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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

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      Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTwitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. SaysDouglass Mackey, a right-wing provocateur, was accused of spreading memes that made Hillary Clinton supporters falsely believe they could cast ballots in 2016 via text message.Douglass Mackey was arrested on Wednesday in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.Credit…Andrew Seng for The New York TimesJan. 27, 2021Updated 4:46 p.m. ETA man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by phone instead of going to the polls.Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked Alaska,” who was arrested after participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.“With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” said Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office is prosecuting the case.Mrs. Clinton was not named in the complaint, but a person briefed on the investigation confirmed that she was the presidential candidate described in the charging documents.A lawyer for Mr. Mackey declined to comment.Mr. Mackey, who was released from custody on Wednesday on a $50,000 bond, faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.The case will test the novel use of federal civil rights laws as a tool to hold people accountable for misinformation campaigns intended to interfere with elections, a problem that has recently become an urgent priority for social media platforms and law enforcement officials to stop.It has become a game of whack-a-mole to police users like Mr. Mackey, who prosecutors said would simply open new Twitter accounts after his old ones were suspended. Mr. Mackey used four different Twitter accounts from 2014 to 2018, the complaint said, always seeking to hide his true identity from the public.The goal of Mr. Mackey’s campaign, according to prosecutors, was to influence people to vote in a “legally invalid manner.”In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda.Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it made the M.I.T. Media Lab’s list of the top 150 influencers in the 2016 election, ranking ahead of the Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge Report and CBS News.Twitter shut down the account in 2016, one month before the election, for violating the company’s rules by “participating in targeted abuse.” At that time, the account had about 58,000 followers. Three days later, an associate of Mr. Mackey’s opened a new account for him, prosecutors said, which was also quickly suspended.It was not clear how Mr. Mackey became connected to Mr. Gionet, or “Baked Alaska,” who was also a popular social media figure among white nationalists and far-right activists. A lawyer for Mr. Gionet declined to comment.Mr. Mackey is a Vermont native who graduated from Middlebury College. He worked for five years as an economist at a Brooklyn-based research firm, John Dunham & Associates, until his termination in the summer of 2016, a company representative said.The complaint showed a surgical precision in the disinformation campaign by Mr. Mackey and his four co-conspirators. In private group conversations on Twitter, they discussed how to insert their memes into trending conversations online, and dissected changes in wording and colors to make their messages more effective.Mr. Mackey was obsessed with his posts going viral, the complaint said, once telling his associates, “THE MEMES ARE SPREADING.” He and his co-conspirators joked about tricking “dopey” liberals.Their effort to misinform voters began after the group saw a similar campaign intended to deceive voters in the 2016 referendum in Britain on whether to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, according to the complaint.Mr. Mackey and his associates created their own version, sharing photos that urged Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to vote for her on Election Day using a hashtag on Twitter or Facebook. To make the images look more legitimate, they affixed the logo of her campaign and linked to her website.Some of their memes appeared to target Black and Latino voters. One image had a Black woman standing in front of a sign supporting Mrs. Clinton, telling people to vote for Mrs. Clinton by texting a specific number. Mr. Mackey shared a similar image written in Spanish, prosecutors said.Less than a week before Election Day, the complaint said, Mr. Mackey sent a message on Twitter: “Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”Around that time, Twitter began removing the images with false information and suspended Mr. Mackey’s account. But the memes had already taken on a life of their own, prosecutors said, as his associates continued to share them with a wider audience.Alan Feuer contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In Trump’s Pardons, Disdain for Accountability

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      Election Results: Biden Wins

      Electoral College Votes

      Congress Defies Mob

      Georgia Runoff Results

      Democrats Win Senate Control

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