rhetoric toward their most popular agenda items. The countermessage is easy enough to imagine — some version of ‘Democrats are not actually going to help you, they are going to help them’.Bouie’s larger point is thatThis debate needs clarity, and I want Shor and his allies to be much more forthright about the specific tactics they would use and what their strategy would look like in practice. To me, it seems as if they are talking around the issue rather than being upfront about the path they want to take.Shor’s critique of the contemporary Democratic Party and the disproportionate influence of its young, well-educated white liberal elite has provoked a network of counter-critiques. For example, Ian Hanley-Lopez, a law professor at Berkeley, recently posted “Shor is mainly wrong about racism (which is to say, about electoral politics)” on Medium, an essay in which Lopez argues thatThe core problem for the Democratic Party is not too many young, liberal activists. The fundamental challenge for Democrats is to develop a unified, effective response to the intense polarization around race intentionally driven by Trump and boosted by the interlocking elements of the right-wing propaganda machine.Haney-Lopez agrees thatDemocratic messages alienate voters when they are predicated on a sense of identity that voters do not share. For instance, “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” are deeply connected to a story of the police and ICE as white supremacist institutions that oppress communities of color. In turn, this story depicts the country as locked into a historic conflict between white people and people of color. It thus asks white voters to see themselves as members of an oppressive group they must help to disempower; and it asks voters of color to see themselves as members of widely hated groups they must rally to defend. This framing is acceptable to many who are college educated, white and of color alike, but not to majorities of voters.But, in Lopez’s view,Shor weds himself to the wrong conclusion. As the Ezra Klein piece reports, Shor “and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration.’” This is Shor’s most dangerous piece of advice to Democrats. For Shor, this has become an article of faith.Lopez argues that the best way to defuse divisive racial issues is to explicitly portray such tactics as “a divide-and-conquer strategy.”The basic idea, Lopez wrote,is to shift the basic political conflict in the United States from one between racial groups (the right’s preferred frame) to one between the 0.1 percent and the rest of us, with racism as their principal weapon. In our research, this race-class fusion politics is the most promising route forward for Democrats.Steve Phillips, the founder of Democracy in Color (and, like Haney-Lopez, a frequent contributor to The Times), goes a giant step further. In an email, Phillips argued that for over 50 years, “Democrats have NEVER won the white vote. All of it is dancing around the real issue, which is that the majority of white voters never back Democrats.” Even white college-educated voters “are very, very fickle. There’s some potential to up that share, but at what cost?” The bottom line? “I don’t think they’re movable; certainly, to any appreciable sense.”Phillips wrote that hisbiggest point is that it’s not necessary or cost-efficient to try to woo these voters. A meaningful minority of them are already with us and have always been with us. There are now so many people of color in the country (the majority of young people), that that minority of whites can ally with people of color and win elections from the White House to the Georgia Senate runoffs,” noting, “plus, you don’t have to sell your soul and compromise your principles to woo their support.In his email, Phillips acknowledged that “it does look like there has been a small decline in that Clinton got 76 percent of the working class vote among minorities and Biden 72 percent. But I still come back to the big picture points mentioned above.”On this point, Phillips may underestimate the significance of the four-point drop, and of the larger decline among working class Hispanics. If this is a trend — a big if because we don’t yet know how much of this is about Donald Trump and whether these trends will persist without him — it has the hallmarks of a new and significant problem for Democrats in future elections. In that light, it is all the more important for Democratic strategists of all ideological stripes to spell out what specific approaches they contend are most effective in addressing, if not countering, the divisive racial and cultural issues that have weakened the party in recent elections, even when they’re won.Saying the party’s candidates should simply downplay the tough ones may not be adequate.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

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Server's Connections to Alfa Bank Produces Fresh Conflict

      by

      A recent indictment suggested that researchers who found strange internet links between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization did not really believe their own work. They are pushing back.WASHINGTON — The charge was narrow: John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the F.B.I.But Mr. Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.Mr. Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Mr. Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Emails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.At the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.Steven A. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.Mr. Durham’s indictment provided evidence that two participants in the matter — Mr. Joffe and Michael Sussmann, the cybersecurity lawyer accused of falsely saying he had no client when he brought the findings of the researchers to the F.B.I. — interacted with the Clinton campaign as they worked to bring their suspicions to journalists and federal agents.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment. The special counsel’s office issued a fresh grand jury subpoena to Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, sometime after Mr. Sussmann was indicted on Sept. 16, in a development first reported on Thursday by CNN and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether the subpoena pertained to Alfa Bank or whether Mr. Durham has finished his investigation into that case.Mr. Durham uncovered law firm billing records showing that Mr. Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers, had logged his time on the Alfa Bank matter as work for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was representing in coming forward with the Alfa Bank data, while saying he was representing only Mr. Joffe and not the campaign.Mr. Durham also found that Mr. Joffe had met with one of Mr. Sussmann’s law firm partners, Marc Elias, who was then the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, and researchers from Fusion GPS, an investigative firm Mr. Elias had commissioned to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia. Fusion GPS drafted a paper on Alfa Bank’s ties to the Kremlin that Mr. Sussmann also provided to the F.B.I.Mr. Durham was appointed in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Justice Department, via Associated PressIn the heat of the presidential race, Democrats quickly sought to capitalize on the research. On Sept. 15, four days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I. about the findings, Mr. Elias sent an email to the Clinton campaign manager, Robbie Mook, its communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and its national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whose subject line referred to an Alfa Bank article, the indictment said.Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”The F.B.I., which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization. The report by the Russia special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the issue.The data remains a mystery. A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause. A Senate report last year accepted the F.B.I.’s assessment that it was unlikely to have been a covert communications channel, but also said it had no good explanation for “the unusual activity.”Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Mr. Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Mr. Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.Earlier articles on Alfa Bank, including in Slate and The New Yorker, did not name the researchers, and used pseudonyms like “Max” and “Tea Leaves” for two of them. Mr. Durham’s indictment did not name them, either.But three of their names have appeared among a list of data experts in a lawsuit brought by Alfa Bank, and Trump supporters have speculated online about their identities. The Times has confirmed them, and their lawyers provided statements defending their actions.The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,” adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is unequivocally false.”The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe, who in 2013 received the F.B.I. Director’s Award for helping crack a cybercrime case, and retired this month from Neustar, another information services company.In addition, the Alfa Bank suspicions were only half of what the researchers sought to bring to the government’s attention, according to several people familiar with the matter.Their other set of concerns centered on data suggesting that a YotaPhone — a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States — had been used from networks serving the White House, Trump Tower and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company whose server had also interacted with the Trump server.Mr. Sussmann relayed their YotaPhone findings to counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. in February 2017, the people said. It is not clear whether the government ever investigated them.The involvement of the researchers traces back to the spring of 2016. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations.DARPA identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples. Mr. Antonakakis and Mr. Dagon reached out to Mr. Joffe to gain access to Neustar’s repository of DNS logs, people familiar with the matter said, and began sifting them.Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Mr. Dagon and Ms. Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.Ms. Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Mr. Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Mr. Joffe.As a candidate in 2016, President Trump publicly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Mr. Dagon wrote in an email to Mr. Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Mr. Trump urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton. By early August, the researchers had combined forces and were increasingly focusing on the Alfa Bank data, the people said. Mr. Joffe reached out to his lawyer, Mr. Sussmann, who would take the researchers’ data and hypothesis to the F.B.I. on Sept. 19, 2016.Defense lawyers contend the indictment presented a skewed portrait of their clients’ thinking by selectively quoting from their emails.The indictment quotes August emails from Ms. Lorenzen and Mr. Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.The indictment says Mr. Joffe sent an email on Aug. 21 urging more research about Mr. Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.The full email provides context: Mr. Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia and yet many links appeared to exist, Mr. Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Mr. Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”He wrote: “If we can show possible email communication between” any Trump server and an Alfa Bank server “that has occurred in the last few weeks, we have the beginning of a narrative,” adding that such communications with any “Russian or Ukrainian financial institutions would give the base of a very useful narrative.”Mr. Tyrrell, his lawyer, said that research in the weeks that followed, omitted by the indictment, had yielded evidence that the specific subsidiary server in apparent contact with Alfa Bank had not been used to send bulk marketing emails. That further discussion, he said, changed his client’s mind about whether it was a red herring.“The quotation of the ‘red herring’ email is deeply misleading,” he said, adding: “The research process is iterative and this is exactly how it should work. Their efforts culminated in the well-supported conclusions that were ultimately delivered to the F.B.I.”Michael E. Sussmann during a cybersecurity conference in 2016. He was charged by Mr. Durham with lying to the F.B.I.via C-SPANThe indictment also quoted from emails in mid-September, when the researchers were discussing a paper on their suspicions that Mr. Sussmann would soon take to the F.B.I. It says Mr. Joffe asked if the paper’s hypothesis would strike security experts as a “plausible explanation.”The paper’s conclusion was somewhat qualified, an email shows, saying “there were other possible explanations,” but the only “plausible” one was that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization had taken steps “to obfuscate their communications.”The indictment suggested Ms. Lorenzen’s reaction to the paper was guarded, describing an email from her as “stating, in part, that it was ‘plausible’ in the ‘narrow scope’ defined by” Mr. Joffe. But the text of her email displays enthusiasm.“In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible,” she wrote, adding: “If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case,” her email said.The indictment cited emails by Mr. Antonakakis in August in which he flagged holes and noted they disliked Mr. Trump, and in September in which he approvingly noted that the paper did not get into a technical issue that specialists would raise.Mr. Antonakakis’ lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, said his client had provided “feedback on an early draft of data that was cause for additional investigation.” And, he said, their hypothesis “to this day, remains a plausible working theory.”The indictment also suggests Mr. Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”The text of that email shows Mr. Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank,” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Mr. Dagon wrote.In the end, Mr. Durham came to investigate them. More

    • 88 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Stephanie Grisham’s Book Details Trump’s ‘Terrifying’ Temper

      by

      The former press secretary is reflective in her tell-all: “I should have spoken up more.”WASHINGTON — Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary perhaps best known for never holding a televised briefing with reporters, plans to release a tell-all book next week that accuses President Donald J. Trump of abusing his staff, placating dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, and making sexual comments about a young White House aide.In her book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” Ms. Grisham recalls her time working for a president she said constantly berated her and made outlandish requests, including a demand that she appear before the press corps and re-enact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Mr. Trump’s (first) impeachment, an assignment she managed to avoid.“I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic,” Ms. Grisham writes, offering a reason for why she never held a briefing.After serving as press secretary, Ms. Grisham worked in Melania Trump’s office. She resigned on Jan. 6 as a horde of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Her book was kept a secret from her closest allies in the White House, though by the time she departed Washington that number had dwindled. (She writes that, months before the election, she had moved to Kansas.) Her publisher, HarperCollins, calls the book “The most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet.”The former president and his advisers have already moved to discredit Ms. Grisham’s account, and have used increasingly personal terms to disparage her.“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Tuesday. He said she had become “very angry and bitter” after a breakup. “She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”In her book, Ms. Grisham offered a pre-emptive response to the criticism: “This is not, by the way, a book where you need to like me.”Here are some highlights from the manuscript obtained by The New York Times:A (fleetingly) tough stance toward Putin is just for showMs. Grisham lands on a well-documented theme when she explores Mr. Trump’s love of dictators. But she says Mr. Trump went out of his way to please one in particular: Mr. Putin, whose cold reception of Mr. Trump, she writes, seemed to make the president want to impress him even more.“With all the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, ‘Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand,’” Ms. Grisham writes, recalling a meeting between the two leaders during the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.During that meeting, Ms. Grisham listened to Fiona Hill, Mr. Trump’s top adviser on Russia who later became an impeachment witness, who observed what she said were Mr. Putin’s subtle efforts to throw Mr. Trump off guard.“As the meeting began, Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure,” Ms. Grisham writes. “She proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president.”Sexist language toward womenWhile he was in the White House, Mr. Trump’s targets included a young press aide whom Ms. Grisham says the president repeatedly invited up to his Air Force One cabin, including once to “look at her,” using an expletive to describe her rear end. Mr. Trump, she writes, instructed her to promote the woman and “keep her happy.” Instead, Ms. Grisham tried to keep her away from the president.During an Oval Office rant about E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Mr. Trump of raping her in the 1990s, Mr. Trump first insults Ms. Carroll’s looks. Then he gazes into Ms. Grisham eyes and says something that unnerves her.“‘You just deny it,’” he told Ms. Grisham. ‘That’s what you do in every situation. Right, Stephanie? You just deny it,’ he repeated, emphasizing the words.”Melania Trump’s quiet rebellionMs. Grisham also confirms what she and Melania Trump had long denied: That the first lady was angry after several reports of her husband’s infidelities — and hush money payments — surfaced in the news media.To the contrary: “After the Stormy Daniels story broke and all the allegations that followed from other women,” Ms. Grisham writes, “I felt that Mrs. Trump was basically unleashed.”The first lady, she says, found ways to omit her husband from photos and tweets, and made it a point to show up on the arm of a handsome military aide. Mrs. Trump, who is closed off to even her closest aides, begins to open up to Ms. Grisham, telling her that she doesn’t believe her husband’s denials or those from his former fixer, Michael Cohen — “Oh, please, are you kidding me?” she asks at one point. “I don’t believe any of that,” the first lady adds, using an expletive. (This book, it should be said, contains a lot of expletives.)Ms. Grisham also attempts to illuminate why Mrs. Trump wore a jacket inscribed with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” to visit a Texas camp for child migrants, but focuses more on the president’s reaction: “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked Ms. Grisham and his wife in the Oval Office, before instructing an aide to tweet out a cover story: “You just tell them you were talking to the” news media, he told the group.The first lady grew more disengaged over time, Ms. Grisham writes, to the point where she was asleep on election night. She was overseeing a photo shoot of a rug on Jan. 6 and declined to comment publicly on what has happening at the Capitol. (For Ms. Grisham, this was the last straw. She resigned later that day.)In the end, the first lady sided with her husband, doubting the election results — “Something bad happened,” she told Ms. Grisham — and declined to invite Jill Biden, the incoming first lady, to the White House for tea.“She would always say, ‘Let me think about it’ or ‘Let’s see what the West Wing will do,’” Ms. Grisham writes, “Which meant no. And when exactly did she decide to start following the West Wing’s lead?”Demands to evict the press from the White HouseMs. Grisham says that a trip to North Korea inspired Mr. Trump to ask her to research ways the press could be permanently evicted from the James S. Brady Briefing Room.“I researched different places we could put them other than the press briefing room. Each time the president asked me about my progress on the matter, I let him know I was still working on options,” Ms. Grisham writes.As she tries to please Mr. Trump, whose press coverage was relentlessly negative, she describes his anger toward her and others as “terrifying”: “When I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras,” she writes, “I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.”She says one frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire was Pat Cipollone, who served as White House counsel: “He didn’t like them telling him that things he wanted to do were unethical or illegal. So he’d scream at them. But then he’d usually listen. And then yell at them again later.”(There were other indignities: Ms. Grisham writes that Mr. Trump called her while aboard Air Force One to defend the size of his penis after Ms. Daniels insulted it in an interview. “Uh, yes sir,” Ms. Grisham replied.)At one point, she writes, Mr. Trump’s handlers designated an unnamed White House official known as the “Music Man” to play him his favorite show tunes, including “Memory” from “Cats,” to pull him from the brink of rage. (The aide, it is revealed later, is Ms. Grisham’s ex-boyfriend. She does not identify him, but it is Max Miller, a former White House official now running for Congress with Mr. Trump’s support.)She was a close-up observer of Mr. Trump’s obsession with control, and details a scene in which the president undergoes a colonoscopy without anesthesia — though she doesn’t name the procedure — because, she reasons, even temporarily assigning power to the vice president would have been “showing weakness.”In the end, Ms. Grisham stood by as three chiefs of staff, two press secretaries, and countless other aides resigned. She notes that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, seemed to grow more powerful.Ms. Trump, she said, made it a point to insert herself into meetings where she did not belong, including when she demanded that her father address the nation from the Oval Office during the early days of the pandemic. But Ms. Grisham reserves special ire for Mr. Kushner, whom she calls “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.” (At one point, Mr. Trump warns her not to get on Mr. Kushner’s bad side.)“The truth was that pretty much everyone eventually wore out their welcome with the president,” Ms. Grisham writes. “We were bottles of milk with expiration dates.”The former press secretary adds, “I should have spoken up more.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Harriet Hageman Goes From Anti-Trump Plotter to His Champion vs. Liz Cheney

      by

      Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming Republican, is the former president’s choice to take on his leading G.O.P. critic. But five years ago, she tried to overturn his victory in the party’s primary race.Former President Donald J. Trump is leading an all-out war against Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming because of her perceived lack of loyalty: After voting to impeach him, she became the voice of Republican opposition to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.But his choice to replace her, Harriet Hageman, was not always a loyal soldier herself. She was part of the final Republican resistance to his ascent in 2016, backing doomed procedural measures at the party’s national convention aimed at stripping him of the presidential nomination he had clinched two months earlier.Ms. Hageman worked with fellow supporters of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in a failed effort to force a vote on the convention floor between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz, regardless of the results of the primaries and caucuses held across America. Calling Mr. Trump “the weakest candidate,” Ms. Hageman attributed his rise to Democrats who she claimed had voted in Republican primaries.She condemned Mr. Trump as a bigoted candidate who would repel voters Republicans needed to win a national election, warning that the G.O.P. would be saddled with “somebody who is racist and xenophobic.”Ms. Hageman’s yearslong journey from Never-Trumpism to declaring him the best president of her lifetime is one of the most striking illustrations yet of the political elasticity demonstrated both by ambitious Republicans in the Trump era and by the former president himself, who has relentlessly asserted his dominance over leaders of his party.Ms. Hageman is hardly the only Republican to vigorously oppose Mr. Trump and later back him when it proved politically advantageous. Mr. Cruz and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, along with Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who led the 2016 rebellion at the convention, all became enthusiastic Trump supporters.None of them, however, have quite achieved Ms. Hageman’s remarkable political transformation, which has not been previously reported. Five years ago, she was a passionate opponent of Mr. Trump who tried to stop him outside the normal electoral process; now, she is his champion in the Republican Party’s marquee showdown over fealty to the former president.Ms. Cheney’s vocal opposition to Mr. Trump has turned what might otherwise be a sleepy contest for a safely Republican Wyoming congressional seat into a high-profile test case of the former president’s dominance over the party. His obsession with removing Ms. Cheney from office — he has derided her in at least 16 statements since March, including one on Thursday that contained a doctored photo combining her hair, body and eyeglasses with former President George W. Bush’s face — has overshadowed nearly all of his other political efforts, aside from vying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.“It’s going to be the most important House race in the country in 2022,” Ms. Cheney said during a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast on Sunday. “It will be one where people do have the opportunity to say, ‘We want to stand for the Constitution.’”For Ms. Hageman, joining forces with Mr. Trump to attack an old ally — the two Wyoming women were once so close that Ms. Hageman served as an adviser to Ms. Cheney’s short-lived 2014 Senate campaign — presents an opportunity to accomplish something she has been unable to do without him: win a statewide race in Wyoming.Ms. Cheney has vocally opposed Mr. Trump, who has pushed his party to remove her from office.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMs. Hageman has never spoken publicly about her effort to block Mr. Trump from the 2016 nomination. In a statement to The New York Times, she drew a tenuous connection between her actions and Ms. Cheney.“I heard and believed the lies the Democrats and Liz Cheney’s friends in the media were telling at the time, but that is ancient history as I quickly realized that their allegations against President Trump were untrue,” Ms. Hageman said. “He was the greatest president of my lifetime, and I am proud to have been able to renominate him in 2020. And I’m proud to strongly support him today.”Ms. Cheney, who declined to comment or be interviewed for this article, supported Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. She endorsed him that May and, in October, issued a statement reiterating her support after the release of the “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged about groping women.The daughter of a longtime Wyoming state legislator, Ms. Hageman, 58, built her career as a water and natural resources lawyer fighting environmentalists and government regulations. She became known in Wyoming for her successful challenge of a Clinton-era prohibition on road construction on millions of acres of U.S. Forest Service land. In 2009, a headline in an environmentalist magazine called her “The Wicked Witch of the West.”In 2016, Ms. Hageman went to the Republican convention in Cleveland as a Cruz delegate after the Texas senator won Wyoming with 66 percent of the vote and 23 of 25 delegates at the state’s county conventions that March.She had been appointed by the Wyoming delegation to the national convention’s powerful Rules Committee. The big question facing the committee’s members that year was how much say delegates should have in choosing the party’s nominee.Leading up to the convention, Ms. Hageman joined a small group of Republicans who organized a last-ditch effort to “unbind” delegates. They hoped to insert a conscience provision freeing delegates to vote for whomever they wanted regardless of the results of state primaries and caucuses, a move concocted by supporters of Mr. Cruz to instigate a convention floor fight.That summer, Ms. Hageman was a regular participant in conference calls plotting the last-gasp opposition to Mr. Trump, long after he had won enough delegates to clinch the nomination. She and other delegates, many of them social conservatives from the West loyal to Mr. Cruz, argued that Mr. Trump was a cancer on the party, chosen by liberal voters in Democratic states to undermine Republicans nationwide.The Republican National Committee, working with the Trump campaign, did all it could to squash the rebellion.Ms. Hageman, center, holding a book; Senator Mike Lee, right; and Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, behind Mr. Lee at back right, were among the Republicans who supported unbinding delegates at the party’s 2016 convention.Gina Blanchard-Reed“To vote to free the delegates at that time was considered a capital offense by the Trump campaign,” said Steve Duprey, then a Republican National Committee member from New Hampshire who was on the Rules Committee. “It was clearly an attempt to deny him the nomination, which he had won fair and square.”Reince Priebus, then the chairman of the R.N.C., held long meetings with Mr. Cuccinelli and Rules Committee members who were seeking to unbind delegates. Ms. Hageman, along with Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who was at the time the highest-profile Rules Committee member involved in the stop-Trump movement, was among the attendees. It soon became clear the Trump team had peeled away enough support from Mr. Cuccinelli that the vote would not be close. Mr. Trump’s allies forced a vote that would affirmatively declare delegates to be bound by the results of their state’s nominating contest.When it was time to vote, 87 stood in favor of binding delegates.Only 12, including Ms. Hageman and Mr. Lee, voted in opposition, far short of the 28 needed to put the question of unbinding delegates to a vote of the full convention, which would have been a potentially embarrassing spectacle for Mr. Trump. Though the fight was over, Ms. Hageman participated in meetings over the next few days in which Cruz delegates discussed whether they had any remaining options to stop Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump, who endorsed Ms. Hageman this month, is aware of her support for Mr. Cruz in 2016 and, during his interview with her this summer before he made his decision, briefly touched on her role in the effort to stop Mr. Trump from claiming the nomination, according to a person familiar with their talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the endorsement process. Mr. Trump, who has taken particular pleasure in collecting the support of converted never-Trumpers, worked to clear the Wyoming field for Ms. Hageman, sending a fleet of aides to work for her and asking other candidates to drop out of the race after he made the endorsement.The former president has for months focused on ousting Ms. Cheney. His aides and his son Donald Trump Jr. tried unsuccessfully in March to change Wyoming’s election law in a way that would have hurt the congresswoman’s re-election prospects. Ms. Hageman, Mr. Trump said in his endorsement, “is all in for America First.”It took years for Ms. Hageman to become an unabashed Trump supporter.When she ran for Wyoming governor in 2018, Mr. Trump endorsed Foster Friess, a billionaire conservative donor who had backed Mr. Trump’s 2016 effort. Mr. Friess, who died in May, finished second to Mark Gordon, who was the state treasurer and is now Wyoming’s governor. Ms. Hageman placed third.Ms. Hageman was known for her penchant to attack fellow Republican candidates in debates. She did not invoke Mr. Trump or his campaign themes in her television advertising.“She was talking about state issues then, not anything federal,” said Diemer True, a former Wyoming State Senate president who also served as chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party.In 2020, Ms. Hageman ran for office again, seeking one of Wyoming’s two posts as members of the Republican National Committee. This time, she aligned herself with Mr. Trump against Barbara Cubin, a former congresswoman backed by party moderates. Ms. Hageman prevailed at a virtual state party convention, 152 votes to 105.Kitty Bennett More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The Alarming Rise of Peter Thiel, Tech Mogul and Political Provocateur

      by

      THE CONTRARIAN Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of PowerBy Max ChafkinA few years ago, on a podcast called “This Is Actually Happening,” a penitent white supremacist recalled a formative childhood experience. One night his mother asked him: “You enjoying your burger?” She went on, “Did you know it’s made out of a cow?”“Something died?” the boy, then 5, replied.“Everything living dies,” she said. “You’re going to die.”Plagued thereafter by terror of death, the boy affected a fear-concealing swagger, which eventually became a fascist swagger.By chance, I’d just heard this episode when I opened “The Contrarian,” Max Chafkin’s sharp and disturbing biography of the Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel, another far-right figure, though unrepentant.An epiphany from Thiel’s childhood sounded familiar. When he was 3, according to Chafkin, Thiel asked his father about a rug, which his father, Klaus Thiel, explained was cowhide. “Death happens to all animals. All people,” Klaus said. “It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you.”A near identical far-right coming-of-age tale — a Rechtsextremebildungsroman? The coincidence kicked off a wave of despair that crashed over me as I read Chafkin’s book. Where did these far-right Americans, powerful and not, ashamed and proud, come from? Why does a stock lecture about mortality lead some 3-to-5-year-old boys to develop contempt for the frailties in themselves — and in everyone else? Like the anonymous white supremacist, Thiel never recovered from bummer death news, and, according to Chafkin, still returns compulsively to “the brutal finality of the thing.” Thiel also turned to swaggering and, later, an evolving, sometimes contradictory, hodgepodge of libertarian and authoritarian beliefs.Thiel stalks through Chafkin’s biography “as if braced for a collision,” spoiling for a fight with whomever he designates a “liberal” — meaning anyone he suspects of snubbing him. Unsmiling, solipsistic and at pains to conceal his forever wounded vanity, Thiel in Chafkin’s telling comes across as singularly disagreeable, which is evidently the secret to both his worldly successes and his moral failures.Young Thiel had the usual dandruff-club hobbies: He played Dungeons & Dragons, read Tolkien and aced the SATs. He was arrogant, and set his worldview against those who mocked him for it. One of Thiel’s classmates at Stanford told Chafkin, “He viewed liberals through a lens as people who were not nice to him.” Looking back on Thiel’s anti-elitist and eventually illiberal politics, Chafkin is succinct: “He’d chosen to reject those who’d rejected him.”Chafkin serves as a tour guide to the ideological roadhouses where Thiel threw back shots of ultraconservative nostrums on his way to serve Donald Trump in 2016. There was his home life, where — first in Cleveland, then in South Africa and, finally, in suburban California — he ingested his German family’s complicity in apartheid (his father helped build a uranium mine in the Namib desert) and enthusiasm for Reagan; his requisite enlightenment via the novels of Ayn Rand; his excoriations of libs at Stanford, which (Chafkin reminds readers) still shows the influence of its eugenicist founding president, David Starr Jordan; and his depressing stint at a white-shoe corporate law firm, where he was disappointed to find “no liberals to fight.”These stages of the cross led Thiel to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, hot to leave big law and gamble on young Randian Übermenschen. An early bet on a coder named Max Levchin hit it big. The two devised PayPal, the company Thiel is famous for, which supercharged his antipathies with capital. Thiel, who’d published a book called “The Diversity Myth,” “made good on his aversion to multiculturalism,” Chafkin writes. “Besides youth, PayPal’s other defining quality was its white maleness.”In 2000, PayPal got in business with Elon Musk. “Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart,” one source tells Chafkin. “Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath.” According to Chafkin, Thiel remained coldblooded during the dot-com crash that year, as PayPal loopholed its way to market dominance. The company rebounded with a growth strategy known as “blitzscaling,” as well as the use of some supremely nasty tactics. “Whereas [Steve] Jobs viewed business as a form of cultural expression, even art,” Chafkin writes, “for Thiel and his peers it was a mode of transgression, even activism.”When PayPal went public, Thiel took out tens of millions and turned to investing full time. With various funds he scouted for more entrepreneurial twerps, and in the mid-2000s he latched onto Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. He also set up a hedge fund called Clarium, where, according to Chafkin, Thiel’s staffers styled themselves as intellectuals and savored the wit of VDARE, an anti-immigration website that regularly published white nationalists. Hoping to make death less inevitable, at least for himself, Thiel also began to patronize the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which has been steadily freezing the corpses of moneyed narcissists in liquid nitrogen since 1976.Thiel passed on investing in Tesla, telling Musk (according to Musk) that he didn’t “fully buy into the climate change thing.” But he gave Zuckerberg a loan for Facebook, which intermittently let him keep a leash on the young founder. After Sept. 11, Chafkin reports, Thiel also panicked about “the threat posed by Islamic terrorism — and Islam itself.” Libertarianism deserted him; he created Palantir, a data-analytics surveillance tech company designed, in essence, to root out terrorists. The C.I.A. used it, the N.Y.P.D. used it and Thiel became a contractor with big government. By 2006 his Clarium had $2 billion under management.Around this time, the wily Nick Denton, of the gossip empire Gawker, took notice of what Chafkin calls Thiel’s “extremist politics and ethically dubious business practices.” Gawker’s Valleywag site dragged Thiel, whose homosexuality was an open secret, suggesting he was repressed. This enraged Thiel, who by 2008 seemed to have lost it, firing off a floridly religious letter to Clarium investors warning of the imminent apocalypse and urging them to save their immortal souls and “accumulate treasures in heaven, in the eternal City of God.”The planet avoided the apocalypse, as it tends to do, but that year the financial crash laid the economy to waste. Several big investors pulled out of Thiel’s fund. In Chafkin’s telling, Thiel unaccountably blamed Denton for scaring away ultraconservatives by outing him. He determined to put Denton out of business, and in 2016, by clandestinely bankrolling a nuisance lawsuit designed to bankrupt Gawker, he did.Chafkin’s chronicle of Thiel’s wild abandon during the Obama years contains some of the most suspenseful passages in the book, as the narrative hurtles toward his acquisition of actual political power. Thiel seemed intoxicated by the rise of Obama, who galvanized the liberals Thiel most loved to hate. Chafkin recounts decadent parties at Thiel’s homes with barely clad men, along with his investments in nutjob projects, like seasteading, which promised life on floating ocean platforms free from government regulation. In a widely read essay, he argued that democracy and capitalism were at odds, because social programs and women’s suffrage curbed the absolute freedom of above-the-law capitalists like himself. He was officially antidemocracy.Thiel then began to direct money to nativist political candidates and causes, and to collaborate — via Palantir — with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the strange right-wing figure who would later become a zealous Trumpite embraced by the QAnon cult. He built an army of mini-Thiels, the Thiel fellows, teenage boys (along with a few girls) whom he paid to quit college, forfeit normal social life and try to get rich in the Valley.Thiel backed Ron Paul for president in 2012, and helped Ted Cruz win a Texas Senate seat. (Gawker noted that Thiel’s support for the anti-gay Cruz was “no crazier than paying kids to drop out of school, cure death or create a floating libertarian ocean utopia.”) He contributed to Tea Party politicians with the aim of building a bigger “neo-reactionary” political movement, and in 2015, he gave his followers their own holy book when he published “Zero to One,” a compendium of antidemocracy, pro-monopoly blitzscaling tips.Peter Thiel, speaking at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. After Donald Trump won the nomination, Thiel decided Trump was a delightful disrupter and kindred spirit and urged voters to take him “seriously, but not literally.”Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesAt the same time, by investing in Lyft, TaskRabbit and Airbnb with his Founders Fund, Thiel seemed to be on the right side of history. When he spoke before mainstream audiences, he sometimes softened his extreme views and even laughed off his more gonzo follies — seasteading, for one.Yet one friend described Thiel to Chafkin as “Nazi-curious” (though the friend later said he was just being glib), and during this period Thiel also became, Chafkin writes, closer to Curtis Yarvin, a noxious avatar of the alt-right who had ties to Steve Bannon. He turned to survivalist prepping, kitting out a giant estate in New Zealand, where he took citizenship, making it possible that at a moment’s notice he could slip the knot of what, Chafkin says, had become his ultimate nemesis: the U.S. government itself.In the mid-2010s, a Palantir rep was also meeting with Cambridge Analytica, the creepy English data-mining firm that was later recorded boasting about using twisted data shenanigans to all but give the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.Like just about every powerful figure who eventually went all in for Trump, Thiel was initially skeptical, according to Chafkin. But once Trump won the nomination Thiel decided he was a delightful disrupter and kindred spirit. High from crushing Gawker, Thiel spoke for Trump at the Republican National Convention, and poured money into Rebekah Mercer’s PAC to rescue the campaign as Trump revealed increasing madness on the stump. He also urged voters to take Trump “seriously, but not literally.” Simultaneously, at Thiel’s recommendation, Chafkin suggests, Zuckerberg continued to allow popular content, including potentially misleading far-right articles, to stay at the top of Facebook’s trending stories, where they could attract more clicks and spike more get-out-the-vote cortisol.Why did Thiel go to such lengths for Trump? Chafkin quotes an anonymous longtime investor in Thiel’s firms: “He wanted to watch Rome burn.” Trump won, which meant that Thiel’s money and his burn-it-down ideology also won.Chafkin recounts that some of Thiel’s friends found this concretizaton of his cosmology too much to bear, and turned on him. But most did what most Trump opponents did for four years: waited it out, tried to wish away the erosion of American democracy and turned to their affairs.For his part, Thiel embraced the role of kingmaker, and Palantir benefited handsomely from contracts the Trump administration sent its way. Thiel found another winning sponsee: Josh Hawley, then Missouri’s attorney general, with whom he fought Google, which threatened the stability of many Thiel-backed companies, and which Hawley saw as communist, or something.Chafkin, a writer and editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, is especially interested in the friction between Zuckerberg and Thiel, who drifted apart for a time as Thiel became more involved in conservative politics. The words spent on discord in this relationship — and on tension between Thiel and other tech titans — distract from the more urgent chronicle of Thiel’s rise as one of the pre-eminent authors of the contemporary far-right movement.“The Contrarian” is chilling — literally chilling. As I read it, I grew colder and colder, until I found myself curled up under a blanket on a sunny day, icy and anxious. Scared people are scary, and Chafkin’s masterly evocation of his subject’s galactic fear — of liberals, of the U.S. government, of death — turns Thiel himself into a threat. I tried to tell myself that Thiel is just another rapacious solipsist, in it for the money, but I used to tell myself that about another rapacious solipsist, and he became president.By way of conclusion, Chafkin reports that Thiel rode out much of the pandemic in Maui, losing faith in Trump. Evidently Thiel considers the devastating coronavirus both an economic opportunity for Palantir, which went public in 2020 and has benefited from Covid-related government contracts, and a vindication of his predictions that the world as we know it is finished. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      White Evangelicals Shun Morality for Power

      by

      Evangelical Christians castigated Bill Clinton in wake of his “improper relationship” with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He had sinned. He would be stoned.Franklin Graham, the evangelical minister, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 1998 that Clinton’s “extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family,” and that “private conduct does have public consequences.”He concluded:“Mr. Clinton’s sin can be forgiven, but he must start by admitting to it and refraining from legalistic doublespeak. According to the Scripture, the president did not have an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with Monica Lewinsky — he committed adultery. He didn’t ‘mislead’ his wife and us — he lied. Acknowledgment must be coupled with genuine remorse. A repentant spirit that says, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. I won’t do it again. I ask for your forgiveness,’ would go a long way toward personal and national healing.”But Mr. Graham never demanded the same of Donald Trump. To the contrary, he became one of Trump’s biggest defenders.When a tape was released during the 2016 campaign of Trump bragging years earlier about sexually assaulting women, Graham revealed his true motives: It wasn’t religious piety, but rather raw politics.He wrote on Facebook that Trump’s “crude comments” could not be defended, “but the godless progressive agenda of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise cannot be defended.” He continued, “The most important issue of this election is the Supreme Court.”The Supreme Court represents a more lasting power than the presidency, a way to lock in an ideology beyond the reach of election cycles and changing demographics at least for a generation.In an interview with Axios on HBO in 2018, Graham said of his support of Trump, “I never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith. And I appreciate that very much.”The courts are central to that supposed defense, in Graham’s calculation.Case in point, his rigid defense of Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of cornering her in a bedroom at a 1982 house party. Graham dismissed the allegations as “not relevant” and said of the episode:Well, there wasn’t a crime that was committed. These are two teenagers, and it’s obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away — if that’s the case, but he says he didn’t do it. He just flat out says that’s just not true. Regardless if it was true, these are two teenagers and she said no and he respected that, so I don’t know what the issue is. This is just an attempt to smear his name, that’s all.The hypocrisy of white evangelicals, taken into full context, shouldn’t have been shocking, I suppose, but as a person who grew up in the church (although I’m not a religious person anymore), it was still disappointing.I had grown up hearing from pulpits that it was the world that changed, not God’s word. The word was like a rock. A lie was a lie, yesterday, today and tomorrow, no matter who told it.I had hoped that there were more white evangelicals who embraced the same teachings, who would not abide by the message the Grahams of the world were advancing, who would stand on principle.But I was wrong. A report for the Pew Research Center published last week found that, contrary to an onslaught of press coverage about evangelicals who had left the church, disgusted by its embrace of the president, “There is solid evidence that white Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than white Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.”That’s right, the lying, philandering, thrice-married Trump, who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct or assault, may actually have grown the ranks of white evangelicals rather than shrunk them.To get some perspective on this, I reached out to an expert, Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies and Africana studies and the chair of the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the author of the recently released book “White Evangelical Racism.”As Professor Butler told me, the reason that some people might be surprised by these findings is that “they believed the hype.” For years, evangelicals had claimed that they were upholding morality and fighting injustice. But what the movement has really been since the 1970s, said Butler, is “a political arm of the Republican Party.” As Butler put it, evangelicals now “use moral issues as a wedge to get political power.”Butler concluded, “We need to quit coddling evangelicals and allowing them to use these moral issues to hide behind, because it’s very clear that that’s not what the issue is. The issue is that they believe in anti-vaxxing, they believe in racism, they believe in anti-immigration, they believe that only Republicans should run the country and they believe in white supremacy.”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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

    • 50 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The Trump Prophets Regroup

      by

      When you are in the business of prophecy, what do you do when prophecy fails?This spring, the media mogul Stephen E. Strang made an unusual apology to readers in the pages of his glossy magazine.Mr. Strang presides over a multimillion-dollar Pentecostal publishing empire, Charisma Media, which includes a daily news site, podcasts, a mobile app and blockbuster books. At 70, he is a C.E.O., publisher and seasoned author in his own right. Despite all that, Mr. Strang worried something had gone awry.“I’ve never been a prophet,” he wrote in a pleading March editor’s note. “But there were a number of prophets who were very certain that Trump would be elected.”This had not come to pass. Mr. Strang continued, “I hope that you’ll give me the grace — and Charisma Media the grace — of missing this, in a manner of speaking.”Over the past five years, he had hitched his professional fate to the Trump presidency, in a particularly cosmic way: promoting, almost daily, the claim that Trump’s rise to power was predestined by God. Interviewed in Mr. Strang’s various platforms, a rotating cast of religious leaders spoke with mystic authority on this subject.Where secular pundits were blindsided by Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory, the prophets of Charisma had been right. And they predicted another sweeping victory for Mr. Trump in 2020. For Mr. Strang, the last year presented the following question: When you are in the business of prophecy, what do you do when prophecy fails?Mr. Strang reflected on this question in a series of interviews last month.He mused, “God has plans and purposes we don’t understand.”This month, Mr. Strang will release his first post-election book, titled “God and Cancel Culture.” The text does not dwell long on questions of prophecy, failed or otherwise. Instead, it skips into the pandemic political zeitgeist, approvingly featuring vaccine skeptics like Stella Immanuel and megachurch pastors who defied lockdowns. The election conspiracist and pillow salesman Mike Lindell does the introduction.Mr. Strang seems to have discovered that one way to handle being publicly wrong is to change the subject and to pray readers stick around.Beyond the spiritual test of unrealized prophecies, there are very earthly stakes here: Under Mr. Strang’s stewardship, Charisma had grown from a church magazine to a multipronged institution with a slew of New York Times best sellers, millions of podcast downloads and a remaining foothold in print media, with a circulation of 75,000 for its top magazine. It is widely regarded as the flagship publication of the fast-growing Pentecostal world, which numbers over 10 million in the United States. With its mash-up of political and prophetic themes, Charisma had tapped a sizable market and electoral force. In 2019, one poll found that more than half of white Pentecostals believed Mr. Trump to be divinely anointed, with additional research pointing to the importance of so-called prophecy voters in the 2016 election.In his new book, Mr. Strang mentions the former president only in passing, with far more attention going to topics such as the coming Antichrist and loathed government overlords seeking to stamp out religion wholesale.Mr. Strang summed it up, “The fact is there are people who want to cancel Christianity.”“Christians and other conservatives need to wake up and stand up,” Mr. Strang said in an interview. “It says that right on the cover of the book.”The supernatural and mass media have long been fused in the story of Pentecostalism. In 1900s Los Angeles, Aimee Semple McPherson broadcast news-style reports of miracles and prophetic words over her own radio station in Echo Park. Oral Roberts conducted healing crusades through the TV screen. The duo Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker mastered the flashy style of prime time talk shows.Mr. Strang’s journalism career began in Florida as a rookie reporter at The Sentinel Star, where he covered more mundane topics like police and town hall meetings. In 1975, Mr. Strang founded Charisma, then a small periodical put out by Calvary Assembly of God, a congregation in the Orlando area that he attended with his wife. Mr. Strang bought the magazine from the parent church in 1981 and dove into religious publishing.In time, Charisma prospered. The editorial voice had the sunny boosterism of a hometown newspaper, covering the personalities of the Pentecostal world, an audience that Mr. Strang believed was woefully underserved. While competitors such as Christianity Today courted the buttoned-up elite of American evangelicalism, Charisma cornered a niche market of what are called charismatic Christians, set apart by their interest in gifts of the spirit, including things like healings, speaking in tongues and modern-day prophecy. Mr. Strang eschewed matters of stuffy dogma for eye-popping tales about the Holy Spirit moving through current events. Editorial meetings would focus on looking for what one former employee called “the spiritual heat” behind the headlines of the day.“We didn’t want to become the kind of boring publications many ‘religious’ journals are,” Mr. Strang wrote in an early editor’s note. “That is why we went first class with this publication.”In time, he surpassed competing publications. With a slick and dependable product, Mr. Strang unified diverse groups who might otherwise squabble over doctrine or not attend the same kinds of churches at all.“Strang became the ultimate Pentecostal businessman,” said John Fea, a historian of evangelicalism at Messiah University. “At Charisma, he fused the marketplace, faith and entrepreneurship.”Mr. Strang’s project stretched to include a book imprint, several spinoff magazines and educational materials for religious schools. By 2000, the company had expanded to a plush $7.5 million, 67,000-square foot headquarters outside Orlando. At the time, The Orlando Sentinel reported that the company employed about 200 people and expected revenue that year of $30 million.Yet the internet upended the world of publishing. By 2015, when Mr. Trump began his quest for the White House, Charisma, like much of the media industry, was dealing with declines in print advertising, revenue and circulation.Mr. Strang did not initially support Mr. Trump’s candidacy, but once the nomination had been clinched, a new theme rippled through the pages of Charisma: Mr. Trump was not just some ally of political convenience, he was anointed by God.In the months to come, the pages and airwaves of Charisma featured a range of religious leaders and lay people telling of a Trump victory. Each claimed that God had revealed — in dreams, visions or ethereal signs — that Mr. Trump would take the presidency. There was, for example: Jeremiah Johnson, a youthful seer from Florida (“a relatively young man but has remarkably accurate prophetic gifts”); Kim Clement, a onetime heroin user from South Africa (“he reveals the heartbeat of God”); and Frank Amedia, a Jew-turned-evangelical preacher with a penchant for spiritual warfare (“known for his bold and accurate prophetic words”).At this time, Charisma’s staff was producing 15 stories a day, many related to the election. (Typical headlines read: “Prophecy: God Sent Donald Trump to Wage War Against Destructive Spirits” or “Prophecy: Donald Trump Is Unstoppable Because the Lord Is Unstoppable.”)“Running stories about politics got clicks. And stories about prophetic words also got clicks,” Taylor Berglund, a former editor at Charisma, said. “So you combine these two and you had the most popular articles on the site.”Monthly readership of the Charisma website rose to somewhere between two and three million, Mr. Berglund said. “There was a real incentive to keep posting like that,” he said.Leah Payne, a scholar of religion at Portland Seminary, said there has long been “a real appetite in the Pentecostal community” for the kinds of prophecies that took off at Charisma during those months, delivered by people “who believe that the Holy Spirit can and does give anyone special insight into the future.”As the polls closed in November 2016, most mainstream news outlets scrambled to explain how projections for a big Hillary Clinton victory had been so off. But Mr. Strang felt vindicated.“Those prophecies may have sounded ridiculous,” he wrote later, “but Trump was elected, just as the prophets had said.”In the next months, the Trump administration brought a cohort of Pentecostal leaders closer to the halls of power than ever before. Mr. Strang’s longtime acquaintance Paula White, a televangelist from Florida, became a spiritual adviser to Mr. Trump. At one point, the president was pictured smiling and holding Mr. Strang’s 2017 book, “God and Donald Trump.”Advocacy groups that monitor the religious right tracked Charisma’s influence with alarm, concerned about the combination of divisive politics with divine prophecy. Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at Right Wing Watch, called Mr. Strang’s work harmful “pro-Trump propagandizing” because it cast political battles as holy wars. “This extreme demonization of one’s political opponents is toxic to our political culture,” Mr. Montgomery said.Mr. Strang’s boosters and critics often portray the company as a large and influential entity, and by most available metrics it does command a relatively large audience for a religious publisher. But Charisma’s staff appears to have shrunk since the early 2000s, when The Sentinel reported that the company employed 200. According to former staff members, in 2020 there were about 60 employees, with fewer than 10 in editorial. Charisma disputed those figures but declined to provide any information about its finances or number of employees.And for all of his hagiographic overtures, Mr. Strang’s love for Mr. Trump appears to always have been lopsidedly unrequited. The two met only once, for a brief interview in Florida.“I was never on the inside circle,” Mr. Strang said. “I went to the White House zero times.”Still, he remained a dutiful fan. Mr. Strang wrote three more glowing books about the president, including “God, Donald Trump and the 2020 Election.” In one chapter, the book explored the possibility that Mr. Trump could lose, but it came down squarely on the side of a preordained victory.And so, on Election Day 2020, Mr. Strang flew to Texas to appear on the livestream of one of his friends, the televangelist Kenneth Copeland.As exit polls were trickling in, Mr. Strang donned a red MAGA hat and beamed at the camera. “I believe Trump is going to win,” he told viewers. “The prophets have been saying that.”The next morning, Mr. Strang was surprised to find that, though ballots were still being tallied, a Biden victory seemed likely, and he would not accept the outcome for some time. He instructed his readers to ignore the mainstream media and fortify themselves in prayer.“I was feeling we were in a fairly serious place,” Mr. Strang said. “The Christian community I serve was actually kind of depressed.”Charisma did not recognize Mr. Biden as president-elect until after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and the congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.In the interim, Charisma gave a platform both to people who questioned the results and those who accepted that Mr. Biden was the president-elect. It also waded through a related challenge: the prickly question of what to do with all the failed divine predictions Charisma had published.Mr. Strang interviewed repentant prophets, such as Mr. Johnson, who shut his ministry after Mr. Trump was not re-elected. Mr. Strang also highlighted prophets who refused to budge, and he parroted Mr. Trump’s howls on Twitter about a stolen election. (“I personally do believe the election was stolen,” Mr. Strang said.)After the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Strang did condemn the violence in Washington in forthright language. At the same time he featured leaders who attended and heralded the gathering as a “prophetic breakthrough.”When a Charisma contributor named Michael Brown organized an open letter calling for firmer standards on prophecies (“We really had egg on our faces,” Mr. Brown recalled in a phone interview), Mr. Strang endorsed and published the plea at Charisma. But Mr. Strang also said his overall editorial approach wouldn’t change much at all. “No,” he said. “We won’t back off from the prophets.”His oft-repeated defense, in discussing the election fallout, is that he was simply doing his job, presenting alternate views.“We quoted other people,” Mr. Strang said. “I’m not a preacher. I’m a journalist.”Mr. Strang built Charisma from the ground up, he also likes to say, and will run it as he pleases. “I don’t have to answer to anybody. I don’t have a boss. I answer to God,” he said. “And I answer to Uncle Sam, you know, with the I.R.S.”Yet with division still lingering in the prophecy crowd, Mr. Strang ultimately seems to have decided to sidestep the question of 2020 and what was stolen or divinely ordained and simply to move on to boogeymen the whole family can agree on: the new administration, virus health mandates, what he has cast as liberal cultural censorship of conservative views and, most broadly, society’s diabolical scheme against Christianity.Mr. Strang’s new book was given a fitting debut at a megachurch rally in Michigan in late August, which was in part sponsored by Charisma and featured a lineup of conservative personalities who decried state health mandates over the course of the weekend.Trump flags billowed outside next to QAnon merchandise, and top billing went to MAGA stalwarts like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. Mr. Strang plugged his book onstage, speaking to an audience of several thousand, and sold copies in the foyer.In an email exchange afterward, Mr. Strang ventured a cheery, if tentative, prediction of his own: He might have another hit.“I signed books all afternoon,” he typed. “People tell me I’ve hit a chord.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump-Era Special Counsel Secures Indictment of Lawyer for Firm With Democratic Ties

      by

      The defendant, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — The special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation obtained a grand jury indictment on Thursday of a prominent cybersecurity lawyer, accusing him of lying to the F.B.I. five years ago during a meeting about Donald J. Trump and Russia.The indictment secured by the special counsel, John H. Durham, also made public his findings about an episode in which cybersecurity researchers identified unusual internet data in 2016 that they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.He concluded that the Clinton campaign covertly helped push those suspicions to the F.B.I. and reporters, the indictment shows. The F.B.I. looked into the questions about Alfa Bank but dismissed them as unfounded, and the special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.The charging of the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had been expected. He is accused of falsely telling a top F.B.I. lawyer that he was not representing any client at the meeting about those suspicions. Prosecutors contend that he was instead representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign.“Sussmann’s false statement misled the F.B.I. general counsel and other F.B.I. personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the F.B.I. of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients,” the indictment said.Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, have denied the accusation, insisting that he did not say he had no client and maintaining that the evidence against him is weak. They also denied that the question of who Mr. Sussmann was working for was material, saying the FB.I. would have investigated the matter regardless.“Michael Sussmann was indicted today because of politics, not facts,” they said on Thursday. “The special counsel appears to be using this indictment to advance a conspiracy theory he has chosen not to actually charge. This case represents the opposite of everything the Department of Justice is supposed to stand for. Mr. Sussmann will fight this baseless and politically inspired prosecution.”A former computer crimes prosecutor who worked for the Justice Department for 12 years, Mr. Sussmann in 2016 represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers.He has been a cybersecurity lawyer for 16 years at the law firm Perkins Coie, which has deep ties to the Democratic Party. A colleague of Mr. Sussmann’s, Marc Elias, was the general counsel to the Clinton campaign. He left the law firm last month.The firm said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Sussmann had also departed: “In light of the special counsel’s action today, Michael Sussmann, who has been on leave from the firm, offered his resignation from the firm in order to focus on his legal defense, and the firm accepted it.”The charge against him centers on a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with the F.B.I. lawyer, James A. Baker, in which Mr. Sussmann relayed concerns about the odd internet data. Cybersecurity researchers had said it might be evidence of clandestine communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Russia’s Alfa Bank.The case against Mr. Sussmann turns on Mr. Baker’s recollection that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client — which Mr. Sussmann denies saying. There were no witnesses to their conversation.The indictment says Mr. Baker later briefed another F.B.I. official — apparently Bill Priestap, the bureau’s top counterintelligence official — about the meeting, and that Mr. Priestap’s notes say Mr. Baker recounted that Mr. Sussmann said he was “not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)In 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified under oath to Congress that he was representing the unnamed technology executive, and his legal team agrees that executive was his client at the meeting — but the only one.Internal law firm billing records, however, show that Mr. Sussmann had been logging his time on Alfa Bank matters to the Clinton campaign, the indictment says, contending that the campaign was his client, too. Those records are said to also show that Mr. Sussmann met or spoke with Mr. Elias about Alfa Bank repeatedly.Seeking to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers had argued to the Justice Department that the billing records were misleading and that he was not at the meeting at the direction or on behalf of the Clinton campaign, according to people familiar with the case. They also denied that the records could be fairly interpreted as showing that he billed the meeting with Mr. Baker to the campaign, as the indictment accuses him.Mr. Durham is known to have been closely scrutinizing the Alfa Bank episode since last fall, including using a grand jury to subpoena documents and question witnesses in ways that suggested he was pursuing a theory that the data had been manipulated or the analysis of it knowingly torqued.The 27-page indictment disclosed much of what he found, including quoting extensively from internal communications of unnamed researchers.The unidentified technology executive whom Mr. Sussmann represented was not the first researcher to scrutinize the data. But his company had access to large amounts of internet data, and he came to play an important role in driving the research and analysis, which he told Mr. Sussmann about around July 2016, the indictment said.In August of that year, the technology executive outlined to other researchers the goal of the effort, saying that unspecified “VIPs” wanted to find “true” information that would merit closer scrutiny. Noting that Mr. Trump had claimed he had no interactions with Russian financial institutions, the executive wrote that data suggesting that was false “would be jackpot” and would “give the base of a very useful narrative.”The executive also wrote: “Being able to provide evidence of *anything* that shows an attempt to behave badly in relation to this, the VIPs would be happy. They’re looking for a true story that could be used as the basis for closer examination.”But one of the researchers working on the project worried that their analysis had weaknesses and that suggested they all shared anti-Trump sentiment.“The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like” Trump, the indictment quoted one unnamed researcher as writing. “This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”In early September, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann met with a New York Times reporter who would later draft a story about Alfa Bank, and also began work on a so-called white paper that would summarize and explain the researchers’ data and analysis, billing the time to the Clinton campaign.On Sept. 12, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann called Mr. Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer, and spoke about his “efforts to communicate” with the Times reporter about the Alfa Bank allegations. Both billed the call to the campaign. And three days later, Mr. Elias exchanged emails with top campaign officials about the matter.In the meantime, on Sept. 14, five days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I., the technology executive emailed three researchers helping him with data. The executive sought to ensure the analysis they were assembling would strike security experts as simply “plausible,” even if it fell short of demonstrably true, prosecutors said.Mr. Sussmann also continued to push the Alfa Bank story to reporters. A month before the election, as Times editors were weighing whether to publish an article the reporter had drafted, Mr. Sussmann told him he should show the editors an opinion essay saying the paper’s investigative reporters had not published as many stories regarding Mr. Trump as other media outlets, the indictment said.Michael E. Sussmann, a lawyer from the firm Perkins Coie, during a cybersecurity conference in 2016.via C-SPANAttorney General William P. Barr appointed Mr. Durham in May 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr stoked expectations among Mr. Trump’s supporters that the prosecutors would uncover grave offenses by high-level government officials and support claims that the Russia investigation was a plot concocted by the so-called deep state to sabotage Mr. Trump.To date, Mr. Durham’s investigation has fallen short of those expectations. Out of office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?”The current attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, said at his confirmation hearing in February that he would let Mr. Durham continue to work and told Congress in July that he agreed with Mr. Barr’s earlier direction that Mr. Durham should eventually submit a report in a form that could be made public.Funding for most Justice Department operations, like much of the federal government, is controlled by an annual budget that covers a fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Spokesmen for Mr. Garland and Mr. Durham have declined to answer questions about whether Mr. Durham’s office has funding approval to continue operating beyond this month.But in announcing the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, the Justice Department said, “The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing.” More