Presidential Election of 2020

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    Atlanta Prosecutors Contact Firms That Consulted With Trump Campaign

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    The two companies were hired in 2020 to investigate voter fraud, but reported that they found no proof that significant fraud had occurred.Prosecutors in Atlanta investigating election interference by Donald J. Trump and his allies recently contacted two consulting companies that were hired by the Trump campaign in 2020 to research myriad claims of vote fraud but ended up finding no proof that significant fraud had occurred, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.Despite the findings of the two companies, Simpatico Software Systems and Berkeley Research Group, Mr. Trump continues to this day to make false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, even though no credible evidence has emerged to support that and many of his election conspiracy theories have been debunked.The interest in the companies and their work in Georgia and several other battleground states could be used by prosecutors to undercut claims by Mr. Trump and his allies that they had legitimate grievances about the election. The firms had previously been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors. The latest development regarding prosecutors in Atlanta was reported earlier by The Washington Post.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is weighing an array of potential charges against Mr. Trump, including whether he violated state laws with his post-election phone calls to state officials, including a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump said he needed to “find” 11,780 votes, or one more than his margin of defeat in the state. Ms. Willis is looking into a number of other post-election moves by the Trump team, including a plan to create a slate of fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump despite President Biden’s victory in Georgia. More than half of the electors have taken immunity deals.A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them. Ms. Willis will need to seek any indictments from a regular grand jury, and has indicated that she will do so in the first half of August.Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at the University of Alabama, said that Ms. Willis is probably interested in the companies’ failure to find significant fraud because it could help establish that Mr. Trump acted with criminal intent.If Ms. Willis does bring charges, Ms. Vance said, she will have to prove “that Trump knew that he lost the election and was in essence not asking them to find legitimate votes, but asking them to steal votes for him.”Both Ms. Willis’s office and the two companies declined to comment.During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several Trump aides and allies testified that it was clear that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.One of the campaign’s lawyers, Alex Cannon, who was a contact point for Simpatico, told Mr. Trump’s son Eric around Thanksgiving 2020 that fraud claims coming in were largely unreliable, according to testimony Mr. Cannon gave to House investigators in their inquiry into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Asked whether Eric Trump “expressed any dismay or concern about the conclusion that you were sharing with him,” Mr. Cannon said, “I think he was dismayed. I think that’s a fair characterization.” Mr. Cannon added that more senior campaign lawyers were “not surprised” that the vast majority of claims were unfounded.By the time the slate of fake electors convened in Atlanta on Dec. 14, 2020, Mr. Trump had already lost three different counts of the vote and the state’s Republican leadership had certified the outcome.Federal prosecutors, who are conducting criminal investigations of Mr. Trump independent of the Georgia inquiry, have also been focusing on whether Mr. Trump and his aides knew that he had lost the race but continued to use bogus claims of election fraud to raise money from Trump supporters, in potential violation of federal wire fraud statutes.Ken Block, the owner of the Rhode Island-based Simpatico Software, has previously said that he received a subpoena for documents from federal prosecutors. Immediately after the election, he said, a Trump campaign adviser asked him to evaluate specific allegations of election fraud in six states — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. Mr. Block said that his company disproved all of the allegations “and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” His company was paid $735,000 for the work.Soon after hiring Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired Berkeley Research Group, a California-based consulting firm that focuses on corporate finance and investigations. A federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.In late April, The New York Times reported that the federal grand jury had been asking questions about whether Mr. Trump was briefed on the results of the Berkeley Research investigation, which also found no evidence of widespread fraud. The company was paid about $600,000 for its work, records show. More

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      The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold

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      There are very real — and substantial — policy differences separating the Democratic and Republican Parties. At the same time, what scholars variously describe as misperception and even delusion is driving up the intensity of contemporary partisan hostility.Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, describes some of these distorted views in his recently published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide”:Seventy-five percent of Democrats said Republicans were closed-minded, and 55 percent of Republicans said that Democrats were immoral (Pew Research Center, 2019). Nearly eight in 10 say that the two parties “fundamentally disagree” about core American values. More than 70 percent of all voters think those in the other party are “a clear and present danger to the American way of life.”At an extreme level, James L. Martherus, Andres G. Martinez, Paul K. Piff and Alexander G. Theodoridis write in a July 2019 article “Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization,” “a substantial proportion of partisans are willing to directly say that they view members of the opposing party as less evolved than supporters of their own party.”In two surveys, the authors found that the mean score on what they call a “blatant difference measure” between Republicans and Democrats ranged from 31 to 36 points. The surveys asked respondents to rate members of each party on a 100-point “ascent of man” scale. Both Democrats and Republicans placed members of the opposition more than 30 points lower on the scale than members of their own party.“As a point of comparison,” they wrote, “these gaps are more than twice the dehumanization differences found by Kteily et al. (2015) for Muslims, 14 points, and nearly four times the gap for Mexican immigrants, 7.9 points, when comparing these groups with evaluations of ‘average Americans.’”A separate paper published last year, “Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy and Support for the Capitol Attacks,” by Miles T. Armaly, David T. Buckley and Adam M. Enders, shows that support for political violence correlates with a combination of white identity, belief in extreme religions and conspiracy thinking.“Perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities and support for conspiratorial information,” they wrote, “are positively related to each other and support for the Capitol riot.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, noted in an email that “much research has shown that Americans’ views of the other party are in fact driven by misperceptions and falsehoods.” Bringing Republicans and Democrats together and revealing their commonalities, she continued, “only lessens affective polarization. It cannot eliminate it.”Why?“Because humans are innately good at finding patterns and establishing stereotypes,” Wronski wrote, citing research showing that just as “Democrats overestimate the percentage of wealthy Republicans, Republicans overestimate the number of L.G.B.T.+ Democrats.”Since these beliefs have their foundations in core values, self-image and group identities, Wronski wrote, “people are motivated to defend them. Protecting your identity becomes more important than embracing the truth.”In other words, misperceptions and delusions interact dangerously with core political and moral disagreements.In March 2021, Michael Dimock, the president of the Pew Research Center, published “America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide,” in which he explored some of this country’s vulnerabilities to extreme, emotionally driven polarization:America’s relatively rigid, two-party electoral system stands apart by collapsing a wide range of legitimate social and political debates into a singular battle line that can make our differences appear even larger than they may actually be. And when the balance of support for these political parties is close enough for either to gain near-term electoral advantage — as it has in the U.S. for more than a quarter century — the competition becomes cutthroat, and politics begins to feel zero-sum, where one side’s gain is inherently the other’s loss.At the same time, Dimock continued:Various types of identities have become ‘stacked’ on top of people’s partisan identities. Race, religion and ideology now align with partisan identity in ways that they often didn’t in eras when the two parties were relatively heterogenous coalitions.The result is that an individual whose party loses on Election Day can feel that his or her identity has suffered a defeat.In separate analyses, Pew has demonstrated the scope of mutual misperception by Democrats and Republicans. In an August 2022 study, “As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System,” Pew found that majorities of both parties viewed the opposition as immoral, dishonest, closed-minded and unintelligent — judgments that grew even more adverse, by 13 to 28 points, from 2016 to 2022. In a June-July 2022 survey, Pew found that 78 percent of Republicans believed Democratic policies are “harmful to the country” and 68 percent of Democrats held a comparable view of Republican policies.I asked Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford, about these developments, and he emailed back, “Americans misperceive the extent of policy disagreement, antidemocratic attitudes, support for political violence, dehumanization of rival partisans — again with the strongest results for perceptions of the views of rival partisans.”Importantly, Willer continued, “misperceptions of political division are more than mere vapor. There is good reason to think that these misperceptions — or at least Democrats’ and Republicans’ misperceptions of their rivals — really matter.”Why?Democrats and Republicans don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight; they greatly overestimate how much their rivals want to break norms of nonviolent, democratic engagement, and this leads Democrats and Republicans to support violent and undemocratic engagement more than they otherwise would.He concluded:As the old sociological adage goes, situations believed to be real can become real in their consequences. It is likely that Democrats’ and Republicans’ inaccurate, overly negative stereotypes of one another are to some extent self-fulfilling, leading partisans to adopt more divisive, conflictual views than they would if they saw each other more accurately.Willer and others who described the centrality of misperception in American politics stressed that they do not want to diminish the serious divisions between Democrats and Republicans on such matters as abortion, race, women’s rights, the safety net and the proper role of government.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” stressed these points in an emailed response to my questions, saying, “Democrats and Republicans are having very real and consequential disagreements on matters of equality, social hierarchy and what it means to be American.”At the same time, Mason continued:Matters of status and identity are easy to whip up into existential conflicts with zero-sum solutions. To the extent that political leaders are encouraging people to focus on threats to their social status rather than their economic or material well-being, they are certainly directing attention in an unhelpful and often dangerous direction. It’s much easier to think of others as disproportionately dangerous and extreme when their victory means your loss, rather than focusing on the overall well-being of the nation as a whole.Alia Braley, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, is the lead author of an August 2022 paper, “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” She and her co-authors argued that “simply fearing that opposing partisans support democratic backsliding can lead individuals to support it themselves.”In an email, Braley wrote:We find that everyday Democrats believe that everyday Republicans are way more hostile to democracy than they really are. And vice versa. In that sense people are, in fact, operating under a delusion that everyday opposing partisans are willing to undermine democracy. And yes, this misperception seems to cause intense affective polarization.Partisans, Braley continued, “overestimate how much members of the other party dislike and dehumanize them. Partisans tend to believe members of the other party want far more extreme policy outcomes than they actually do.” These misperceptions “can create a type of downward spiral in terms of polarization,” she wrote, citing Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen:This rhetoric likely causes Republicans to start to believe that Democrats are undermining democracy. When Democrats see this election denial, they naturally come to think that Republicans are trying to undermine democracy by not accepting election results. The result is a state of mutual fear.Gabriel Lenz — a political scientist at Berkeley and one of Braley’s co-authors — emailed to say “that much of the polarization is delusional.”“There are two main drivers” of this phenomenon, Lenz wrote. The first “is the need for politicians to mobilize citizens with busy lives and not much of an incentive to participate in politics. There are many ways politicians can mobilize voters, but fear is tried and true.”The second is speculative: “That humans evolved to survive conflict with the other human groups around them,” Lenz wrote. “This likely selected for people who excelled at sticking together in conflicts. Many of our biases seem explained by this incentive, especially a tendency to see the other side as evil.”Lenz stressed the point thatPoliticians don’t need to fully convince their supporters of these perceptions to get their supporters to act on them. If I’m only partially convinced that Democrats intend to steal the next election or want to murder babies, that partial belief may still be enough to get me to act.Even more significant, according to Lenz, is the recognition thatSome misperceptions are much more important than others. Misperceptions on policy or on the demographic makeup of parties are probably important, but they don’t directly threaten democracy. Misperceiving that the other side no longer supports democracy, however, is a more direct threat to democracy. It’s a more direct threat because it leads your own side to no longer support democracy to the same degree.Lenz cited a 2020 paper, “Malice and Stupidity: Out-Group Motive Attribution and Affective Polarization” by Sean Freeder, a political scientist at the University of North Florida, who argued that “negative motive attribution — partisans’ tendency to assume ill intent guides out-party interests” is a “key dynamic underlying affective polarization. When asked why out-party members prefer certain policy outcomes, roughly half of partisan respondents offer an explanation involving selfishness, ignorance, hatred and other negative motives.”Freeder wrote:Exposure to positive out-group motives does appear to lead respondents to update out-partisan attributions, which in turn leads to increased out-group affect. However, motivated reasoning makes such updating likely only when the out-party motives shown are of uniformly high quality — even one bad apple appears to spoil the whole bunch.Affective polarization can, in Freeder’s analysis, take on a momentum of its own:Once partisan polarization begins, negative motive attribution may provide partisans with an easy way to ‘other’ the out-group, which in turn increases the internal desire to further negatively attribute. Such a feedback loop leads citizens to perceive themselves as increasingly surrounded by monsters.There are other problems with efforts to lessen the mutual disdain of Democrats and Republicans.A May 2023 paper by Diego A. Reinero, Elizabeth A. Harris, Steve Rathje, Annie Duke and Jay Van Bavel, “Partisans Are More Likely to Entrench Their Beliefs in Misinformation When Political Out-Group Members Fact-Check Claims,” argued that “fact-checks were more likely to backfire when they came from a political out-group member” and that “corrections from political out-group members were 52 percent more likely to backfire — leaving people with more entrenched beliefs in misinformation.”In sum, the authors concluded, “corrections are effective on average but have small effects compared to partisan identity congruence and sometimes backfire — especially if they come from a political out-group member.”The rise of contemporary affective polarization is a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon.In a July 2022 paper, “Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization,” Shanto Iyengar and Matthew Tyler, both political scientists at Stanford, found thatThe share of American National Election Studies partisans expressing extreme negativity for the out-party (a rating of 0 on a scale of 0 to 100) remained quite small leading up to and during 2000. Since 2000, however, the size of this share has increased dramatically — from 8 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2020. Thus, over the first two decades of this century, partisans’ mild dislike for their opponents metastasized into a deeper form of animus.In their paper “Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information-Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading?” Erik Peterson, a political scientist at Rice, and Iyengar asked, “Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading?”Their answer: “Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.”In an email, Iyengar warned that “The threat to democratic functioning posed by misinformation is real. The people who stormed the Capitol were not cheerleading; they genuinely believed the election was ‘stolen.’”He wrote that of the causes of increased affective polarization, “the explanation I consider most viable is changes in the media environment.” In the 1970s, he continued, “the vast majority of the voting-age population encountered the same news stories on the same topics” — what he called “a vast information commons.”Today, Iyengar wrote, not only are there more sources of information, but also “partisans have ample opportunity to tune in to ‘congenial sources’ — news providers delivering coverage with a partisan slant in accord with the viewer.”Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, wrote by email that “there are two schools of thought” concerning delusions and misperceptions in contemporary politics:The first argues that factual mistakes are a significant engine of polarization and if we spend time correcting people’s misperceptions, it will have beneficial knock-on effects in reducing affective polarization.He continued, “In lab settings or other controlled environments where experts can bombard subjects with accurate information, people can move toward the center and release themselves from some of their partisan misconceptions.”Persily wrote, however, that his analysis falls into a second school of thought:I do not think most of affective polarization is driven by a misunderstanding of facts. Indeed, I think many in this field make the mistake of thinking that the line to be policed is the line between truth and falsehood. Rather, I think the critical question is usually whether the truth is relevant or not.In this context, according to Persily, “partisan polarization resembles religious polarization. Attempting to ‘disprove’ someone’s long-held religion will rarely do much to convince them that your god is the right one.”Viewed this way, partisan affiliation is an identity, Persily wrote, “and displays dynamics familiar to identity politics”:People root for their team, and they find facts or other narratives to justify doing so. Remember, most people do not spend a lot of time thinking about politics. When they do so, their attitudes grow out of other affinities they have developed over time from signals sent by trusted elites or friendship networks.Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., shares Iyengar’s view on the key role of the changing media environment. In an email, he wrote:A good chunk of affective polarization is delusion or based on misperceptions. For instance, people have exaggerated stereotypes about the other party (and what members of the other party think of them), and when you correct those false perceptions, they quickly become less hostile.People are motivated, he continued,to affirm evidence that confirms their beliefs and affirms their identities. For committed partisans, they are often more motivated by these social goals than the desire to be accurate. People also share misinformation for social reasons — it can signal loyalty and help people gain status in some partisan communities.A significant component, Van Bavel said, “is based on misperceptions they’ve absorbed from their social network on (social) media stories. It suggests that if we could simply provide accurate and diverse portrayals of other groups, it might reduce the growing trend toward affective polarization.”But, he cautioned, “correcting misinformation is extremely hard; the impact tends to be pretty small in the political domain, and the effects don’t last long.”In a 2021 paper, “Identity Concerns Drive Belief: The Impact of Partisan Identity on the Belief and Dissemination of True and False News,” Andrea Pereira, Elizabeth Harris and Van Bavel surveyed 1,420 Americans to see which of the following three alternatives best explained the rise and spread of political misinformation:The ideological values hypothesis (people prefer news that bolster their values and worldviews), the confirmation bias hypothesis (people prefer news that fit their pre-existing stereotypical knowledge) and the political identity hypothesis (people prefer news that allow them to believe positive things about political in-group members and negative things about political out-group members).Their conclusion:Consistent with the political identity hypothesis, Democrats and Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their in-group or the value-undermining behavior of their out-group. Belief was positively correlated with willingness to share on social media in all conditions, but Republicans were more likely to believe and want to share political fake news.There have been a number of studies published in recent years describing the success or failure of various approaches to reducing levels of misperception and affective polarization. The difficulties facing these efforts are reflected, in part, in an October 2022 paper, “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Antidemocratic Attitudes,” by Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight colleagues.The authors found that even when “three depolarization interventions reliably reduced self-reported affective polarization,” the interventions “did not reliably reduce any of three measures of antidemocratic attitudes: support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence and prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means.”In other words, the irrational element of partisan hostility has seemingly created a political culture resistant to correction or reform. If so, the nation is stuck, at least for the time being, in a destructive cyclical pattern that no one so far has found a way to escape.The embodiment of delusional politics is, of course, Donald Trump, with his false, indeed fraudulent, claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The continuing willingness of a majority of Republican voters to tolerate this delusion reflects the difficulty facing the nation as it struggles to restore sanity to American politics — if it’s not too late.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump White House Aides Subpoenaed in Firing of Election Security Expert

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      The special counsel is scrutinizing the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, who contradicted baseless claims by the former president that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.The special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election has subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who may have been involved in firing the government cybersecurity official whose agency judged the election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter.The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Krebs enraged Mr. Trump when his agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, released a statement nine days after the 2020 election attesting to the security of the results. The statement added a sharp rebuke — in boldface type — to the unfounded conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump and his allies were spreading about compromised voting machines.“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” the statement from Mr. Krebs’s agency read.Five days later, Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Krebs was “terminated” after releasing a “highly inaccurate” statement about the 2020 election.Mr. Krebs later testified to the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that before his firing, he was aware of “skepticism” among Trump allies about his “loyalty to the president.”It was far more than skepticism. Within the Presidential Personnel Office, a small group of Trump loyalists, led by Mr. Trump’s former personal aide, John McEntee, were on a mission to find and fire people perceived as disloyal to Mr. Trump within the federal bureaucracy. And they had fingered the outspoken Mr. Krebs, who had been appointed by Mr. Trump himself, as among the ranks of the disloyal.Staff members within the personnel office had drafted a document about Mr. Krebs that outlined reasons to distrust him. The memo, first reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, detailed a litany of Mr. Krebs’s alleged sins against Mr. Trump, including: “Wife posted a family photo on Facebook with the ‘Biden Harris’ logo watermarked at the bottom.”Mr. Smith’s team is asking witnesses about broader efforts made by Mr. Trump’s personnel officials to test the loyalty of federal officials and potential hires, the people briefed on the matter said. Mr. McEntee was seen going into the grand jury in recent months.Months before the 2020 election, Mr. McEntee, now the head of a dating app for conservatives, and a deputy sought to overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed what became known by some officials as “the loyalty test” — a new questionnaire for government hires that asked such questions as “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?”Mr. Krebs is among those whom Mr. Smith’s team has interviewed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Krebs declined to comment when contacted.Mr. Smith’s team has also been trying to figure out how the personnel office interacted with the Justice Department as Mr. Trump grasped at any available instrument within his bureaucracy that might help him subvert the 2020 election result.In his final weeks in office, Mr. Trump grew increasingly frustrated with the department’s leaders as one after another rebuffed his pressure on them to falsely declare that large-scale voter fraud had occurred in swing states, such as Georgia, that Mr. Trump had lost to Mr. Biden.By the time the election took place, Heidi Stirrup, a loyalist close to Mr. Trump’s policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had been installed as the White House liaison at the Justice Department. Mr. Smith’s office has asked questions about her role, one of the people briefed on the matter said.Ms. Stirrup was banned from entering the Justice Department building a month after the 2020 election, after she tried to glean sensitive information from department officials about efforts to hunt for election fraud, according to officials with knowledge of the episode.Soon after, Attorney General William P. Barr, whom Mr. Trump had long seen as an ally, resigned after telling Mr. Trump that his election fraud theories were bogus and that the legal team he had assembled to challenge the results was a “clown show.” Jeffrey A. Rosen, who replaced Mr. Barr, also refused to follow Mr. Trump’s orders to use the machinery of the Justice Department to overturn the election.Jeffrey B. Clark, the acting head of the civil division, was the one senior Justice Department official who embraced Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory. Mr. Clark had a relatively low profile, but in the frantic period after the election, Mr. Trump identified him as his most important ally inside the department. Mr. Trump seriously considered firing Mr. Rosen and putting Mr. Clark in charge.Justice Department leaders were horrified and pledged to collectively resign. Mr. Trump shelved the plan, but during the past two years has spoken warmly of Mr. Clark and hosted him at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.Mr. Clark has been the focus of investigators’ attention as well in connection with his role in helping Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election outcome. More

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      Inside Fox’s Legal and Business Debacle

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      In August 2021, the Fox Corporation board of directors gathered on the company’s movie studio lot in Los Angeles. Among the topics on the agenda: Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against its cable news network, Fox News.The suit posed a threat to the company’s finances and reputation. But Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, reassured the board: Even if the company lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail. The First Amendment was on Fox’s side, he explained, even if proving so could require going to the Supreme Court.Mr. Dinh told others inside the company that Fox’s possible legal costs, at tens of millions of dollars, could outstrip any damages the company would have to pay to Dominion.That determination informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months, according to a New York Times review of court and business records, and interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making.The case resulted in one of the biggest legal and business debacles in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire: an avalanche of embarrassing disclosures from internal messages released in court filings; the largest known settlement in a defamation suit, $787.5 million; two shareholder lawsuits; and the benching of Fox’s top prime-time star, Tucker Carlson.And for all of that, Fox still faces a lawsuit seeking even more in damages, $2.7 billion, filed by another subject of the stolen-election theory, the voting software company Smartmatic, which can now build on the evidence produced in the Dominion case to press its own considerable claims.In the month since the settlement, Fox has refused to comment in detail on the case or the many subsequent setbacks. That has left a string of unanswered questions: Why did the company not settle earlier and avoid the release of private emails and texts from executives and hosts? How did one of the most potentially prejudicial pieces of evidence — a text from Mr. Carlson about race and violence — escape high-level notice until the eve of the trial? How did Fox’s pretrial assessment so spectacularly miss the mark?Repeatedly, Fox executives overlooked warning signs about the damage they and their network would sustain, The Times found. They also failed to recognize how far their cable news networks, Fox News and Fox Business, had strayed into defamatory territory by promoting President Donald J. Trump’s election conspiracy theories — the central issue in the case. (Fox maintains it did not defame Dominion.)When pretrial rulings went against the company, Fox did not pursue a settlement in any real way. Executives were then caught flat-footed as Dominion’s court filings included internal Fox messages that made clear how the company chased a Trump-loving audience that preferred his election lies — the same lies that helped feed the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — to the truth.It was only in February, with the overwhelming negative public reaction to those disclosures, that Mr. Murdoch and his son with whom he runs the company, Lachlan Murdoch, began seriously considering settling. Yet they made no major attempt to do so until the eve of the trial in April, after still more damaging public disclosures.At the center of the action was Mr. Dinh and his overly rosy scenario.Mr. Dinh declined several requests for comment, and the company declined to respond to questions about his performance or his legal decisions. “Discussions of specific legal strategy are privileged and confidential,” a company representative said in a statement.Defenders of Mr. Dinh, a high-level Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, say his initial position was sound. Because of the strength of American free speech protections, Dominion needed to clear a high bar. And unfavorable rulings from the Delaware judge who oversaw the case hurt Fox’s chances, they argue.“I think Viet and Fox carried out just the right strategy by moving down two paths simultaneously — first, mounting a strong legal defense, one that I think would have eventually won at the appellate stage, and, second, continuously assessing settlement opportunities at every stage,” said William P. Barr, the former attorney general under Mr. Trump who worked with Mr. Dinh earlier in his career. Of course, the case would have been difficult for any lawyer. As the internal records showed, executives knew conspiracy theories about Dominion were false yet did not stop hosts and guests from airing them.That placed Fox in the ultimate danger zone, where First Amendment rights give way to the legal liability that comes from knowingly promoting false statements, referred to in legalese as “actual malice.”An Unanswered LetterMaria Bartiromo was the first Fox host to air the Dominion conspiracy theory.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesThe fall of 2020 brought Fox News to a crisis point. The Fox audience had come to expect favorable news about President Trump. But Fox could not provide that on election night, when its decision desk team was first to declare that Mr. Trump had lost the critical state of Arizona.In the days after, Mr. Trump’s fans switched off in droves. Ratings surged at the smaller right-wing rival Newsmax, which, unlike Fox, was refusing to recognize Joseph R. Biden’s victory.The Fox host who was the first to find a way to draw the audience back was Maria Bartiromo. Five days after the election, she invited a guest, the Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell, to share details about the false accusations that Dominion, an elections technology company, had switched votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.Soon, wild claims about Dominion appeared elsewhere on Fox, including references to the election company’s supposed (but imagined) ties to the Smartmatic election software company; Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator who died in 2013; George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor; and China.On Nov. 12, a Dominion spokesman complained to the Fox News Media chief executive, Suzanne Scott, and the Fox News Media executive editor, Jay Wallace, begging them to make it stop. “We really weren’t thinking about building a litigation record as much as we were trying to stop the bleeding,” Thomas A. Clare, one of Dominion’s lawyers, said recently at a post-mortem discussion of the case held by a First Amendment advocacy group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.As Fox noted in its court papers, its hosts did begin including company denials. But as they continued to give oxygen to the false allegations, Dominion sent a letter to the Fox News general counsel, Lily Fu Claffee, demanding that Fox cease and correct the record. “Dominion is prepared to do what is necessary to protect its reputation and the safety of its employees,” the letter warned.It came amid more than 3,600 messages that Dominion sent debunking the conspiracy theories to network hosts, producers and executives in the weeks after the election.Such letters often set off internal reviews at news organizations. Fox’s lawyers did not conduct one. Had they done so, they may have learned of an email that Ms. Bartiromo received in November about one of Ms. Powell’s original sources on Dominion.The source intimated that her information had come from a combination of dreams and time travel. (“The wind tells me I’m a ghost but I don’t believe it,” she had written Ms. Powell.)Dan Novack, a First Amendment lawyer, said that if he ever stumbled upon such an email in a client’s files, he would “physically wrest my client’s checkbook from them and settle before the police arrive.”Fox, however, did not respond to the Dominion letter or comply with its requests — now a key issue in a shareholder suit filed in April, which maintains that doing so would have “materially mitigated” Fox’s legal exposure.The CaseDominion’s chief executive, John Poulos, at a news conference in April after the company settled its defamation suit against Fox.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThree months after the election, another voting technology company tied to the Dominion conspiracy, Smartmatic, filed its own defamation suit against Fox, seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Dominion told reporters that it was preparing to file one, too.Mr. Dinh was publicly dismissive.“The newsworthy nature of the contested presidential election deserved full and fair coverage from all journalists, Fox News did its job, and this is what the First Amendment protects,” Mr. Dinh said at the time in a rare interview with the legal writer David Lat. “I’m not at all concerned about such lawsuits, real or imagined.”Mr. Dinh was saying as much inside Fox, too, according to several people familiar with his actions at the time. His words mattered.A refugee of Vietnam who fled the Communist regime and landed with his family in the United States virtually penniless, he graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law and was a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. As an assistant attorney general for George W. Bush, he helped draft the Patriot Act expanding government surveillance powers. He and Lachlan Murdoch later became so close that Mr. Dinh, 55, is godfather to one of Mr. Murdoch’s sons.Mr. Dinh took a hands-on approach to the Dominion case, and eventually split with a key member of the outside team, Charles L. Babcock of Jackson Walker, according to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions.After disagreement over the best way to formulate Fox’s defense, Jackson Walker and Fox parted ways. George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former assistant general counsel for The Times, said Mr. Babcock’s exit had left Fox down a seasoned defamation defense lawyer. “He’s probably the best trial lawyer in the media bar,” Mr. Freeman said.By then, Mr. Dinh was fashioning the legal team more in his own image, having brought in a longtime colleague from the Bush administration, the former solicitor general Paul Clement.Mr. Clement’s presence on the Fox team was itself an indication of Mr. Dinh’s willingness to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court — few members of the conservative legal bar had more experience there.Mr. Dinh hired Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney, for the role of lead litigator, succeeding Mr. Babcock. Mr. Webb was known for representing a beef manufacturer that sued ABC News over reports about a product sometimes referred to as “pink slime.” The case was settled in 2017 for more than $170 million.The Fox legal team based much of the defense on a doctrine known as the neutral reportage privilege. It holds that news organizations cannot be held financially liable for damages when reporting on false allegations made by major public figures as long as they don’t embrace or endorse them.“If the president of the United States is alleging that there was fraud in an election, that’s newsworthy, whether or not there’s fraud in the election,” Mr. Clement told Jim Geraghty, a writer for National Review and The Washington Post. “It’s the most newsworthy thing imaginable.”Fox remained so confident, the company said in reports to investors that it did not anticipate the suit would have “a material adverse effect.”But the neutral reportage privilege is not universally recognized. Longtime First Amendment lawyers who agree with the principle in theory had their doubts that it would work, given that judges have increasingly rejected it.“Most astute media defamation defense lawyers would not, and have not for a very long time, relied on neutral reportage — certainly as a primary line of defense, because the likelihood that a court would accept it as a matter of First Amendment law has continued to diminish over time,” said Lee Levine, a veteran media lawyer. An early warning came in late 2021. The judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, rejected Fox’s attempt to use the neutral reportage defense to get the suit thrown out altogether, determining that it was not recognized under New York law, which he was applying to the case. Even if it was recognized, Fox would have to show it reported on the allegations “accurately and dispassionately,” and Dominion had made a strong argument that Fox’s reporting was neither, the judge wrote in a ruling.That ruling meant that Dominion, in preparing its arguments, could have access to Fox’s internal communications in discovery.That was a natural time to settle. But Fox stuck with its defense and its plan, which always foresaw a potential loss at trial. “There was a strong belief that the appeal could very well be as important, or more important, than the trial itself,” Mr. Webb said at the post-mortem discussion of the case with Mr. Clare.Things Fall ApartText messages that came to light in the Dominion case included assertions by the Fox host Tucker Carlson that voter fraud could not have made a material difference in the election.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesFox executives did not foresee how daunting the discovery process would become.At nearly every step, the court overruled Fox’s attempts to limit Dominion’s access to private communications exchanged among hosts, producers and executives. The biggest blow came last summer, after a ruling stating that Dominion could review messages from the personal phones of Fox employees, including both Murdochs.The result was a treasure trove of evidence for Dominion: text messages and emails that revealed the doubts that Rupert Murdoch had about the coverage airing on his network, and assertions by many inside Fox, including Mr. Carlson, that fraud could not have made a material difference in the election.The messages led to even more damaging revelations during depositions. After Dominion’s lawyers confronted Mr. Murdoch with his own messages showing he knew Mr. Trump’s stolen election claims were false, he admitted that some Fox hosts appeared to have endorsed stolen election claims.That appeared to have undermined Fox’s defense. But Mr. Dinh told Mr. Murdoch afterward that he thought the deposition had gone well, according to a person who witnessed the exchange. Mr. Murdoch then pointed a finger in the direction of the Dominion lawyer who had just finished questioning him and said, “I think he would strongly disagree with that.”During Mr. Carlson’s deposition last year, Dominion’s lawyers asked about his use of a crude word to describe women — including a ranking Fox executive. They also mentioned a text in which he discussed watching a group of men, who he said were Trump supporters, attack “an Antifa kid.” He lamented in the text, “It’s not how white men fight,” and shared a momentary wish that the group would kill the person. He then said he regretted that instinct.Mr. Carlson felt blindsided by the extent of the questions, according to associates and confirmed by a video leaked to the left-leaning group Media Matters: “Ten hours,” he exclaimed to people on the set of his show, referring to how long he was questioned. “It was so unhealthy, the hate I felt for that guy,” he said about the Dominion lawyer who had questioned him.There is no indication that Mr. Carlson’s texts tripped alarms at the top of Fox at that point.The alarms rang in February, when reams of other internal Fox communications became public. The public’s reaction was so negative that some people at the company believed that a jury in Delaware — which was likely to be left-leaning — could award Dominion over a billion dollars. Yet the company made no serious bid to settle.With prominent First Amendment lawyers declaring that Dominion had an exceptionally strong case, a siege mentality appeared to set in.In the interview with Mr. Geraghty, Mr. Clement said Fox was being singled out for its politics. Unlike mainstream media, which tend to report on major events the same way and have power in numbers, he said, “conservative media, or somebody like Fox, is in a much more vulnerable position.” He added, “If they report it, and the underlying allegations aren’t true, they’re much more out there on an island.”Reflecting the view of Mr. Dinh’s supporters even now, Mr. Barr, the former attorney general, said the “mainstream media stupidly cheered on Dominion’s case,” which he said they would come to regret because it would weaken their First Amendment protections. (He made a similar argument in March in The Wall Street Journal.)But Judge Davis had determined that Fox had set itself apart by failing to conduct “good-faith, disinterested reporting” in the segments at issue in the suit. That was in large part why, just ahead of opening statements, he ruled that Fox could not make neutral reportage claims that the conspiracy theory was newsworthy at the trial, knocking out a pillar of Fox’s strategy. (He also ruled that Fox had, indeed, defamed the company in airing the false statements.)Mr. Webb, who had already drafted much of his opening statement and tested it with a focus group, had to remove key parts of his remarks, he said in the post-trial discussion with Mr. Clare.The Directors Step InRupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesAll along, the Fox board had been taking a wait-and-see approach.But the judge’s pretrial decisions began to change the board’s thinking. Also, in those final days before the trial, Fox was hit with new lawsuits. One, from the former Fox producer Abby Grossberg, accused Mr. Carlson of promoting a hostile work environment. Another, filed by a shareholder, accused the Murdochs and several directors of failing to stop the practices that made Fox vulnerable to legal claims.The weekend before trial was to begin, with jury selection already underway, the board asked Fox to see the internal Fox communications that were not yet public but that could still come out in the courtroom.That Sunday, the board learned for the first time of the Carlson text that referred to “how white men fight.” Mr. Dinh did not know about the message until that weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter. Fox’s lawyers believed it would not come out at trial, because it was not relevant to the legal arguments at hand. The board, however, was concerned that Dominion was prepared to use the message to further undermine the company with the jury.In an emergency meeting that Sunday evening, the board — with an eye on future lawsuits, including those from Smartmatic and Ms. Grossberg — decided to hire the law firm Wachtell, Lipton Rosen & Katz to investigate whether any other problematic texts from Mr. Carlson or others existed.Over that same weekend, Lachlan Murdoch told his settlement negotiators to offer Dominion more than the $550 million for which he had already received board approval.In interviews, people with knowledge of the deliberations disagreed about how much Mr. Carlson’s text contributed to the final $787.5 million settlement price.By the time the board learned of the message, the Murdochs had already determined that a trial loss could be far more damaging than they were initially told to expect. A substantial jury award could weigh on the company’s stock for years as the appeals process played out.“The distraction to our company, the distraction to our growth plans — our management — would have been extraordinarily costly, which is why we decided to settle,” Lachlan Murdoch said at an investment conference this month.But there was broad agreement among people with knowledge of the discussions that the Carlson text, and the board’s initiation of an investigation, added to the pressure to avoid trial.The text also helped lead to the Murdochs’ decision a few days later to abruptly pull Mr. Carlson off the air. Their view had hardened that their top-rated star wasn’t worth all the downsides he brought with him.Fox’s trouble has not ended. In the weeks since the settlement and Mr. Carlson’s ouster, prime-time ratings have dropped (though Fox remains No. 1 in cable news), and new plaintiffs sued the network, most recently a former Homeland Security official, Nina Jankowicz.As one of Ms. Jankowicz’s lawyers said in an interview, the Dominion case “signals that there is a path.”Still pending is the Smartmatic suit. In late April, Fox agreed to hand over additional internal documents relating to several executives, including the Murdochs and Mr. Dinh. In a statement reminiscent of Mr. Dinh’s early view of the Dominion case, the network said that the $2.7 billion in damages sought by Smartmatic — operating in only one county in 2020 — were implausible and that Fox was protected by the First Amendment.“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” the statement said. More

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      Trump Lawyers Seek Meeting With Garland Over Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Two lawyers for the former president asserted that he was being treated unfairly in the investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to remain in power.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump sent a letter on Tuesday requesting a meeting with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland related to the special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump’s conduct.The letter cited no specifics but asserted that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the Justice Department through the investigations led by the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Smith is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material that was discovered at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, after his presidency, as well as his efforts to retain power after he lost the 2020 election.There are indications that Mr. Smith is approaching the stage of the investigation where he could start making decisions about whether to seek indictments of Mr. Trump and others in the documents case. The status of his other line of inquiry, into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and how they contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters, is less clear.“Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly,” the lawyers for Mr. Trump, James Trusty and John Rowley, wrote to Mr. Garland.“No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion,” they wrote.They requested a meeting to discuss the “ongoing injustice” by Mr. Smith’s team.The letter was reported earlier by ABC News.A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment.The letter’s tone is markedly different from the approach taken by Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, recovering documents that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena demanding that they be returned to the government. At the time, Mr. Trump, through an intermediary, sent a message to Justice Department officials that the search inflamed the country, and he asked how he could help to lower the temperature.The letter from his lawyers on Tuesday was directly confrontational. It implied that the family of Mr. Biden, who appointed Mr. Garland and who is himself the focus of a special counsel investigation into a far smaller number of classified documents from his vice-presidential and Senate days found in spaces where he worked and in his home, is benefiting from more favorable treatment.Hunter Biden is under separate investigation on possible tax charges and for possibly having lied about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in an increasingly crowded Republican field. But with the letter, Mr. Trump is relying on a frequently used playbook, in which he suggests a judge or prosecutor is treating him unfairly by the act of investigating him.Most recently, he tried suggesting the judge overseeing an indictment against him in a state court in Manhattan has a conflict because a family member works for Democrats.Seen another way, the letter could be an attempt by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to lay down a marker toward asking Mr. Garland to recuse himself from involvement in whether Mr. Trump faces charges.While Mr. Smith will make the recommendation on whether to charge Mr. Trump with federal crimes in the two cases, a final decision would be made by Mr. Garland. In the documents-related case, prosecutors have examined evidence related to obstruction of justice, as well as to whether he mishandled classified material.Mr. Smith’s team is still hearing from witnesses in the two cases, according to multiple familiar with the activity, although all signs point to the documents investigation nearing its end point.Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately predicted that the former president will face charges in the case related to the documents at a minimum, although they maintain he did nothing wrong. They have also grown angry at the number of people who have been subpoenaed, from low-level workers at Mar-a-Lago to former government officials.Mr. Trump is under indictment in New York on charges of paying hush money to a porn star and is facing a separate investigation in Georgia into his efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls there in 2020.It is highly unlikely that Mr. Garland would agree to meet with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of the attorney general’s former aides said.“Merrick Garland will not meet with Trusty or any of the other Trump lawyers,” said Anthony Coley, Mr. Garland’s former spokesman. “Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Merrick Garland.”Glenn Thrush More

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      Trump Is Back, to Tear Our Families Apart Once More

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      My cousin back in rural Illinois, where I grew up and where most of my family still lives, sent me a nice note over Facebook the other day. She saw I had a novel coming out and told me she was proud of me and couldn’t wait to read it. I thanked her and said I’d love to catch lunch the next time I’m in town. She said that would be nice.Then she added: “And no politics … I promise!”I promised as well. We’re going to do our best to honor that promise. But it’s getting harder. Again.Families across America that were so divided by the Trump era have only started to heal in the last couple of years — and now we’re facing the real possibility of a sequel.I’m dreading, and I sense that she and many other Americans are dreading, having to go through this gantlet so soon again. Politics have divided families in ugly ways, and I do sense that the Biden era, for many, has been a chance to try to heal. But the wounds may be about to be reopened.One of the implicit, but central, selling points of a Joe Biden presidency was that, if he did his job right, the average American wouldn’t have to pay much attention to him. The “normalcy” Mr. Biden vowed to return us to was partly about making the executive branch a functioning arm of government again, and about no longer being the (very scary) joke that the country had become globally during the Donald Trump presidency.But at home, for many Americans, it was about something simpler than that: It was about returning to a world where we did not have to talk and fight about politics all the time. It was about being in your own home, among your own family and being able to forget, if just for a little while, that politics were happening at all — or at least assume that reasonable people were taking care of it.The Trump years made this impossible, and the ubiquitousness of politics, the sense that you had to be screaming about the state of the world at all times, fractured families across the country. What had once been merely some awkward moments at Thanksgiving became constant fissures pitting kids against parents, siblings against siblings, generation against generation.Some of these fissures became ruptures, or even chasms: I have one friend who clashed with his in-laws over Mr. Trump so dramatically that they still haven’t met their 3-year-old granddaughter. The constant and inescapable political discourse of 2015 to 2021 frayed every bond of American society, perhaps family most of all.But there has been a quiet change the last couple of years. These disagreements have not gone away: The world is as perilous and fraught as it has always been. But since Mr. Trump left office, you’ve been able to find moments of escape and respite, and even, yes, normalcy. There have not been constant presidential tweets; there has not been a ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries; whatever verbal gaffes Mr. Biden might make, you have felt fairly confident he’d never refer to another country with a scatological vulgarity.Things have not been perfect, and there are still people desperately trying to fight about everything — there’s always that relative who insists on making sure you saw his “Let’s Go Brandon” hat. But with the easing of a pandemic that scrambled the planet, you have been able to walk around in the world for at least a few minutes at a time without worrying that it would explode. Maybe you even mended some fences with the people who, no matter how much you may disagree with them, you love. (My friend’s daughter finally has a meeting with her grandparents planned for this summer.)You could take those first steps, because, for the first time in a long time, politics hasn’t been the center of American life. But the recent CNN town hall with Mr. Trump was a reminder of storm clouds on the horizon — and these clouds look very familiar.A majority of Americans do not want to see another matchup between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. There are many reasons for this, yet I wonder if a big one for many people is the fear that those tumultuous times that we just went through and unceasing torrent of political battles that invaded our holiday dinner table are about to return. Trump versus Biden? This is what we just went through. We have to go through that again?And what if Ron DeSantis gets the Republican nomination over Mr. Trump? Maybe that will just lead to entirely new fights. Though considering how bruising any nomination battle that Mr. Trump loses would be — if such a battle ends at all — I suspect it won’t leave the country in a healing mood, either.My cousin and I disagree on many things, and there have been times — as when I saw her on Facebook cheering on the buses of “patriots” on their way to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021 — when I thought our relationship was essentially over. This was not long after she, someone who detasseled corn in the vast Illinois fields alongside me when we were both children, called me an “elitist deep stater.” It was difficult to wrap my mind around how much had changed: I had gone from affably disagreeing with her about Mitt Romney to wondering if she’d lost touch with reality entirely.But the fact remains: I love my cousin, and my cousin loves me. It is impossible to imagine my life, who I would be, without her place in it, and I’m sure she feels the same way. She has known me forever in a way so few people have. I’ve enjoyed reconnecting and have even thought, “If our relationship can survive 2020, it can survive anything.” But can it survive that twice? I am not sure. I suspect many families across the country are wondering the same thing.We can avoid talking about it, but it’s coming. It lurks, waiting to blast us all apart again. If you want to know why millions of Americans are so wary of a Trump-Biden sequel, that gathering storm is a big part of the answer.Will Leitch is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Time Has Come,” and is a contributing editor at New York magazine.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why ‘Succession’ Is a Work of Fantasy

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      It was interesting, after writing last week’s newsletter on the problems of conservative media, to watch Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Succession,” in which the show’s lightly fictionalized version of Fox News, run by its somewhat more meaningfully fictionalized version of the Fox-owning Murdoch family, takes center stage for an imagined election night. (There will be some spoilers below, fair warning.) Between the Dominion Voting Systems settlement and the Tucker Carlson firing, we’ve had a lot of real-world Fox drama lately, and the contrast between reality and fiction tells us something interesting about how art depicts our politics — and how the nature of democratic politics can resist successful dramatization.In the real world, the last presidential election night saw Fox News call Arizona early (calling it correctly, though probably earlier than was justified by the extremely narrow margin), yielding fury from Donald Trump’s campaign and backlash from the Fox audience, whose drift toward other outlets helps explain why Fox allowed election conspiracy theories to run wild on some of its shows. It was a case study in the problem I described last week, where conservative media has ended up captive to the particular expectations of a large television audience — a demand for infotainment, reality-TV drama, good guys and bad guys, nothing that doesn’t make sense within the expected nightly narrative.In the world of “Succession,” the key election-night dilemma is somewhat similar — when to call a crucial state — but the dynamics are quite different. The show’s presidential election is disrupted by a fire (arson?) at a Milwaukee precinct that destroys thousands of ballots, leaving the right-wing candidate ahead pending litigation, and his campaign wants ATN (the show’s Fox News) to call Wisconsin for him immediately. The decision gets punted up to the Roy siblings, the would-be heirs to their recently deceased father’s corporate empire, and though there are references to what the ATN audience wants, the Roys end up making a very bad, republic-undermining decision for reasons internal to their family dynamics. The brothers, Kendall and Roman, want to keep the company rather than go through with a planned sale to a Scandinavian tech billionaire, the right-wing candidate has promised to block the deal for them if he’s elected, and their sister, Shiv, the liberal of the group, is playing her own double game that blows up in her face.A key question throughout the show’s seasons has been whether “Succession” is ultimately the drama of, well, succession promised by the title — a story in the style of “The Godfather,” where one of the main characters emerges as the (corrupted) heir to the father’s empire — or whether it’s headed for a version of the “Hamlet” ending, where everybody stabs or poisons everybody else and some outsider shows up to claim the throne. With two episodes left, the dice seem loaded for the second outcome: Failsons and a faildaughter lose their company and, oops, bring down the American republic along the way.But as a political drama, which “Succession” is at least secondarily, both of these narratives are essentially elite-driven and family-driven, suggesting a world where to understand what happens in American politics, you mostly need to understand the pressures and pathologies afflicting a narrow group of power brokers.Which is, certainly, part of the truth. I write a lot about elites, everybody writes a lot about elites, because as the word suggests they’re pretty important to figuring out what’s going on in society — and also because when you write about politics for a living, you’re often writing for an audience that thinks of itself as at least elite-adjacent, part of the professional class, the overclass, the meritocracy.Thus a lot of arguments about the Republican Party in the age of Trump necessarily revolve around what some segment of this overclass is getting wrong. Is it liberal elites whose failures and ideological fixations keep giving oxygen to populism? Or media elites who keep covering Trump the wrong way (with vast disagreements about what the right way would be)? Or conservative elites who just need to summon moral courage and stand up against demagogy? Or the entire elite that needs replacement by a better one, ideally forged by classically minded finishing schools and papal encyclicals? The answer varies but the narrative endures because “affecting some change in elite behavior” is the biggest lever that seems within a pundit’s reach.When I watch “Succession” with this mind-set, my main complaint about the show’s political vision is that it mostly leaves out a kind of Republican elite who would be connected to any Fox News-like enterprise. The show obviously has no trouble scripting the amoral cynics getting rich off a conservative base they secretly despise, and it does a decent job channeling the voice of the very-online right (the far-right presidential candidate has a weird patois that sounds like Robert Nisbet crossed with a Nietzschean edgelord). But it doesn’t have much representation for the more normal Republicans who definitely exist inside Fox World, the kind of people who believe in conventional conservative principles and end up compromising with populists they dislike because of liberals they fear more. The show can only imagine weird fanatics on the one hand, and on the other hand pure cynics who secretly know the liberals are right and they themselves are bad guys.But what’s really missing from the political drama on “Succession” isn’t just sincere, non-edgelord Republicans. It’s the crucial role of non-elites — mass opinion, “the people,” anything from a national majority to a primary-season electorate or just a particularly large television audience — as a force unto themselves, a gravity well that every elite stratagem has to work with or around.Sure, the people don’t rule in some naïve or simplistic sense; some kind of elite power is always fundamental. But from a dramatic point of view, the mass American public is as important a “character” in the story of right-wing populism as Rupert Murdoch or for that matter Trump himself. The people, in the form of the mass Fox News audience, drove what happened around and after the 2020 election more than any sibling rivalry inside the House of Murdoch. They’re why the alleged election fraud fiasco went down the way it went down. They’re why Carlson became a cable news ratings king. They’re why, since his firing, a lot fewer people have been watching Fox and Newsmax has been pulling in about as many viewers in its 8 p.m. time slot as CNN.The same point applies to democratic politics writ large. People in rooms talking drive a lot of political action, but if they drove all of it, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would have been the Republican nominee in 2016 (when Murdoch’s network was surprised and overwhelmed by Trumpism), Elizabeth Warren probably would have been the Democratic nominee in 2020 and Trump definitely wouldn’t be a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024. Our elites can work to tame mass opinion, to master it or redirect it or find some means of resistance — but it’s always there, always doing something in the story.And if that’s a somewhat difficult thing for punditry to reckon with, at least we can write and talk about it in terms of opinion polling and television ratings and the like. Dramatizing the force of mass opinion artistically is much harder. It’s a big part of why there aren’t that many great novels or great movies about the workings of American democracy, relative to the monarchical systems of the past; one of the democratic age’s central characters, the mass public, is just really hard to realize on the page or on the screen.Likewise, a significant part of the contemporary appeal of both historical fiction and my own favored genre of fantasy is that they return politics to a period where the personal encompasses more of the political — where family rivalries and court intrigues loom larger, and mass politics means the occasional mob or the rampaging army but not the daily poll or the nightly ratings, the force of public opinion that lacks embodiment but constantly drives political action nonetheless.The elite world of “Succession,” where the patriarch Logan Roy was both a corporate king and a political kingmaker, is thus ultimately a kind of fantasy fiction, a George R.R. Martin-ish gloss on contemporary American politics: entertaining and smart and on point in some ways, hopefully headed for a more successful wrap than “Game of Thrones,” but finally inadequate to actual political reality, because it always leaves a protagonist offstage.Programming NotesFirst, a reminder that I’m part of a new Times podcast, “Matter of Opinion,” that comes out every Thursday; find the latest episodes here.Second, The Times has just introduced a new iOS app for audio journalism called New York Times Audio, featuring all our podcasts as well as narrated articles from across all our sections, from Opinion and Politics to Food and Sports. It includes the archive of “This American Life” and read-aloud stories from a range of national magazines. It’s available to Times news subscribers, and you can download it here.BreviaryNathan Pinkoski on the evolution of Francis Fukuyama.Scott Alexander compares Francis Galton and Paul Ehrlich.Alex de Waal on the war for Khartoum.Richard Rushfield and Matt Stoller on the Hollywood writers’ strike.Damon Linker tries to stabilize social liberalism. More

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      Fani Willis Signals August Timetable for Charges in Georgia Trump Inquiry

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      The Fulton County district attorney said most of her staff would work remotely at times, and asked judges not to schedule trials, in the first half of August.The Georgia prosecutor leading an investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies has taken the unusual step of announcing remote work days for most of her staff during the first three weeks of August, asking judges in a downtown Atlanta courthouse not to schedule trials for part of that time as she prepares to bring charges in the inquiry.The moves suggest that Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, is expecting a grand jury to unseal indictments during that time period. Ms. Willis outlined the remote work plan and made the request to judges in a letter sent on Thursday to 21 Fulton County officials, including the chief county judge, Ural Glanville, and the sheriff, Pat Labat.“Thank you for your consideration and assistance in keeping the Fulton County Judicial Complex safe during this time,” wrote Ms. Willis, who has already asked the F.B.I. to help with security in and around the courthouse.Ms. Willis had said in a previous letter that any charges related to the Trump investigation would come in the grand jury term that runs from July 11 to Sept. 1. Her letter on Thursday appears to offer more specificity on timing.Her timetable, however, has already been pushed back as she has sought to hammer out cooperation deals with some potential defendants.Mr. Trump’s legal team is trying to scuttle the case with a motion, filed in March, seeking to quash much of the collected evidence and throw Ms. Willis off the case before any charges are filed.Ms. Willis’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.Ms. Willis must now seek approval from a regular grand jury for any charges she plans to bring.With security concerns about the looming indictments in such a high-profile investigation weighing on county officials, Ms. Willis said that she would reduce staffing in her office by about 70 percent and rely on remote work on days when grand juries were in session from July 31 to Aug. 18.She said that there would be exceptions to the remote work plan, including “my leadership team” and “all armed investigators.”Ms. Willis noted in the letter that most judges would be attending a judicial conference during the week of July 31. She added: “I respectfully request that judges not schedule trials and in-person hearings during the weeks beginning Monday, Aug. 7 and Monday, Aug. 14.”Last year, Ms. Willis wrote to the Atlanta field office of the F.B.I., asking for a risk assessment of the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta and for the agency to “provide protective resources to include intelligence and federal agents.”She noted in the letter last year that Mr. Trump had called the prosecutors investigating him “vicious, horrible people” during a Texas rally in January 2022 and called for protests in cities where he was being investigated. His recent criminal indictment in New York City, on charges related to hush money payments made to a porn star, took place largely without incident. Armed pro-Trump protesters appeared around the Georgia State Capitol a number of times in the weeks after the 2020 election, as Mr. Trump and his allies made false accusations of electoral fraud. On at least one occasion, armed counterprotesters were also in the streets.Ms. Willis, who has had some staff members outfitted with bulletproof vests, is clearly concerned about the potential for unrest after any indictments in the Trump inquiry. In a letter sent to the local sheriff last month, she wrote of “the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.” More

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      Trump Lawyer Resigns From Defense Team in Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Timothy Parlatore, who has been defending the former president in the investigations into classified documents and Jan. 6, is leaving as federal prosecutors appear to be nearing decisions about bringing charges.Timothy Parlatore, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump in the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has resigned from the former president’s legal team.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Parlatore declined to discuss the specific reasons for his departure, but said it was not related to the merits of either inquiry — both of which are being led by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Parlatore said that he informed Mr. Trump of his decision directly and that he left the legal team on good terms with the former president.His departure was reported earlier by CNN.Mr. Parlatore’s withdrawal from the twin special counsel cases leaves Mr. Trump a lawyer short at a moment when prosecutors under Mr. Smith seem to be nearing the end of their sprawling grand jury investigations and may be approaching a decision about whether to bring charges.Two other lawyers — James Trusty and John Rowley — will for now continue to take the lead in representing Mr. Trump in both of the cases.Mr. Parlatore informed Mr. Trump’s team on Monday that he anticipated withdrawing, according to a person familiar with the events.Since last summer and until recently, Mr. Parlatore played a key role in Mr. Trump’s attempts to use attorney-client and executive privilege to limit the scope of the testimony provided by a series of witnesses who appeared in front of grand juries hearing evidence in both of the matters.Over and over in sealed filings and at closed-door hearings, Mr. Parlatore and his colleagues sought to assert privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump in the hopes of narrowing testimony from top Trump aides like Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence. But their efforts were almost completely unsuccessful.At one point, Mr. Parlatore himself was subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury investigating the documents case. During his appearance, he answered questions about efforts made by Mr. Trump’s legal team to comply with a subpoena issued by the Justice Department last May demanding the return of all classified material in the former president’s possession.Among the things that Mr. Parlatore said he discussed with the grand jury were searches — ordered by a judge in response to a push from the Justice Department — that he oversaw at the end of last year of several properties belonging to Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla. During the search of the storage site, investigators found at least two more documents with classified markings.Those searches followed a search in August of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, by the F.B.I., which led to the discovery of more than 100 classified documents that had not been returned in response to the earlier subpoena.Mr. Parlatore was brought on to the legal team by Boris Epshteyn, who had been serving as something of an in-house counsel, hiring and negotiating contracts for lawyers. Mr. Epshteyn has shown a penchant for delivering sunny news to Mr. Trump despite bad circumstances, and for creating a bottleneck for the lawyers in dealing with the client, according to several people familiar with the events.Last month, Mr. Parlatore wrote a letter to Congress asking lawmakers for help in taking the documents investigation away from prosecutors and giving it to the intelligence community — a move that, among other things, would have removed the threat of a criminal indictment against Mr. Trump.The letter also seemed to preview some of Mr. Trump’s potential defenses in the documents case, noting that during his chaotic departure from the White House, aides “quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida.” This hasty process, Mr. Parlatore argued, suggested that “White House institutional processes,” not “intentional decisions by President Trump,” were responsible for sensitive material being hauled away.Last week, Mr. Trump appeared to undercut those assertions on live television, declaring at a CNN town hall event that he knowingly removed government records from the White House and claiming that he was allowed to take anything he wanted with him as his personal property.“I took the documents,” he said at the event. “I’m allowed to.” More