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      Putin Authorized Russian Interference in 2020 Election, Report Says

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      The assessment was the intelligence community’s most comprehensive look at foreign efforts to interfere in the election.WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded.A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.The report also found that neither Russia nor other countries tried to change ballots themselves. Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election. But the officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.Foreign efforts to influence United States elections are likely to continue in coming years, American officials said. The public has become more aware of disinformation efforts, and social media companies act faster to take down fake accounts that spread falsehoods. But a large number of Americans remain open to conspiracy theories pushed by Russia and other adversaries, a circumstance that they will exploit, officials warned.“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”While it was declassified by the Biden administration, the report is based on work done during the Trump administration, according to intelligence officials, reflecting the vastly different views that officers had from their political overseers, who were appointed by Mr. Trump.The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency’s assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.“They were disingenuous in downplaying Russia’s influence operations on behalf of the former president,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “It was a disservice not to level with the public and to try to fudge the intelligence in the way they did.”Some of the report’s details were released in the months leading up to the election, reflecting an effort by the intelligence community to disclose more information about foreign operations during the campaign after its reluctance to do so in 2016 helped misinformation spread.During the 2020 campaign, intelligence officials outlined how Russia was spreading damaging information about Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in an attempt to bolster Mr. Trump’s re-election chances. It also outlined efforts by Iran in the final days before the election to aid Mr. Biden by spreading letters falsely purporting to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group.Accusations of election interference have been some of the most politically divisive in recent years. The intelligence report is akin to a declassified assessment in early 2017 that laid out the conclusions about Russia’s efforts in Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, further entrenched the partisan debate over his relationship with Moscow and cemented his enmity toward intelligence and law enforcement officials.With Mr. Trump out of office and the new report’s conclusions largely made public in releases during the campaign, the findings were not expected to prompt as much partisan fury. But elements of the report are likely to be the subject of political fights.Its assessment that China sat on the sidelines is at odds with what some Republican officials have said. In private briefings on Capitol Hill, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s last director of national intelligence, said Chinese interference was a greater threat in 2020 than Russian operations.The declassified documents released on Tuesday included a dissenting minority view from the national intelligence officer for cyber that suggested that the consensus of the intelligence community was underplaying the threat from China.In a letter in January, Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in support of that minority view and said that the report’s main conclusions about China “fell well short of the mark.” He said the minority conclusion was more than one analyst’s view and argued that some intelligence officials were hesitant to label Chinese actions as influence or interference. Privately, some officials defended the consensus view, saying their reading of the intelligence supported the conclusions that China sought some level of influence but avoided any direct efforts to interfere in the vote.The most detailed material in the assessment was about Russia, which sought to influence how the American public saw the two major candidates “as well as advance Moscow’s longstanding goals of undermining confidence in U.S. election processes.”Moscow used Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian member of Ukraine’s Parliament, to undermine Mr. Biden, the report confirmed. Mr. Derkach released leaked phone calls four times to undermine Mr. Biden and link him to Ukrainian corruption. The report said Mr. Putin “had purview” over the actions of Mr. Derkach, who had ties to Russian intelligence.Citing in one instance a meeting between Mr. Derkach and Mr. Giuliani, intelligence officials warned Mr. Trump in 2019 that Russian intelligence officers were using his personal lawyer as a conduit for misinformation.Mr. Giuliani also provided materials from Ukraine to American investigators to push for federal inquiries into Mr. Biden’s family, a type of operation that the report mentioned as an example of Russia’s covert efforts without providing names or other identifying details.The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.Collecting intelligence to feed to Mr. Trump’s allies and use against Mr. Biden was a priority for Russian intelligence. Moscow’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., conducted a hacking campaign against a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, in what was most likely an attempt to gather information about Mr. Biden’s family and their work for the company, the report confirmed.In the closing weeks of the campaign, intelligence officials also said that Russian hackers had broken into state and local computer networks. But the new report said those efforts were not aimed at changing votes.Unmentioned in this report was the wide-ranging hacking of federal computer systems using a vulnerability in software made by SolarWinds. The absence of a concerted effort by Russia to change votes suggests that Moscow had refocused its intelligence service on a broader effort to attack the U.S. government.Earlier in 2020, American officials thought Iran was likely to stay on the sidelines of the presidential contest. But Iranian hackers did try a last-minute effort to change the vote in Florida and other states. Iranian hackers sent “threatening, spoofed emails” to Democratic voters that purported to be from the Proud Boys, the report said. The group demanded that the recipients change their party affiliation and vote for Mr. Trump. They also pushed a video that supposedly demonstrated voter fraud.The Iranian effort essentially employed reverse psychology. Officials said Iranian operatives hoped the emails would have the opposite effect of the message’s warning, rallying people to vote for Mr. Biden by thinking Mr. Trump’s supporters were playing dirty campaign tricks. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, authorized the campaign, the report said. More

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      Court Dismisses Trump Campaign’s Defamation Suit Against New York Times

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCourt Dismisses Trump Campaign’s Defamation Suit Against New York TimesA New York State judge ruled that the opinion essay at the center of the suit was constitutionally protected speech.The campaign of former President Donald J. Trump sued three news organizations last year. Two of the lawsuits have been dismissed.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMarch 9, 2021, 8:31 p.m. ETA New York State court on Tuesday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the re-election campaign of Donald J. Trump against The New York Times Company, ruling that an opinion essay that argued there had been a “quid pro quo” between the candidate and Russian officials before the 2016 presidential election was protected speech.The Times published the Op-Ed, written by Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times who was not named as a defendant in the suit, in March 2019 under the headline “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.” Mr. Frankel made the case that in “an overarching deal” before the 2016 election, Russian officials would help Mr. Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in exchange for his taking U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Russia direction.Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, Donald J. Trump for President Inc., filed the suit in New York State Supreme Court in February 2020, alleging defamation and accusing The Times of “extreme bias against and animosity toward” the campaign.In his decision on Tuesday, Judge James E. d’Auguste noted three reasons for dismissal. He wrote that Mr. Frankel’s commentary was “nonactionable opinion,” meaning it was constitutionally protected speech; that the Trump campaign did not have standing to sue for defamation; and that the campaign had failed to show that The Times had published the essay with “actual malice.”“The court made clear today a fundamental point about press freedom: We should not tolerate libel suits that are brought by people in power intending to silence and intimidate those who scrutinize them,” David McCraw, The Times’s deputy general counsel, said in a statement.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately reply to a request for comment.The Times had filed a motion to dismiss the case and impose sanctions on the campaign. The judge declined to impose sanctions.The Times was a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press during his four years in office. Before the suit, he accused the paper of “treason,” and he often threatened to take news organizations to court. Last year, the Trump campaign made good on the threats, filing defamation suits against The Times, CNN and The Washington Post. In November, a federal judge dismissed the suit against CNN. The Post suit is pending.In all three actions, the Trump campaign’s lawyer was Charles J. Harder, who represented Terry G. Bollea, the former professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan, when he sued Gawker Media in 2012 over the publication of a sex video. That suit, secretly funded by the conservative tech investor Peter Thiel, resulted in a $140 million decision that prompted Gawker Media’s bankruptcy and sale.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump Will Return to Spotlight With Appearance at CPAC

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPolitical memoA Quiet Life Out of the Spotlight? Not for This Former PresidentMost presidents leave the White House and adopt low profiles. Donald Trump is returning to the national stage with a prominent appearance at a conservative conference on Sunday.A statue of former President Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. His grip on the Republican Party remains strong.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 4:50 p.m. ETFor decades, the normal course of action for presidents departing the White House has been to lie low and let their successors have the stage to themselves in their first months in office.But Donald J. Trump was never a normal president. And less than two months after he departed Washington as a twice-impeached leader whose supporters stormed the Capitol to try to thwart the certification of a democratic election, Mr. Trump will attract a national spotlight as the final act at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday.“His presidency was unlike any other, so why would we expect his post-presidency to be like any other?” said James Carville, the Democratic strategist most associated with former President Bill Clinton’s success in 1992. When Mr. Clinton left office in early 2001, it was also as an impeached president. But Mr. Clinton took at least some time out of view before emerging with a philanthropic group that he went on to build up for years.Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Carville said, “It would have been utterly surprising if he would have gone away and worked on a memoir or taught a Zoom class at a state university.”Mr. Trump is set to deliver a closing speech at CPAC that is expected to be a withering critique of President Biden’s first few weeks in office, touching on topics ranging from shuttered schools to immigration policy, said an adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the unfinished speech.He isn’t expected to deliver a lengthy list of his own accomplishments in office and will aim to sound more like the candidate he was in 2016 than the campaigner he was in 2020, the adviser said. And there will be some focus on the future of the Republican Party.When former President Barack Obama left office, he was photographed kite-surfing in February 2017, a relaxed smile on his face. His predecessor, George W. Bush, made clear his disdain for Washington and his eagerness to escape it. Karl Rove, the architect of Mr. Bush’s campaign, called it “highly unusual” for a former president not to give the incoming chief executive a grace period of his own silence.Mr. Trump has been relatively selective in speaking publicly since he left the White House, after being cautioned by advisers not to say anything that might make him a larger target for the various prosecutors considering or pursuing investigations related to him. Without his Twitter feed and the presence of reporters assigned to cover the presidency, the attention that Mr. Trump craves so deeply has been in short supply.Yet his grip on the Republican Party remains strong. Members of Congress, fearing backlash from Mr. Trump’s voters, have made plain their desire to move past any discussion of responsibility for months of helping Mr. Trump spread the baseless claim that the election was stolen from him by shadowy forces in the Democratic Party.He was widely hailed on the first day of the CPAC convention Friday.“Let me tell you right now,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said, “Donald J. Trump ain’t goin’ anywhere.” Even Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who at one point let it be known that he might vote to convict Mr. Trump in his second impeachment trial, told Fox News this week that he would support Mr. Trump if he were to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.To that end, Mr. Trump is serious at the moment about running for president a third time in 2024. While some aides expect that he ultimately won’t go through with another bid, his musings could have a chilling effect on his party.“There was never a consideration of, Should George H.W. Bush run again?” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the conference. Mr. Trump is “in a different place, and he’s also still incredibly popular with the people who voted for him.”Mr. Trump has discussed with aides the possibility of writing a book. And he has started putting together a political operation with long-serving aides including Bill Stepien, the campaign manager at the end of 2020; Justin Clark, the counsel on his campaign; and Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, his former campaign manager and deputy campaign manager. Brad Parscale, who was removed as the 2020 campaign manager last summer, remains in the Trump circle and is handling Mr. Trump’s email system.Jason Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, remains close to him. And Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is set to take a more active role in his political organization than he previously had.Most members of that group had an hourslong meeting on Thursday with Mr. Trump, for whom few former aides are ever permanently cast aside.The former president is setting up a process for people looking to receive his endorsement, but he has made it clear that he is also determined to extract vengeance against Republicans who crossed him by questioning his lies about the election or by voting in support of impeachment. On Friday, he endorsed a former aide, Max Miller, as a primary challenger to Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, who voted in favor of impeachment.What remains to be seen at CPAC is whether Mr. Trump will attempt to revive his false statements about a “rigged” 2020 election. His advisers are imploring him not to, and they say the hope is that Mr. Trump will focus on suggesting changes to election rules across the country.Even if he doesn’t say it himself, CPAC — once a forum for conservative ideas with a strong libertarian strain — has been transformed into a cult of personality around Mr. Trump. So far at the four-day gathering, a golden statue of Mr. Trump has been pushed around the Orlando, Fla., venue, with no apparent sense of irony. The event is being held away from Washington, its customary home, because regulations intended to slow the spread of Covid-19 are more lax in Florida.Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud have already gotten a boost at the gathering; a panel titled “How Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence” was conducted on Friday.In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Mr. Rove wrote that Mr. Trump should steer away from his desire to discuss payback against other Republicans.“Mr. Trump took this approach in his disastrous campaign stop the night before the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoffs,” Mr. Rove wrote. “If he repeats it at CPAC, he’ll be speaking to the shrinking share of the electorate that believes his every claim.” He urged Mr. Trump to take a “more constructive” approach.Few Republicans believe that Mr. Trump has the discipline to drop his desire for attention for long, if at all. Already, he has shown flashes of behaving like the political gadfly in search of attention he was in the years leading up to his run in 2016.When Mr. Trump was considering a bid for president as early as 2011, he used his Twitter feed and his frequent Fox News appearances to inject himself into nearly every topic in the news cycle. Mr. Trump’s advisers insist that he says he is happier without his Twitter feed.But just a few weeks out of office, Mr. Trump has at times relied on the same impulse: getting media attention for topics in the news, such as the death of the radio host Rush Limbaugh or the car accident that felled the golfer Tiger Woods, to speak to an audience that is already supportive of him.“In 2013 and 2014, Mr. Trump wanted ‘to be part of the action,’” recalled Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016. Now, as a former president, Mr. Nunberg said, Mr. Trump “has ‘to be part of the action’ to keep his precarious grip as the leading contender for the 2024 G.O.P. primary.”“The reality is that speaking at CPAC so soon after becoming only the 10th president to lose re-election is a sign of weakness,” Mr. Nunberg said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      If There Was a Republican Civil War, It Appears to Be Over

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyIf There Was a Republican Civil War, It Appears to Be OverThe party belongs to Trump for as long as he wants it.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 17, 2021A Trump supporter wearing a paper mask of the former president’s face at a rally in Pennsylvania in 2018.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesThat there is a backlash against the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump of inciting a mob against Congress is not that shocking. What is shocking is how fast it happened.Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, was immediately censured by the Louisiana Republican Party. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Senator Cassidy to convict former President Trump,” the party announced on Twitter. Another vote to convict, Richard Burr of North Carolina, was similarly rebuked by his state party, which censured him on Monday. Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are also in hot water with their respective state parties, which see a vote against Trump as tantamount to treason. “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he’s doing,” one Pennsylvania Republican Party official explained. “We sent him there to represent us.”That this backlash was completely expected, even banal, should tell you everything you need to know about the so-called civil war in the Republican Party. It doesn’t exist. Outside of a rump faction of (occasional) dissidents, there is no truly meaningful anti-Trump opposition within the party. The civil war, such as it was, ended four-and-a-half years ago when Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president.If there’s a conflict, it’s less a war and more a small skirmish with an outmatched and outnumbered opponent. Seventy-five percent of Republicans want Trump to continue to “play a prominent role in the Republican Party,” according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University, and 87 percent say he should be allowed to “hold elected office in the future.” A recent survey from Morning Consult likewise shows Trump far ahead of his rivals in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, with 54 percent support versus 12 percent for the runner-up, Mike Pence.The Republican Party belongs to Trump for as long as he wants it. Its most prominent politicians will follow his lead and attempt to build on his example. His children and in-laws will have a place as heirs to his legacy. If Trump decides to seek the White House for a second term, the nomination is almost certainly his to lose.What does it mean, in practice, for Trump to retain this strong a hold over the Republican Party? Since “Trumpism” isn’t a policy platform as much as it is a singular devotion to the man himself, a Trumpified Republican Party is one in which candidates do everything they can to shape themselves in his image. Just look at the candidates who would like to be president, if Trump doesn’t run. Most of them were, at some point before he became president, critics, with harsh words for Trump’s policies, personality and proclivities. These days, however, they’re his biggest fans.Ted Cruz has adopted a version of Trump’s Twitter presence, using the platform to stoke anti-liberal resentment and attack perceived cultural enemies. The Texas senator, who by virtue of his legislative seat and second-place finish in the last Republican primary, is one of the most high-profile politicians in the country. But he has more to say about personnel changes at Disney than the problems facing his constituents.Nikki Haley hasn’t tried to emulate Trump, but she knows not to keep too much distance between them. In December, when Trump was still working to overturn the election through the courts, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor defended him to Politico’s Tim Alberta. “He believes he’s following that oath,” Haley said of the then-president. “This would be different if he was being deceptive.” Just a few weeks later, after the attack on the Capitol, when it looked for a moment like Republicans might break with Trump, she told a crowd at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting that “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.” But when it was clear that Trump was still in command of the party, she switched gears. “Give the man a break!” she said in an interview on Fox News in late January arguing against impeachment.Even state and legislative candidates are borrowing from Trump and aligning themselves with his political movement. Here where I live, in Virginia, Amanda Chase and Kirk Cox, Republican candidates for governor, are running on guns and “cancel culture,” with Chase still treating Trump as if he were the rightful president. Josh Mandel, running for Senate in Ohio, reintroduced himself to voters as a pro-MAGA Republican. “I’m going to Washington to advance a Trump America First Agenda and to stand up for economic freedom and individual liberty,” he told Fox News.The impeachment trial was the Republican Party’s last chance to rid itself of Trump. Had 10 more Republicans joined their colleagues in the Senate, the former president would have been on the way to being barred from future office. Presidential hopefuls like Cruz (or Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio) would have cleared out at least one obstacle to their ambition. But, in a repeat of the 2016 primary, no one wants to take the risk of losing his supporters and thus any chance at the nomination or the White House.Just as it was five years ago, the hope is to come ahead somehow without confronting Trump, to win his voters without challenging his status among Republicans. Maybe, if Trump leaves politics to monetize his post-presidency, this will work. So far, that is not looking likely; Trump still speaks as if he is the party and the party is him. In a statement attacking Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, Trump bragged that he was responsible for what Republican success there was last year. “In 2020, I received the most votes of any sitting president in history, almost 75,000,000. Every incumbent House Republican won for the first time in decades, and we flipped 15 seats, almost costing Nancy Pelosi her job.”With Trump’s grip on the party and its image what it is, the outcome we’re most likely to see is the one we already experienced: a Republican Party with Trump at its head, committed to nothing but his insatiable ego.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Fact-Checking Trump's Lawyers on Day 4 of Impeachment Trial

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentFriday’s HighlightsDay 4: Key TakeawaysWhat Is Incitement?Trump’s LawyersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFact CheckTrump’s Lawyers Repeated Inaccurate Claims in Impeachment TrialThe three members of the former president’s legal team made a number of misleading or false claims about the events of Jan. 6, antifa, the impeachment process and voter fraud.Former President Donald J. Trump’s defense lawyers Bruce L. Castor Jr. and Michael van der Veen arriving at the Capitol on Friday.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesFeb. 12, 2021Updated 7:52 p.m. ETAs they mounted their defense of the former president on Friday, Donald J. Trump’s lawyers made a number of inaccurate or misleading claims about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s remarks, the impeachment process and 2020 election. Many claims were echoes of right-wing talking points popularized on social media or ones that were spread by Mr. Trump himself.Here’s a fact check.Mr. Trump’s lawyers were misleading about what happened on Jan. 6.What Was Said“Instead of expressing a desire that the joint session be prevented from conducting its business, the entire premise of his remarks was that the democratic process would and should play out according to the letter of the law.” — Michael van der Veen, lawyer for Mr. TrumpFalse. In his speech on Jan. 6 and before, Mr. Trump repeatedly urged former Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of the Electoral College votes, saying Mr. Pence should “send it back to the States to recertify.” Mr. Trump continued his speech on Jan. 6 saying he was “challenging the certification of the election.”What Was Said“Far from promoting insurrection of the United States, the president’s remarks explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully and patriotically.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is exaggerated. Mr. Trump used the phrase “peacefully and patriotically” once in his speech, compared with 20 uses of the word “fight.”What Was Said“As everyone knows, the president had spoken at hundreds of large rallies across the country over the past five years. There had never been any moblike or riotous behaviors.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is misleading. While no other Trump rally has led to a siege of the Capitol, there have been episodes of violence, sometimes encouraged by the president. Less than two months before the riot on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump waved to supporters who had gathered in Washington to protest his election loss and who later violently clashed with counterprotesters. Previously, other supporters had attacked counterprotesters, and in one case a BBC cameraman, at several Trump rallies. Mr. Trump called one victim “disgusting” and offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who had punched a protester.What Was Said“Given the timeline of events, the criminals at the Capitol weren’t there at the Ellipse to even hear the president’s words. They were more than a mile away engaged in their preplanned assault on this very building.” — Bruce L. Castor Jr., another lawyer for Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. It is true that the Capitol was first breached before Mr. Trump had concluded his remarks, but this does not rule out the possibility that some rioters were inspired by his speech. In fact, several have said that they were.For example, Robert L. Bauer, who had attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 and entered the Capitol, told law enforcement that when Mr. Trump told the crowd to march to the Capitol (about 16 minutes into his speech), many heeded those words. Mr. Bauer “reiterated that he marched to the U.S. Capitol because President Trump said to do so,” according to a criminal complaint.Mr. Castor’s reasoning that Mr. Trump could not have incited the crowd to riot because the siege was preplanned also ignores an argument that House managers had made this week: Mr. Trump had spent months trying to invalidate the results of the election and encouraging his supporters to act.What Was Said“At no point was the president informed the vice president was in any danger.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is disputed. Comments by Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, suggest otherwise. This week, Mr. Tuberville recounted that he and Mr. Trump had spoken just as the Capitol was breached before the phone call was cut short.“I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Mr. Tuberville said.They made inaccurate references to antifa, left-wing protests and the 2016 election.What Was Said“One of the first people arrested was the leader of antifa.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is misleading. Mr. van der Veen was most likely referring to John E. Sullivan, a Utah man who was charged on Jan. 14 with violent entry and disorderly conduct. Mr. Sullivan, an activist, said he was there to film the siege. He had previously referred to antifa — a loosely affiliated group of antifascist activists that has no leader — on social media, but he has repeatedly denied being a member of the movement.The F.B.I. has said there is no evidence that supporters of the antifa movement had participated in the Capitol siege.What Was Said“As many will recall, last summer the White House was faced with violent rioters night after night. They repeatedly attacked Secret Service officers, and at one point pierced a security wall, culminating in the clearing of Lafayette Square.” — Mr. van der VeenFalse. This timeline is wrong. Law enforcement officials began clearing Lafayette Square after 6 p.m. on June 1 to allow Mr. Trump to pose with a Bible in front of a church, not because of a breach. Additional security barriers were installed after those events, according to local news reports and the National Park Service.What Was Said“The entire Democratic Party and national news media spent the last four years repeating without any evidence that the 2016 election had been hacked.” — Mr. van der VeenFalse. United States intelligence agencies concluded years ago that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 election. The Republican-led Senate agreed last year that Russia had disrupted that election to help Mr. Trump.They mischaracterized the impeachment process.What Was Said“The House waited to deliver the articles to the Senate for almost two weeks, only after Democrats had secured control over the Senate. In fact, contrary to their claim that the only reason they held it was because Senator McConnell wouldn’t accept the article, Representative Clyburn made clear they had considered holding the articles for over 100 days to provide President Biden with a clear pathway to implement his agenda.” — David I. Schoen, another lawyer for Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. Democrats had considered delivering the article of impeachment earlier, but Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the majority leader, precluded the possibility. In a letter on Jan. 8, he informed Republican lawmakers that the Senate was in recess and “may conduct no business until Jan. 19.”Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, suggested withholding the articles longer after Mr. McConnell made his timeline known. In an interview with CNN, Mr. Clyburn suggested Mr. McConnell was “doing what he thinks he needs to do to be disruptive of President Biden,” but Democrats might respond to that tactical delay with one of their own to “give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running.”What Was Said“Our Constitution and any basic sense of fairness require that every legal process with significant consequences for a person’s life, including impeachment, requires due process under the law, which includes fact-finding and the establishment of a legitimate, evidentiary record. Even last year, it required investigation by the House. Here, President Trump and his counsel were given no opportunity to review evidence or question its propriety.” — Mr. SchoenThis is misleading. The point about lack of “due process” is one that Mr. Trump’s lawyers and supporters had argued during his first impeachment and one that law scholars have dismissed.There are no “enforceable rights” to due process in a House inquiry, and while those rights exist in the Senate trial, they are limited, said Frank O. Bowman III, a law professor at the University of Missouri and an expert on impeachment.“One justice suggested something like that if it were found that the Senate was deciding cases on a coin flip, that might violate due process,” Mr. Bowman said. “Anything short of that, basically court’s not going to get involved.”Moreover, a senior aide on the House impeachment team said that the Trump legal team was given the trial material, including all video and audio footage, before the start of the proceedings.They repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims about voter fraud.What Was Said“Based on an analysis of publicly available voter data that the ballot rejection rate in Georgia in 2016 was approximately 6.42 percent, and even though a tremendous amount of new, first-time mail-in ballots were included in the 2020 count, the Georgia rejection rate in 2020 was a mere 0.4 of 1 percent, a drop-off from 6.42 percent to 0.4 percent.” — Mr. CastorThis is misleading. Georgia elections officials have repeatedly debunked this claim, which conflates the overall rejection rate for mail-in ballots in 2016 to the rejection rate specifically for signature mismatch in 2020. (Ballots can also be rejected for arriving late or not having a signature, among other reasons.)In 2016, Georgia rejected about 6.4 percent of all returned mail-in ballots and 0.24 percent of those ballots because of signature-matching issues. It is unclear what the 0.4 percent refers to, but in both 2018 and 2020, Georgia rejected 0.15 percent of mail-in ballots because of signature-matching issues.What Was Said“President Trump wanted the signature verification to be done in public. How can a request for signature verifications to be done in public be a basis for a charge for inciting a riot?” — Mr. CastorThis is misleading. Contrary to Mr. Trump’s belief and Mr. Castor’s repetition of it, Georgia does verify signatures. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state noted that the state trained officials on signature matching and created a portal that checked and confirmed voters’ driver’s licenses. In a news conference last month debunking Mr. Trump’s claims, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, explained that the secretary of state’s office also brought in signature experts to check over 15,000 ballots. They discovered issues with two, and after further examination, concluded that they were legitimate.“Shockingly, the disinformation continues,” Mr. Sterling tweeted during the trial.Nicholas Fandos More

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      Manafort Can't Be Prosecuted After Trump Pardon, New York Court Rules

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyManafort Can’t Be Prosecuted in New York After Trump Pardon, Court RulesThe Court of Appeals let stand a lower-court ruling that the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution of Paul Manafort was barred by the double jeopardy rule.Mr. Manafort was serving a sentence of seven and a half years in federal prison after being convicted at a 2018 financial fraud trial.Credit…Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesFeb. 8, 2021Updated 6:52 p.m. ETThe Manhattan district attorney’s attempt to prosecute former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman was dealt a final blow when New York’s highest court said quietly last week it would not review lower court rulings on the case.The court’s decision brings to an end the district attorney’s quest to ensure that the campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, will face state charges for mortgage fraud and other state felonies, crimes similar to those for which he was convicted in federal court and then pardoned by Mr. Trump.When the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, first brought charges against Mr. Manafort in March 2019, it was widely understood that he was doing so to make sure that Mr. Manafort would face prosecution even if Mr. Trump decided to pardon him.At the time, Mr. Manafort was serving a sentence of seven and a half years in a Pennsylvania federal prison after being convicted at a 2018 financial fraud trial by prosecutors working for the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.In October, a New York appeals court found that Mr. Vance’s efforts to try Mr. Manafort violated the state’s double jeopardy law. Mr. Vance took the case to the Court of Appeals.Then, in December, Mr. Trump did pardon Mr. Manafort, 71, who had been released to home confinement in Northern Virginia, after his lawyers argued that he was at risk of contracting the coronavirus.A lawyer for Mr. Manafort, Todd Blanche, said that he had received the high court’s one-paragraph decision Monday and that he was happy with the ruling. “Mr. Manafort is similarly pleased with the result,” he said.A spokesman for Mr. Vance’s office declined to comment.The charges that Mr. Vance brought against Mr. Manafort were the result of an investigation, started in 2017, into loans the campaign chairman had received. Mr. Vance ultimately accused Mr. Manafort of having falsified business records in order to obtain the loans.At the time, Mr. Vance said that Mr. Manafort had not “been held accountable” for the charges at hand. But in a ruling in December 2019, a judge threw out the charges, finding that they violated the double jeopardy law, which says a defendant cannot be tried twice for the same offense.The judge, Justice Maxwell Wiley, said at the time that “the law of double jeopardy in New York State provides a very narrow window for prosecution.”Mr. Vance’s office has taken action against other associates of Mr. Trump whom the former president has pardoned in federal cases. Last week, The New York Times reported that Manhattan prosecutors had opened an investigation against Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House strategist who was pardoned by Mr. Trump during the president’s final hours in office.But the double jeopardy defense is unlikely to help Mr. Bannon in the same way it helped Mr. Manafort, because Mr. Bannon had not yet been tried, let alone convicted.“The basis for the prosecution being improper doesn’t in any way apply to Mr. Bannon as far as I can tell,” Mr. Blanche said.While the U.S. Constitution bars being tried twice for the same crime, the Supreme Court has long held that there is one exception: Federal and state prosecutions for the same conduct are allowed because the federal government and states are understood to be independent sovereigns. In 2019, the court affirmed that exception.That year, the state legislature in New York passed a measure that lawmakers argued was necessary in order to check Mr. Trump’s pardon power and to ensure that his associates were not permitted to escape justice. The law, signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in October 2019, allows state prosecutors to pursue charges against individuals who have been granted presidential pardons for similar crimes.State Senator Todd Kaminsky, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor who sponsored the bill, said that the Manafort case drove home the need for the legislation.“It really underscored why we had to take legislative action that we did so that states can pursue their own path even if there is a federal pardon,” he said. The law would make it easier for state prosecutors to pursue those on Mr. Trump’s pardon list.The law passed too late to apply to Mr. Manafort’s case. The result, Mr. Kaminsky said, was that Mr. Vance’s office had to contort itself to try to show that the acts that Mr. Manafort had been charged with in federal court were not the same as those they were pursuing. It is possible, though unlikely, that Mr. Manafort may still face federal charges. Last month, Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor from the special counsel’s office, argued that the wording of Mr. Trump’s pardons had been “oddly” drafted. Rather than relieving those who had been pardoned from all potential liability for their actions, Mr. Weissmann argued, the language only narrowly covered their convictions. In Mr. Manafort’s case, that might leave the door open to new charges, including on crimes that Mr. Manafort admitted he was guilty of as part of a plea deal. Those include 10 counts of financial crimes, as well as other offenses.William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Biden Administration Urged to Drop Julian Assange Case

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCivil-Liberties Groups Ask Biden Justice Dept. to Drop Julian Assange CaseA Friday deadline in the London extradition case may force the Biden administration to decide whether to keep pursuing a Trump-era policy.The Trump administration had sought to have the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange extradited to the United States to face a trial on potentially precedent-setting Espionage Act charges.Credit…Matt Dunham/Associated PressFeb. 8, 2021Updated 3:58 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — A coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration on Monday to drop efforts to extradite the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain and prosecute him, calling the Trump-era case against him “a grave threat to press freedom.”The coalition sent a letter urging a change in course before a Friday deadline for the Justice Department to file a brief in a London court. American prosecutors are due to explain in detail their decision — formally lodged on Jan. 19, the last full day of the Trump administration — to appeal a ruling blocking their request to extradite Mr. Assange.The litigation deadline may force the new administration to confront a decision: whether to press on with the Trump-era approach to Mr. Assange, or to instead drop the matter.Democrats like the new Biden team are no fan of Mr. Assange, whose publication in 2016 of Democratic emails stolen by Russia aided Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory over Hillary Clinton. But the charges center instead on his 2010 publication of American military and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, and they raise profound First Amendment issues.“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do,” the letter said, adding: “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”The Freedom of the Press Foundation organized the letter. Other signers — about two dozen groups — included the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Project on Government Oversight and Reporters Without Borders.“Most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a separate statement. “President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.”For now, the Justice Department remains committed to appealing the denial of its request to extradite Mr. Assange, said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for its National Security Division.The deadline to either continue working to extradite Mr. Assange by filing the brief or drop the matter reflects a common legal policy dilemma when a new administration takes over and confronts matters inherited from its predecessor. Newly installed officials face too many issues to make careful decisions on all at once, so some get punted.But litigation calendars can force early decisions about whether to proceed or shift direction in some cases. It is often easier to stay the course, based on an argument that the issue can be revisited later when there is more time. But once the new administration has started down that path, it owns the policy as a matter of political and bureaucratic reality and so can effectively get locked in.Complicating matters for making any decision to keep or jettison the Trump-era policy to go after Mr. Assange with criminal charges, the Biden administration’s intended leadership team is not yet in place at the Justice Department. The Senate has yet to confirm Mr. Biden’s nominee to be attorney general, Judge Merrick B. Garland.In the meantime, the department is being temporarily led by a caretaker career official, Monty Wilkinson, the acting attorney general to whom the letter was addressed.After Mr. Assange published the documents provided by Ms. Manning in 2010, the Obama administration engaged in extensive deliberations under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. over whether to prosecute Mr. Assange but never charged him with a crime.By contrast, Ms. Manning, a low-level Army intelligence analyst who downloaded the archives of documents and sent them to WikiLeaks, was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013 of leaking the documents and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence in 2017.But law enforcement officials under Mr. Obama shied away from bringing charges against Mr. Assange. They feared that there was no legally meaningful way to distinguish his actions from those of conventional investigative national-security journalism as practiced by mainstream news organizations like The New York Times. The Obama team did not want to create a precedent that could chill or cripple traditional journalism, according to people familiar with its deliberations.In March 2018, however, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump Justice Department obtained a grand jury indictment against Mr. Assange. It initially sidestepped press freedom issues by narrowly accusing him of participating in a hacking-related criminal conspiracy with Ms. Manning, rather than focusing on his publication of government secrets.That indictment was unsealed in April 2019, when Mr. Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and arrested. (He had taken refuge there in 2012, initially to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questions about sexual assault accusations, which he has denied. Sweden had rescinded its arrest warrant for Mr. Assange in 2017.)The Justice Department — by then under Attorney General William P. Barr — then obtained a superseding indictment expanding the charges against Mr. Assange to include allegations that his journalistic-style activities violated the Espionage Act. A second superseding indictment later added more allegations related to the notion of a hacking conspiracy.Notably, there is some overlap in personnel from earlier internal debates about the dilemma raised by Mr. Assange. The top national security official in the Trump Justice Department, John C. Demers, remains in place atop its National Security Division for now; the Biden transition asked him to temporarily stay on for continuity purposes even as most other Trump political appointees resigned.Mr. Demers’s predecessor from 2013 to 2016, John Carlin, has returned to the Justice Department and is currently serving as the acting deputy attorney general. Mr. Carlin’s predecessor, Lisa O. Monaco, who ran the National Security Division from 2011 to 2013, is Mr. Biden’s nominee to be deputy attorney general but has not yet been confirmed.The letter from the rights groups portrayed the Trump-era Justice Department’s decision to proceed against Mr. Assange as jeopardizing journalism “that is crucial to democracy” more broadly, and noted that the Trump administration had “positioned itself as an antagonist to the institution of a free and unfettered press in numerous ways.”They added: “We are deeply concerned about the way that a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveraged — perhaps by a future administration — against publishers and journalists of all stripes.”Since the original indictment was unsealed, lawyers for Mr. Assange have fought the extradition request, arguing that the United States was prosecuting him for political reasons.A British judge in January largely rejected those arguments, holding that he had been charged “in good faith.” But she denied his extradition anyway — citing harsh conditions for security-related prisoners in American jails and the risk that Mr. Assange might be driven to commit suicide. It is that rationale that the brief due on Friday would appeal.Elian Peltier More

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      Kevin Clinesmith, Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer, Is Sentenced to Probation

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEx-F.B.I. Lawyer Who Altered Email in Russia Case Is Sentenced to ProbationA judge rebuffed a request by prosecutors to impose a prison sentence on Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted doctoring an email used to help authorize a wiretap on a former Trump campaign aide.The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The judge overseeing the case against a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, said the destruction of his career had already provided significant punishment.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesJan. 29, 2021Updated 6:45 p.m. ETA former F.B.I. lawyer who has admitted doctoring an email during preparations to seek renewed court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide during the Russia investigation was sentenced on Friday to one year of probation and 400 hours of community service — but no prison time.Prosecutors led by John H. Durham, a special counsel scrutinizing the government’s actions in the Russia investigation, had asked the judge overseeing the high-profile case against the former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, to impose several months of prison time.But the judge, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, said the destruction of Mr. Clinesmith’s career — and being vilified in a “media hurricane” — had already provided significant punishment and sent a deterrent message.“Anybody who has watched what Mr. Clinesmith has suffered is not someone who will readily act in that fashion,” Judge Boasberg said. “Weighing all of these factors together — both in terms of the damages he caused and what he has suffered and the positives in his own life — I believe a probationary sentence is appropriate here and will therefore impose it.”The surveillance of the former aide, Carter Page, in 2016 and 2017 was a minor part of the overall Russia investigation. But it has become a political flash point because the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered numerous errors and omissions in its four court applications, flaws that President Donald J. Trump and his allies used as fodder in portraying the Russia inquiry as a plot by the so-called deep state.Mr. Clinesmith’s misdeed was the most egregious of the problems uncovered by the inspector general. In June 2017, as the F.B.I. was preparing to seek the final renewal of the order, an F.B.I. official who was going to sign a sworn description of the facts asked Mr. Clinesmith to seek clarity from the C.I.A. about whether Mr. Page was a source for the agency, as he had claimed.In fact, Mr. Page had spoken to the C.I.A. in the past about his interactions with Russian intelligence agents — a material fact that all four wiretap applications omitted, and that might have made him look less suspicious had the court been told about it. But Mr. Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’” into a C.I.A. email and showed it to his colleague, which satisfied him and prevented the problem from coming to light internally.The inspector general referred Mr. Clinesmith for a criminal investigation, and the matter was assigned to Mr. Durham, a United States attorney from Connecticut whom the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, had assigned to investigate the Russia investigation. The Clinesmith case is the only criminal prosecution Mr. Durham’s team has brought.When Mr. Clinesmith pleaded guilty last year to making a false statement, he acknowledged that he had intentionally altered the email and created a false record. But he also claimed that he did not intentionally mislead his colleague because at the time he believed the words he inserted were accurate. He had separately told his colleague by text that Mr. Page was not a C.I.A. source, but rather a subsource of someone else who had talked to the agency.In arguing for prison time on Friday, prosecutors suggested that Mr. Clinesmith’s explanation made no sense and that he must also have known he was misleading his colleagues, pointing to evidence that he wanted to avoid the F.B.I. having to explain to the court why it had omitted that fact of Mr. Page’s help to the C.I.A. from all the applications.But Judge Boasberg said that based on the record, he believed Mr. Clinesmith’s version.Judge Boasberg is also the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handled the disputed wiretaps of Mr. Page, although he did not personally sign off on any of them. After the disclosures, Judge Boasberg ordered the F.B.I. to review all other wiretap cases Mr. Clinesmith had been involved with and the bureau adopted more stringent rules for its national security wiretap applications.Mr. Page spoke at the hearing, which was conducted by video and teleconference because of the pandemic. Mr. Page said he had been harmed by the invasion of his privacy and public knowledge that he was under scrutiny as part of the Russia investigation, including losing friendships and receiving death threats.Mr. Page emphasized that it became publicly known that he was being investigated as part of the inquiry into whether Trump associates had conspired with Russia in its 2016 election interference — which Mr. Page termed a “manufactured scandal.”Judge Boasberg later suggested that the intelligence court may well have approved the last wiretap extension even if it had been told about the C.I.A. issue, citing the numerous other flaws in the applications.Notably, Mr. Page did not ask Judge Boasberg to impose prison time on Mr. Clinesmith. He also volunteered to serve as a “friend of the court” in future surveillance court matters, citing his own civil liberties experiences as a target of surveillance since deemed improper. (The Justice Department has said it no longer believes the full range of evidence available to it by the final two extensions met legal standards to invade Mr. Page’s privacy.)Mr. Clinesmith also spoke, expressing contrition for what he portrayed as a failure of judgment and talking about the effect of losing his job and reputation. His list of apologies included one to his wife — who is pregnant with their first child — for the stress and loss of his $150,000 income, and one to the F.B.I. for bringing public opprobrium upon it and for the extra work colleagues had to do in remedial actions.“I apologize to everyone,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More