Presidential Election of 2020

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      Pence, Tiptoeing Away From Trump, Lays Groundwork for ’24 Run

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      The former vice president is part of a group of Republicans who have visited early nominating states as they weigh a challenge to their party’s most dominant force.AMES, Iowa — For months, former Vice President Mike Pence has been edging away from his alliance of convenience with former President Donald J. Trump.After four years of service bordering on subservience, the increasingly emboldened Mr. Pence is seeking to reintroduce himself to Republican voters ahead of a potential presidential bid by setting himself apart from what many in the G.O.P. see as the worst impulses of Mr. Trump. He’s among a small group in his party considering a run in 2024 no matter what Mr. Trump decides.Mr. Pence first used high-profile speeches to criticize the former president’s push to overturn the 2020 election results, stating flatly that Mr. Trump was “wrong” in his assertion that Mr. Pence could have blocked the Electoral College ratification on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Pence then unsubtly visited the Charlottesville, Va., memorial to Heather Heyer, who was killed in the 2017 white supremacist riot there that Mr. Trump sought to rationalize by faulting “both sides.”Now, on Monday outside Atlanta, Mr. Pence is taking his boldest and most unambiguous step toward confronting his former political patron. On the eve of Georgia’s primary, the former vice president will stump with Gov. Brian Kemp, perhaps the top target of Mr. Trump’s 2022 vengeance campaign against Republicans who didn’t bow to his election lies.Mr. Pence grew close with Mr. Kemp during the pandemic and 2020 campaign, and now he is lining up against Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidate, former Senator David Perdue. But more than that, Mr. Pence is seeking to claim a share of credit in what’s expected to be the starkest repudiation yet of Mr. Trump’s attempt to consolidate power, with Mr. Kemp widely expected to prevail.It is an emphatic break between the onetime running mates, who have not spoken for nearly a year but have also not publicly waged a proxy war until now. Mr. Pence, his aides say, knows full well what going down to Georgia represents and the symbolism alone will stand without him targeting Mr. Trump or even Mr. Perdue in his remarks.In a statement ahead of Mr. Pence’s visit to Georgia, Mr. Trump belittled his vice president through a spokesman. “Mike Pence was set to lose a governor’s race in 2016 before he was plucked up and his political career was salvaged,” said Taylor Budowich, the spokesman. “Now, desperate to chase his lost relevance, Pence is parachuting into races, hoping someone is paying attention. The reality is, President Trump is already 82-3 with his endorsements, and there’s nothing stopping him from saving America in 2022 and beyond.”Georgia may represent only the beginning of a new rivalry.In Texas on Jan. 6, 2021, a Trump supporter cut Pence’s name from a campaign sign.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesMr. Pence on Monday will stump with Gov. Brian Kemp, perhaps the top target of Donald Trump’s 2022 vengeance campaign.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn an interview before a speech last month in Iowa, Mr. Pence pointedly declined to rule out running even if Mr. Trump also enters the 2024 primary. “We’ll go where we’re called,” Mr. Pence said, explaining that he and his wife would act on prayer. “That’s the way Karen and I have always approached these things.”How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Recalling the gratitude he gets from resisting Mr. Trump’s demands that he block Congress from affirming President Biden’s victory, he said: “I have been very moved traveling around the country how much people have made a point to express appreciation, it has been very humbling to me.”Yet in the same interview, he recalled spending “five years in the foxhole” with Mr. Trump, noting that he was “incredibly proud of the record,” before giving a dinner speech trumpeting the “Trump-Pence” administration multiple times.His approach amounts to the first soundings of a sort of Trump-without-the-chaos strategy, a bet that Republican primary voters crave the policy record of the last administration but without the impulsiveness, norm-breaking and naked demagogy.There may yet be a constituency for such an appeal, as this year’s G.O.P. primaries demonstrate how Trumpism is flourishing no matter whom its architect blesses.However, it’s far from clear that the sober-minded Mr. Pence is the best vessel for that message at a time many G.O.P. voters thrill more to closed-fist Trumpian pugnacity than paeans to the power of prayer.As of now, Mr. Trump is the clear favorite. Yet all his hints about becoming the first former president in over a century to try to reclaim the office haven’t stopped a host of other potential aspirants.Mr. Pence and the president he served for four years on the campaign trail in Michigan in 2020.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhether it’s Mr. Pence or former Trump cabinet members or a range of other elected officials, ambitious Republicans are already visiting early nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire, courting influential lawmakers and cultivating relationships with donors.Even if Mr. Trump runs, many Republicans believe there will still be a hotly contested race.“I don’t think it ends the primary,” said Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who is mulling a presidential campaign. “My sense is you’re still going to have a very robust primary here just because everyone has to earn it.”So far, Republican contenders are voting with their feet.Among those who have beaten a path to the early nominating states: Mr. Pence; former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley; and Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Rick Scott of Florida.Should Mr. Trump run, he would most likely sideline some Republicans who would either find him difficult to beat or just as soon wait it out. A smaller group of contenders, however, may find the less crowded field more appealing.Those ranks include former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest and most prominent supporters in 2016, but who has broken with him since the 2020 election.“Given the problems the country is facing at home and abroad, if you only feel up for it if somebody else doesn’t run, well, then you better not run,” Mr. Christie said. “Everybody who is considering running for president in ’24 should have a moral obligation to make that decision regardless of who else runs.”As for his own plans, he said: “Sure, I’m thinking about it.”Mr. Trump’s populist and pugilist imprint on the party has been cemented, whether he runs or not. That’s why Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is being so closely watched by conservative voters, donors and activists.Seizing on every chance to confront the left and the news media, and to draw coverage on right-wing media for both, Mr. DeSantis has risen to second place behind Mr. Trump in a series of way-too-early polls of Republican voters.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who split with Mr. Trump over the 2020 vote, campaigning for Governor Kemp in Georgia.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty ImagesConservative voters, donors and activists are watching for a possible run by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBut he’s steadfastly refused to visit Iowa and New Hampshire as a would-be White House candidate, leaving Florida mostly just to stockpile more money for his re-election. That’s not to say he’s not keeping his eye on national politics — he reached out to Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa to wish her well before her response to President Biden’s State of the Union address this year.Mr. DeSantis, though, is hardly beloved among his fellow Republican governors, a group that’s unlikely to rally around him in the same fashion they did George W. Bush, then the Texas governor, in 2000.“I know there’s a lot of talk on Fox News and stuff like that on the national level or in Florida but there’s really not talk about him here in New Hampshire,” Mr. Sununu said of Mr. DeSantis.What there is there, said the longtime Republican strategist Jim Merrill, is a quiet but persistent appetite among many in the rank-and-file to turn the page on Mr. Trump, at least as the party’s nominee.“There is a desire to move on here and it’s not just among the John Kasich and Bill Weld crowd,” said Mr. Merrill, alluding to two former Republican governors who ran as anti-Trump moderates in the state’s primary.Yet if Mr. Trump faces a divided Republican field as he did in the first wave of caucuses and primaries in 2016, he could again claim the nomination with a plurality rather than a majority in many states because of his seemingly unshakable hold on a third of his party’s electorate.At a county G.O.P. dinner in Ames — a college community that’s more upscale, and decidedly less Trump oriented, than much of Iowa — it was not difficult to find Republicans eager to find a fresh nominee, even if they edged into saying as much with Midwest Nice euphemisms.“He’s calm and predictable so that’s a good thing,” Eric Weber said of Mr. Pence.Mr. Trump was “too divisive even though what he did is great,” Mr. Weber said as his wife, Carol, suggested another Trump bid “may divide people.”Yet they weren’t ready to sign up with Mr. Pence, as both noted their affection for Mr. Cotton and Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Pence’s speech was received well if not overwhelmingly so. It had all the bearings of a Republican in Iowa leaning toward a presidential bid — knowing references to local politicians, Midwest totems like John Deere and attacks on the Democrats in power in Washington.Yet it also had the distinct air of a pre-Trump brand of Republicanism, with only the slightest criticism of the news media (and that was even gloved with “all due respect”), references to becoming a grandfather and G-rated jokes that could have just as easily been delivered by Mitt Romney (it involved Washington, D.C., and “hot air.”)Mr. Pence’s Iowa speech featured references to local politicians and attacks on the Democrats in power in Washington.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesFew at the gathering liked Mr. Pence as much as Kevin and Linda Lauver.Their phones blaring with tornado warnings, the Lauvers took shelter in the Ames Country Club basement ahead of the April G.O.P. dinner. And they bumped into the evening’s keynote speaker.“We want somebody from the Midwest,” Ms. Lauver told Mr. Pence, nudging him to run for president in 2024. “I like Mike,” Mr. Lauver chimed in.Mr. Pence earnestly patted his heart and offered his thanks.As Mr. Lauver headed back upstairs after the tornado false alarm, he wanted to be clear that he liked Mr. Trump.“He did what he said what he was going to do,” said Mr. Lauver, before adding in Iowa deadpan: “When he said the least it was the best.”Now, he continued, “We need him to say, ‘OK, I’ll step aside.’” Then Mr. Lauver paused.“I don’t know if he’ll do that.” More

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      Kushner’s and Mnuchin’s Quick Pivots to Business With the Gulf

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      Weeks before the Trump administration ended, Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin met with future investors on official trips to the Middle East.Shortly before the 2020 election, Trump administration officials unveiled a U.S. government-sponsored program called the Abraham Fund that they said would raise $3 billion for projects around the Middle East.Spearheaded by President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, the fund promised to capitalize on diplomatic agreements he had championed between Israel and some Arab states — pacts known as the Abraham Accords. Steven Mnuchin, then Treasury secretary, helped inaugurate the fund on a trip to the United Arab Emirates and Israel, hailing the accords as “a tremendous foundation for economic growth.”It was little more than talk: With no accounts, employees, income or projects, the fund vanished when Mr. Trump left office. Yet after Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin crisscrossed the Middle East in the final months of the administration on trips that included trying to raise money for the project, each quickly launched a private fund that in some ways picked up where the Abraham Fund had ended.Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin brought along top aides who had helped court Gulf rulers while promoting the Abraham Fund, and soon, both were back in the same royal courts asking for investments, although for purely commercial endeavors.Within three months, Mr. Mnuchin’s new firm had circulated detailed investment plans and received $500 million commitments from the Emiratis, Kuwaitis and Qataris, according to previously unreported documents prepared by the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which itself soon committed $1 billion. Mr. Kushner’s new firm reached an agreement for a $2 billion investment from the Saudis six months after he left government.A New York Times report last month revealing the Saudi investments in the Kushner and Mnuchin funds raised alarms from ethics experts and Democratic lawmakers about the appearance of potential payoffs for official acts during the Trump administration.But an examination of the two men’s travels toward the end of the Trump presidency raises other questions about whether they sought to exploit official relationships with foreign leaders for private business interests.In the weeks after the election, Mr. Kushner made three trips to the Middle East, the last for a Jan. 5 summit in Saudi Arabia with leaders of the Gulf monarchies. Mr. Mnuchin that day began a tour through the region that was planned to include private meetings with the heads of the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait — all future investors. (He cut it short after the Capitol riot, dropping the Kuwait stop and, in Saudi Arabia, meeting only with the finance minister.)Mr. Kushner and his aides have sometimes cast his private firm, Affinity Partners, as something like a continuation of the Abraham Fund. On a four-day trip to Israel in March to meet companies seeking investments, Mr. Kushner’s team portrayed the firm as a chance to invest in the peacemaking potential of the Abraham Accords, people who heard the pitch said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.Both Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin hired several aides who were deeply involved in the accords: A top executive at Affinity, retired Maj. Gen. Miguel Correa, is a former military attaché in the Emirates who later worked in the White House. Top executives at Mr. Mnuchin’s fund, Liberty Strategic Capital, include a former ambassador to Israel and a former Treasury aide who helped arrange meetings with Gulf leaders.The transition from government work for one Liberty Strategic executive was so fast that his jobs appeared to overlap. A roster of 11 top executives and advisers provided to the Saudis by April 2021 included the managing director Michael D’Ambrosio, even though he was still an assistant director at the Secret Service through the end of May. (A Secret Service spokesman said that Mr. D’Ambrosio had disclosed his new employment to the agency and spent his last weeks there on paid leave.)An organizational chart for Liberty Strategic Capital, Mr. Mnuchin’s new investment fund, that the Saudis were reviewing by April.A former Treasury aide known as a close confidant had resigned in 2019 and was waiting for Mr. Mnuchin in the private sector. That confidant, Eli Miller, had been working with Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds at Blackstone, another investment firm, and immediately rejoined the secretary at his new firm’s founding.The path from public service to private investing is well trod by members of both parties. The two Treasury secretaries under President Barack Obama later went to Wall Street.But Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin stand out, ethics experts said, for the speed of their pivots and for the sums they raised from foreign rulers they had recently dealt with on behalf of the United States.The Saudi investment with Mr. Kushner was made despite an advisory panel’s objections about his lack of relevant experience, the absence of other big investors, a high fee and the “public relations risk” of his ties to the former president, according to the minutes of a Saudi Public Investment Fund meeting last June that were obtained by The Times. Ethics experts suggested that the payment could be seen as a bid for influence if his father-in-law returned to office.Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has urged the Justice Department to “take a really hard look” at whether Mr. Kushner violated any criminal laws.Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics, said each fund raised different issues. For Mr. Kushner, she said, “the reason this smells so bad is that there is all sorts of evidence he did not receive this on the merits.”But for Mr. Mnuchin, who was a successful investor before entering government, the biggest question is whether he was burnishing relationships as Treasury secretary that he knew would be useful to him in the near future, Ms. Clark said.“If he was, that is an abuse of his office,” she said. “I don’t know if it is criminal, but it is certainly corrupt.”Through a spokesman, Mr. Kushner declined to comment.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Mnuchin denied that he had sought investments while in office and said without providing specifics that some of the details in the Saudi documents were inaccurate. The former secretary was returning to a decades-long career as a professional investor, the spokesman added, and the firm has diverse backers, “including U.S. insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, family offices and other institutional investors.”The Adviser and the SecretaryBefore vying for Persian Gulf investments, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin sometimes competed for influence in the White House. During the transition to the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner sought to install his own candidates as Treasury secretary, until Mr. Mnuchin caught wind of it and launched a countercampaign, recalled several people familiar with the efforts.The two men had come from very different business backgrounds. Mr. Kushner had previously run his family’s real estate empire and owned a weekly newspaper, both with mixed results; Mr. Mnuchin had followed his father into a career at Goldman Sachs and made a fortune investing in Hollywood films and a California bank. They kept a cordial distance in the administration. But both took strong and sometimes overlapping interests in the Persian Gulf.President Donald J. Trump with Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Mr. Mnuchin at a diplomatic meeting involving Israel and the United Arab Emirates.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Mnuchin had few business dealings in the region before the Trump administration. Yet he spent far more time there as Treasury secretary — and met far more often with the heads of sovereign wealth funds — than his immediate predecessors: He made at least 18 visits over four years to the Persian Gulf monarchies, compared with a total of eight made by his three predecessors over the previous decade.Former Treasury officials who worked with Mr. Mnuchin said that his time there reflected the priorities of the White House, including Iran sanctions, combating terrorist financing and the Abraham Accords. They noted that fund chiefs could be useful conduits to the rulers of the region.“He was a business guy who really knew how to do personal diplomacy, and they liked him,” said Michael Greenwald, a former Treasury attaché in Kuwait and Qatar who served in the Obama and Trump administrations. “So that was an effective tool.”Many of Mr. Mnuchin’s contacts appear to have been informal. One of his first meetings with Yasir al-Rumayyan, chief of the Saudi fund, was a September 2017 breakfast at the home of Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chief executive and Mr. Mnuchin’s neighbor. Mr. Miller, the secretary’s chief of staff at the time and now a senior managing director at Liberty Strategic, also attended.Mr. Mnuchin met with Mr. al-Rumayyan at least nine more times during the Trump presidency, including in Bahrain, Switzerland and a Treasury conference room, according to department emails that the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Times.In addition to multiple meetings with the Qatari emir and other officials, Mr. Mnuchin met at least 10 times with the head of the Qatar Investment Authority.“I will just do one-on-one with Mansoor,” he emailed an aide in 2019, referring to Mansoor bin Ibrahim al-Mahmoud, the fund’s chief executive. “We have communicated direct.”Mr. Mnuchin also met five times with the heads of the two main Emirati funds, once at a Washington dinner hosted by the co-founder of the Carlyle investment group.And he met repeatedly with the rulers of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. That included a private meeting with the Saudi crown prince in Riyadh in 2018 shortly after the kingdom’s agents killed Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident and columnist for The Washington Post. And the documents suggest Mr. Mnuchin built a rapport with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, known by the initials M.B.Z., who recently became the Emirates’ president.Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates.Frank Augstein/Associated Press“I am available anytime to see you and His royal highness M.B.Z.,” Mr. Mnuchin wrote to an unidentified recipient in February 2020, planning a visit. “If possible it would be great for us to have a bike ride and dinner as we had discussed.”Suggesting a blurring of the lines between government and business, he wrote to a top Treasury aide in December 2020, apparently about a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund scheduled to take place after he stepped down.“Do we have any more info on PIF late January?” he wrote to the aide, Zachary McEntee, who accompanied him on Gulf trips that involved the Abraham Fund and later joined Mr. Mnuchin’s firm. A spokesman said Mr. Mnuchin was asking about a conference sponsored by the Saudi fund that he attended as a private citizen.Two weeks before he left office, Mr. Mnuchin flew to the region for official meetings with leaders across the Persian Gulf, with the stated purpose of discussing sanctions, terrorist financing and other national security matters. The visit included a private lunch on Jan. 8 at the National Museum of Qatar with the head of the country’s main investment fund.As for Mr. Kushner, he had made his highest goal in the White House the brokering of a Middle East peace plan centered on funding from Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. The core of the plan was to solicit investments from the Gulf that might persuade Palestinians to relinquish some of their demands for a future state. As the culmination of those efforts, he and Mr. Mnuchin organized a “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Bahrain that no Palestinian officials attended.To court Gulf rulers, Mr. Kushner helped persuade Mr. Trump to make the first foreign trip of his administration a 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia. Shortly after a meeting there with Mr. Kushner, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led a blockade of Qatar, accusing it of supporting extremism. Qatar hosts a major American military base, and the secretaries of defense and state pushed for an end to the blockade, but Mr. Trump initially backed it.Mr. Kushner returned repeatedly to the Persian Gulf — making at least 10 trips during the Trump administration, often to visit multiple countries — and formed a close alliance with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. After American intelligence agencies concluded that the Saudi leader had approved the brutal murder of Mr. Khashoggi, Mr. Kushner defended the prince in the White House.Mr. Kushner at a meeting in September 2020 with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.SPA handout/AFP, via Getty ImagesIn December 2020, Mr. Kushner visited Saudi Arabia and Qatar on a trip billed as an effort to end their three-year feud, returning to the kingdom on Jan. 5 for a Gulf summit where they formally reopened relations.“Jared led the diplomatic effort to heal the Gulf rift,” Mr. Kushner’s firm declared in a recent investor presentation.Allies of Mr. Mnuchin, though, said he also played a leading role, in part by working closely with Qatar to police terrorist financing and improve relations with Mr. Trump.In reality, diplomats said, the resolution was driven by the Saudis’ desire to end the rift before the start of a new American administration. But credit for ending the blockade may be valuable in courting investments.Exit StrategiesMr. Mnuchin wasted no time getting back to business. Three weeks after the Trump administration ended, he said in an interview that he had a plan but wasn’t ready to discuss it.By April 2021, his firm was showing potential investors a detailed list of target industries, according to documents obtained from the Saudi fund. The firm had arranged a legal structure that enabled foreign sovereign wealth funds to invest in strategically sensitive American industries, the documents show, and had already hired several former Treasury and State Department officials as top executives.Mr. Kushner got off to a slower start. Even by the time he reached his $2 billion agreement with the Saudi fund last July, he had not hired any executives with relevant investing experience.From left: Maj. Gen. Miguel Correa, Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone and Avi Berkowitz, whom Mr. Kushner hired for his fund.From Left: Bob Collet/Alamy Stock Photo; Steve Mack/Alamy Stock Photo; Mark Lennihan/Associated PressHe brought on his closest aide, Avi Berkowitz, and General Correa, the former military attaché. The general had left the U.S. embassy in the Emirates after clashing with senior diplomats who believed he had held unauthorized private meetings with the country’s leaders about arms sales and other matters. He had nonetheless been elevated to the White House, where he worked closely with Mr. Kushner. Career diplomats said that by the end of the administration, General Correa and Mr. Berkowitz were sometimes the only Americans accompanying Mr. Kushner to meet with Persian Gulf officials.Mr. Kushner also hired Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, a former diplomat in Jerusalem who had worked on the Abraham Accords and been named a director of the Abraham Fund.A December 2021 presentation Mr. Kushner’s firm shared with potential investors, reported last month by The Intercept, suggests his firm’s focus may be blurring. As investment targets, the presentation listed a grab bag of high-growth industries including media, technology, health care, finance, consumer services and sustainable energy.But the presentation also touted Mr. Kushner’s “geopolitical experience” and role in Middle Eastern diplomacy.Mr. Kushner has continued to link his private firm to the Abraham Accords. “If we can get Israelis and Muslims in the region to do business together it will focus people on shared interests and shared values,” he recently told The Wall Street Journal, apparently referring to Muslims in neighboring countries (though about 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Muslim). The fund has so far invested in two Israeli companies.Adam Boehler, a finance official and Mr. Kushner’s college roommate, oversaw the Abraham Fund.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Abraham Fund was overseen by Adam Boehler, at the time the head of a newly formed development finance agency and a college roommate of Mr. Kushner’s. Mr. Boehler joined Mr. Mnuchin on his Gulf visit in October and accompanied Mr. Kushner to Qatar and Saudi Arabia in December.Officials said the fund would invest in poorer countries that joined the accords, and its first projects were said to include upgrading checkpoints into Israel from the Palestinian territories and building a gas pipeline between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.Neither project went anywhere. Nor did the efforts to enlist Gulf money.In January last year, Mr. Boehler announced the only publicly disclosed investment in the Abraham Fund: a “commitment of up to $50 million” from Uzbekistan, a relatively low-income country. Uzbek officials said at the time that they sought to reduce poverty and foster regional cooperation. Long criticized for human rights abuses, Uzbekistan had begun a lobbying push in Washington to improve its image after a leadership change; its new president also gave Mr. Trump a $2,950 silver replica of a historic building and his wife a $4,200 bed cover.But no money for the short-lived Abraham Fund was ever delivered.Ben Hubbard More

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      How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures

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      LANSING, Mich. — At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times. The tally accounts for 44 […] More

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      Scorned by Trump, Mo Brooks Rises in Alabama Senate Race

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      Mr. Brooks, a hard-right representative, seems to be making an unlikely comeback in a Senate race in which the Trump endorsement may not determine votes of Trump supporters.CLANTON, Ala. — Two months ago, Representative Mo Brooks, whose hard-right credentials were unblemished, seemed to be imploding in the Alabama Republican Senate race.Under a rain of attack ads, polls showed him falling behind two rivals. Former President Donald J. Trump humiliated Mr. Brooks by rescinding an earlier endorsement.But Mr. Brooks has staged a compelling comeback, with recent polling putting him in a statistical tie for the lead in a tight three-candidate race ahead of the primary on Tuesday.In a twist of fate, the Brooks bounce-back appears to be driven by voters who identify as “Trump Republicans” — another bit of evidence, after recent primaries from Nebraska to Pennsylvania, that the former president’s political movement may no longer be entirely under his command.“Brooks may be surging just at the right time,” a conservative talk radio host, Dale Jackson, said over the Birmingham airwaves on Friday.Mr. Brooks — who appeared at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally before the siege of the Capitol, where he goaded election deniers to start “kicking ass” — has returned to contention not only despite Mr. Trump’s fickleness, but also in the face of opposition by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. A super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell has funneled $2 million to a group attacking Mr. Brooks in television ads.In 12 years as an arch-conservative in the House, Mr. Brooks has bucked party leadership, which won him no fans among Senate Republican leaders. Mr. McConnell and his allies would prefer a different replacement for the open seat of Senator Richard Shelby, 88, who is retiring. Alabama’s deep-seated conservatism means that the Republican nominee is all but assured of winning in November.Katie Britt, a lawyer and former aide to retiring Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, is currently leading in polls for the seat Mr. Shelby is vacating. Sean Gardner/Getty ImagesA polling average by Real Clear Politics showed Katie Britt, a former aide to Mr. Shelby, in the lead with 34 percent, Mr. Brooks with 29 percent and Mike Durant, a military contractor and Army veteran, with 24 percent. If no candidate consolidates more than 50 percent on Tuesday, the top two advance to a runoff on June 21.“Slowly but surely, conservatives are figuring out I’m the only conservative in this race,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. He called Mr. Durant “a John McCain-type of Republican” and Ms. Britt “a Mitch McConnell-establishment, open-borders, cheap-foreign-labor, special-interest-group Republican.”A poker-faced former prosecutor, Mr. Brooks nonetheless seemed to savor, at a couple of campaign appearances on Friday, his comeback from March, when he was polling in the teens and Mr. Trump abandoned him. The former president accused Mr. Brooks of having gone “woke” because he had urged a crowd, months earlier, to put the 2020 election “behind you.”Mr. Brooks, 68, “is the least woke person in the state of Alabama,” said Terry Lathan, a former chair of the Alabama Republican Party, who is a co-chair of the Brooks campaign.In style and experience, there are strong differences between the stolid Mr. Brooks and the energetic Ms. Britt, a lawyer whose first digital ad featured her marriage to Wesley Britt, a former University of Alabama football star — no small credential in a state where the other senator, Tommy Tuberville, is a former Auburn University football coach. Ms. Britt, 40, presents herself as a committed social conservative. Campaign ads feature her calling to get “kids and God back in the classroom” and, while striding through a girls’ locker room, accusing “crazy liberals” of wanting to let boys in.A poll on Thursday for The Alabama Daily News and Gray Television showed likely voters who identified as “traditional conservative Republicans” favored Ms. Britt and Mr. Durant over Mr. Brooks.But Mr. Brooks won the support of a plurality of voters who identified as “Trump Republicans” — 35 percent, up from 26 percent in an earlier survey.The race has seen millions of dollars spent on negative ads attacking all three candidates that in many ways have shaped the turbulent peaks and valleys of their campaigns.In particular, opinions of Mr. Durant and Ms. Britt, who as first-time candidates are less well-known, have been battered by assaults over the airwaves.The anti-tax Club for Growth, which supports Mr. Brooks, has spent $6 million in the state on ads, including one barraging Ms. Britt — the former head of an Alabama business group — as “really a lobbyist” who supported a state gas tax increase. One ad flashes a tweet from Donald Trump Jr. in 2021 — back when his father still liked Mr. Brooks — calling Ms. Britt “the Alabama Liz Cheney.”The share of voters with a favorable view of Ms. Britt dropped six points in the recent Alabama Daily News poll, compared with a survey in early May.Mr. Brooks, already a known quantity, better withstood attacks and is slightly above water in terms of favorable and unfavorable opinions with voters.“The story of the numbers in a way is that everyone at this point has an image that is pretty close to the water line,” said John Rogers, a strategist for Cygnal, which conducted the Alabama Daily News polling.Mike Durant, a former Army pilot, is currently trailing the other two top contenders for the Alabama Senate seat. Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesIt is Mr. Durant, a former Army pilot who figured in the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, who seems most battered — and most upset — by the blasts of negativity on the airwaves. In March, he was leading in polls. Now he is struggling to make it into a runoff, after being accused of weakness on gun rights and fighting off a false claim that he doesn’t live in Alabama.In politics, “the only thing that matters is how much money you’ve got and how low you’re willing to go,” he said with disgust on Friday. “It’s very, very disturbing. I hope it will backfire.”Mr. Brooks’s time in the barrel took place in the spring. A super PAC favoring Ms. Britt, Alabama’s Future, dredged up clips of the congressman disparaging Mr. Trump in 2016. “I don’t think you can trust Donald Trump with anything he says,” Mr. Brooks said back then. Another outside group, calling itself No More Mo, ran an ad in the Florida media market that includes Mar-a-Lago, which blared that Mr. Brooks was “a proven loser” and “Trump deserves winners.”Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks shortly after.His stated reason was that Mr. Brooks had gone wobbly on election denialism by urging voters to focus on future races. Mr. Brooks revealed in response that Mr. Trump had pressed him for months after Jan. 6 to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election and to remove President Biden, and that he told Mr. Trump it was impossible under the Constitution.Despite the Trumpian snub, Mr. Brooks continues to falsely maintain that the election was stolen from the former president, a view widely held by Alabama Republicans.On May 12, Mr. Brooks was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. On that date, Mr. Brooks, wearing body armor, had asked the roiling crowd of Trump supporters gathered near the White House, “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” Cheers erupted. He went on: “Will you fight for America?” Not long after, the protest became a riot and the Capitol was breached.On Friday night, Mr. Brooks appeared in Clanton at Peach Park, a popular roadside fruit and ice cream stand adorned with pictures of beauty queens posing with peaches, for an outdoor screening of the movie “2000 Mules.” The film is the latest conservative effort to promote the myth of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The Georgia State Elections Board last week dismissed some claims central to the movie.“What we’re going to see tonight is a reaffirmation of what we already know,” Mr. Brooks told a sparse crowd.Awaiting the start of the film, Apryl Marie Fogel told Mr. Brooks that she had been an undecided voter, but had made up her mind to support him.Ms. Fogel is the host of “Straight Talk with Apryl Marie” on Montgomery talk radio. She told Mr. Brooks that on her show that day, “We all agreed that it’s going to be a runoff between you and Katie and that you have picked up steam.”There was speculation on air, she said, that Mr. Trump would re-endorse him.Mr. Brooks paused, his face a mask.“That would be interesting,” he allowed. More

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      What Donald Trump Didn’t Count On in Georgia

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      Brian Kemp, the incumbent governor, is at the top of the former president’s enemies list. But to many Georgia Republicans, he is ‘one of us.’THOMASTON, Ga.— Brian Kemp, Georgia’s incumbent governor and a prominent fixture on former President Donald J. Trump’s enemies list, was clip-clopping around in a pair of cowboy boots in this small city on a recent morning, glad-handing his way through an adoring Republican throng at a place called Greatest Generation Memorial Park. Soon he was confronted by a smiling man wearing a baseball cap adorned with a cursive letter “A.”It was a University of Alabama hat. Mr. Kemp, a sports nut, is a famous partisan of the University of Georgia, his alma mater and one of Alabama’s gridiron rivals. He has even adopted the Bulldog football team’s motivational catchphrase, “Keep choppin’,” as his own.There was a brief moment of good-natured sports-guy ribbing. Then Mr. Kemp turned to his left and addressed a man with a badge. “We need to lock this guy up, sheriff,” he deadpanned. The crowd chuckled.With his boots, his football fixation and a distinctively folksy Southern voice — one that rarely, in campaign mode, nails the “g” at the end of a gerund — Mr. Kemp presents himself as the most Georgian of Georgians. And it is his gift for both reflecting and rewarding his conservative Georgia constituency that has given him a surprisingly cushy lead in the polls in advance of Tuesday’s Republican primary, even as Mr. Trump, who remains tremendously popular in Georgia, continues to disparage him as a “Republican in name only” and demands that voters punish Mr. Kemp for declining to help him overturn the state’s presidential election results of November 2020.What the former president wasn’t counting on, apparently, was the willingness of many Georgia Republicans to remain simultaneously loyal to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Kemp.Former President Donald Trump and former U.S. Senator David Perduee at a Save America rally in Commerce, Ga., in March. Mr. Trump has endorsed Mr. Perdue in the gubernatorial primary.Audra Melton for The New York TimesJust after the campaign event in Thomaston, Sheriff Dan Kilgore of Upson County identified himself as a Trump voter. But he said that Mr. Kemp seemed like a natural fit for the state. “He’s of the people,” Mr. Kilgore said. “He’s one of us.”How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Linda Reeves, a retired government worker, said that she and her husband, Clarence, voted for Mr. Trump and even believed his assertion that the Georgia election was stolen, an argument that proved baseless. “We are Trump supporters,” she said. “But everything that comes out of someone’s mouth is not necessarily true.” Mr. Kemp, she said, had proven his bona fides, most recently by signing a law limiting the discussion of race in public-school classrooms, and another allowing Georgians to carry firearms without a permit.“Brian Kemp is a very conservative governor,” she said.While Mr. Kemp has kept socially conservative Republicans appeased with legislation, he has also strengthened his hand with important economic-development wins, including a planned Rivian electric truck plant east of Atlanta and a new Hyundai electric vehicle plant to be built outside of Savannah. The state budget he signed this month includes pay raises for teachers and state government employees. Former Vice President Mike Pence is planning to come to Georgia on Monday to campaign on Mr. Kemp’s behalf; in a statement, he called Mr. Kemp “one of the most successful conservative governors in America.”Mr. Trump has endorsed former U.S. Senator David Perdue, the former chief executive of the Dollar General discount chain, who has repeated Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election. But Mr. Perdue, who lives in the exclusive community of Sea Island, has struggled to gain traction in his primary against the governor.This week, NBC News reported that the former president has been privately complaining about Mr. Perdue’s performance and had essentially written him off. Mr. Trump pushed back Friday with a social media post calling the reporting “FALSE.”“I am with David all the way because Brian Kemp was the WORST Governor in the Country on Election Integrity!” he wrote.Mr. Trump’s record in influencing Republican primary outcomes this season has been mixed. Successful Trump-backed candidates include J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, and Doug Mastriano, a candidate for Pennsylvania governor who echoes Mr. Trump’s untrue claims of election fraud. But other Trump candidates have lost high-profile Republican primary contests in North Carolina, Nebraska and Idaho.Attendees listen to Mr. Kemp speak in Greensboro, Ga., on Thursday. Mr. Kemp has a cushy lead in the polls in advance of Tuesday’s Republican primary.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Trump has endorsed an extensive slate of Republican candidates in Georgia, where he and some of his allies are under investigation in Fulton County for potentially violating state criminal law in their attempts to interfere with the presidential election results. But the outcomes of Georgia’s Trump squad members this primary season may vary.A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of likely Republican voters shows the U.S. Senate candidate and former University of Georgia running back Herschel Walker with a big lead in his primary race, likely aided by both Mr. Trump’s endorsement and Mr. Walker’s status as a football legend. The same poll shows the Trump-backed candidate for secretary of state, U.S. Representative Jody Hice, in a tight primary race against incumbent Brad Raffensperger. The April AJC poll shows Mr. Kemp with a 23-point lead over Mr. Perdue; a more recent Fox News poll showed the governor ahead by more than 30 points. Mr. Perdue, whose appearances this week included a Bikers for Trump event in Plainville, Ga., is hoping that heavy early-voting turnout is a sign that Trump voters are quietly moving the needle in his direction and will at least allow him to force Mr. Kemp into a runoff.The Kemp campaign has vastly out-raised and outspent the Perdue campaign, a sign that much of the Georgia donor class, which tends to be wary of political turbulence, prefers the status quo. And though Mr. Perdue has benefited from outside groups’ TV ads featuring Mr. Trump, the Perdue campaign has not been on the air with its own ads since late April, according to Adimpact, an ad-tracking firm.Mr. Kemp, meanwhile, has countermanded Mr. Trump’s wrath with a relentless focus on affairs in his own backyard. On Wednesday, Norman Allen, the Upson County Commission chairman, praised Mr. Kemp for personally taking his calls in 2020 and promising extra help from state government as the county suffered in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Kemp has also strategically dispensed executive spoils, including coveted government appointments, keeping fellow Georgia Republicans in his camp, or at least on the sidelines. That appeared to be the case earlier this year, when the state board that oversees Georgia’s public college system, which is stocked with Kemp loyalists, chose as system chancellor Sonny Perdue, a former Georgia governor and Trump cabinet official who happens to be David Perdue’s cousin.Before his stump speech in Thomaston, Mr. Kemp mingled with the crowd, with the sleeves of his red-gingham shirt rolled up, shaking hands with old acquaintances, talking about tailgate parties from football seasons past and praising the moxie of his octogenarian mother.Mr. Kemp is aware that this kind of warm welcome, from a rural, mostly white crowd, coexists with a strong distaste for him on the left and from influential voices outside of Georgia. In 2018, a number of high-profile Democrats described some moves he made as secretary of state as voter suppression tactics. Some of them used variations of the word “steal” to describe Mr. Kemp’s defeat of the Democrat Stacey Abrams that year in the governor’s race. Ms. Abrams, who also alleged that Mr. Kemp engaged in voter suppression, never conceded in that contest.His four years in office have brought more controversy. President Biden described the sweeping law that Mr. Kemp signed in the wake of the 2020 election to restrict voting access “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” And Mr. Kemp was heavily criticized for his decision, in April 2020, to allow many businesses in the state to reopen in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.In his speech in Thomaston, Mr. Kemp said he knew those criticisms were wrong, because he had listened to voters. “I knew how bad they were hurting, because I was hearing from them,” he said of Georgia business owners and workers affected by the pandemic. “I was talking to them. I was talking to barbers and the cosmetologists and the waitresses and the restaurant owners.”The governor made no mention of David Perdue, or of Mr. Trump, but rather looked ahead, with multiple mentions of Ms. Abrams, whom he will face off against in the general election if he gets there. “We’re in a fight for the soul of our state, y’all,” he said. “We’re getting up every single morning to make sure that Stacey Abrams is not going to be our governor or our next president,” he said.He added: “Keep choppin’, God bless you, and thanks for coming.” More

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      Perdue Had Trump. In Georgia, Kemp Had Everything Else.

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      David Perdue challenged Gov. Brian Kemp because of Donald Trump’s fury over his 2020 loss. Thoroughly outflanked and failing to gain traction, he is now staring down defeat.In September 2021, former Senator David Perdue was hemming and hawing about running for governor of Georgia. Over dinner with an old friend on Sea Island, he pulled out his iPhone and showed the list of calls he’d gotten from Donald J. Trump, lobbying him to take the plunge.“He said Trump called him all the time,” said Martha Zoller, a former aide to Mr. Perdue who now hosts a talk radio show in Gainesville, Ga. “He showed me on his phone these multiple recent calls and said they were from the president.”Ms. Zoller and a legion of other former Perdue aides and advisers told the former senator that running was a bad idea. He listened to Mr. Trump instead.Now, Mr. Perdue is staring down an epic defeat at the hands of Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican whom Mr. Trump has blamed for his 2020 loss more than any other person. The Perdue campaign is ending the race low on cash, with no ads on television and a candidate described even by his supporters as lackluster and distracted.“Perdue thought that Trump was a magic wand,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a Trump ally, who was among Mr. Perdue’s highest-profile Georgia supporters. “In retrospect, it’s hard to understand David’s campaign, and it’s certainly not the campaign those of us who were for him expected.”Mr. Perdue’s impending downfall in Tuesday’s primary for governor looms as the biggest electoral setback for Mr. Trump since his own defeat in the 2020 election. There is perhaps no contest in which the former president has done more to try to influence the outcome. Mr. Trump recruited, promoted and cleared the field for his ally, while assailing Mr. Kemp, recording television ads and giving $2.64 million to groups helping Mr. Perdue — by far the most he has ever invested in another politician.Yet the race has exposed the limits of Mr. Trump’s sway, especially against entrenched Republican incumbents.Gov. Brian Kemp campaigning with former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in Alpharetta, Ga., this past week. A recent poll showed him leading the Republican primary by more than 30 percentage points.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Perdue’s failures were not just of his own making. He was outflanked by a savvy incumbent in Mr. Kemp who exploited the powers of his office to cut off Mr. Perdue from allies — including Mr. Perdue’s own cousin Sonny, a former governor and Trump agriculture secretary whom Mr. Kemp’s allies appointed chancellor of the University System of Georgia.Mr. Kemp also appeared to punish those who crossed him: One congressional seat was drawn to exclude the home of a candidate whose father, a Perdue supporter, had publicly criticized the governor.And he offered goodies to voters, including a gas-tax holiday that conveniently runs through the end of May, just past the primary.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.On Thursday, as Mr. Perdue campaigned outside the Semper Fi Bar and Grille in Woodstock, Ga., he was not conjuring up a path to victory but haggling over the scope of his widely expected defeat, after a Fox News survey showed him down 32 percentage points.“Hell no, I’m not down 30 points,” insisted Mr. Perdue, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article. “We may not win Tuesday,” he added, “but I guaran-damn-tee-you we are not down 30 points.”The key threshold on Tuesday is 50 percent: Mr. Kemp must win an outright majority in the five-candidate field to avoid a one-on-one runoff in June.The story of Mr. Perdue’s effort is less one of political collapse and more of a failure to launch. From the moment he announced his candidacy in December, Mr. Perdue never demonstrated the same commitment to winning that he displayed in his first Senate race in 2014.His case for ousting Mr. Kemp was always largely based on support from the former president. Mr. Perdue argued at his campaign introduction that the governor had so alienated the party’s Trump faithful that they would not rally around Mr. Kemp against Stacey Abrams, the presumptive Democratic nominee and a leading villain for Republicans.But Mr. Perdue, 72, a wealthy former chief executive of Dollar General, never came close to matching the $3.8 million of his own money he put into his 2014 Senate race. He invested just $500,000 in his bid for governor.That is less than he and his wife spent last year for a waterfront lot on a secluded peninsula on scenic St. Simons Island, a purchase made not long after his runoff defeat at the hands of a then-33-year-old Democrat that delivered Senate control to Democrats. A permit to build a nearly 12,000-square-foot mansion worth an estimated $5 million — on land including “over 625 feet of lake frontage,” according to the listing — was granted two weeks after he declared his candidacy, records show.Mr. Perdue’s home remains under construction on St. Simons Island in Georgia. Parker Stewart for The New York TimesMr. Trump has simultaneously invested heavily in Mr. Perdue, with his $2.64 million, and sought to avoid blame as the candidate has faltered, telling The New York Times in April that the news media’s focus “should be on the endorsements — not the David Perdue one” to measure his influence.Mr. Trump’s last rally in Georgia came in late March. He did not return, as Perdue allies had hoped, instead holding a conference call for supporters in early May.“I am with David all the way because Brian Kemp was the WORST governor in the Country on Election Integrity!” Mr. Trump insisted Friday on his Truth Social messaging platform.Mr. Perdue, like candidates for governor in Idaho and Nebraska this month, learned that a Trump endorsement alone does not assure the support of Trump voters or Trump donors.“The Trump endorsement is very important, but it’s only an endorsement,” said former Representative Jack Kingston, who lost the 2014 Senate primary to Mr. Perdue and is a former Trump adviser. “It’s not an army of infrastructure and door-knockers the way it would be if you have the Sierra Club or the N.R.A. or the A.F.L.-C.I.O.”Mr. Perdue, second from left, with Senator Kelly Loeffler, left, President Donald J. Trump and Melania Trump shortly after the 2020 election. Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler lost to Democrats in early 2021.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe juxtaposition between the Kemp and Perdue camps was particularly stark on Friday.Mr. Kemp was outside Savannah, announcing that Hyundai was investing $5.5 billion in an electric battery and vehicle manufacturing plant, one of the largest economic development projects in Georgia history. There was a champagne toast.Mr. Perdue was nearby holding an endorsement event with Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, who is making her own comeback attempt in a House race in Alaska.“I would rather be standing on the stage announcing 7,500 jobs than standing next to Sarah Palin,” said Mr. Kemp’s lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, a fierce Trump critic who opted not to run for re-election this year.Randy Evans, a Perdue supporter who served as ambassador to Luxembourg in the Trump administration, said the Kemp operation had been ruthless in using what he called the “bullying” powers of the governorship.Mr. Evans’s son, Jake, is running for Congress in the Atlanta suburbs. When Kemp-aligned Republican legislators drew new lines in redistricting, the younger Mr. Evans was suddenly drawn out of the district in which he had been planning to run.“They cut a sliver about the size of your little finger,” the elder Mr. Evans said. “Jake had to move, buy a new house.”Mr. Kemp, 58, leveraged the powers of incumbency in other crucial ways. He signed a measure to provide tax refunds of up to $500 for married couples, then announced on May 11, after early voting had begun, that those checks were in the mail. He appealed to rural Georgians by raising pay for teachers, and pleased conservatives by signing sweeping legislation to restrict voting access, expand gun rights and forbid school mask mandates.Mr. Kemp at a campaign stop in Canton, Ga., this past week. He has signed several conservative priorities into law over the past year.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Perdue’s efforts could seem feeble in comparison. In March, he attacked Mr. Kemp for recruiting an electric truck maker to open a factory in rural Georgia — creating thousands of jobs — because George Soros, the prominent Democratic donor, had recently invested in the company.The Kemp-Perdue contest was steeped in the drama of personal betrayal.Mr. Kemp had spent weeks campaigning with Mr. Perdue before the senator’s defeat in the January 2021 Senate runoff election. By then, Mr. Kemp had infuriated Mr. Trump by defending the legitimacy of Georgia’s presidential results.Last spring, Mr. Kemp’s aides said, Mr. Perdue assured Mr. Kemp that he did not intend to run for governor. That June, Mr. Perdue introduced the governor at the Georgia Republican Party’s annual convention.In 2018, Mr. Perdue and Mr. Kemp appeared together during Mr. Kemp’s campaign for governor.Audra Melton for The New York TimesBut Mr. Kemp, cannily, had already begun the process of installing Sonny Perdue, a popular former governor, to run Georgia’s state universities — an appointment that effectively put him on the sidelines. (Sonny Perdue, through a spokesman, declined to comment.)Mr. Kemp also pre-emptively secured the loyalty and fund-raising might of Alec Poitevint, a South Georgia businessman who had served as campaign chairman for David Perdue’s Senate campaigns and Sonny Perdue’s campaigns for governor — one of many ways the Kemp operation boxed out Mr. Perdue financially.Mr. Poitevint said he was among a host of longtime David Perdue supporters who had urged him not to run.“I didn’t think it was serious,” Mr. Poitevint said. “I expressed the fact that I didn’t agree with it, that I thought that the governor had done a great job and deserved re-election.”Shunned by the state’s political establishment, Mr. Perdue tried framing himself as a political outsider — “I’ve been an outsider since I got into politics,” he said on Thursday — but that is a difficult case to make for a former senator boasting of his support from a former president.Even Mr. Trump’s $2.64 million infusion was swamped by the $5.2 million in television ads paid for by the Republican Governors Association to aid Mr. Kemp.For all of Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Kemp, the governor never struck back. Mr. Kemp’s advisers believe that discipline helped provide permission for even the most devoted Trump supporters to stick with the governor.Mr. Perdue’s campaign, meanwhile, was laser-focused on falsehoods about 2020 — repeating Mr. Trump’s lie and blaming Mr. Kemp for President Biden’s election.Mr. Evans, the former ambassador who in early 2021 had tried to broker a peace deal between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kemp, campaigned for Mr. Perdue but said he saw little effort to define a distinctive platform.​​ “As far as having an existence that existed independent of Trump, I really didn’t see that materialize,” Mr. Evans said.Mr. Kemp’s lieutenant governor, Mr. Duncan, summarized the arc of the Perdue candidacy.“David Perdue made a bad bet six months ago when he jumped in the race and thought, ‘Because Donald Trump likes me, I’m going to win,’” Mr. Duncan said. “He bet wrong.”Maya King More

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      Giuliani Meets With Jan. 6 Committee for Over 7 Hours

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      The onetime Trump lawyer was central to the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, who helped lead President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election as his personal lawyer, sat on Friday for a lengthy interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the closed-door interview.Mr. Giuliani’s interview, which was virtual, lasted for more than seven hours, the people said. The interview was transcribed, and he was under oath. He took a break in the middle of it to host his hourlong afternoon radio show.It was unclear what Mr. Giuliani told the committee, but his centrality to Mr. Trump’s various attempts to subvert the election made him a potentially pivotal witness for the panel, with knowledge of details about interactions with members of Congress and others involved in the plans.Mr. Giuliani, whose interview was reported earlier by CNN, had negotiated with the panel about testifying for months, and he reached an agreement to speak about matters other than his conversations with Mr. Trump or any other topic he believed was covered by attorney-client privilege.Earlier this month, he abruptly pulled out of a scheduled interview with the committee after the panel refused to let him record the session. He later dropped that objection and agreed to testify after the panel threatened to use its “enforcement options,” an implied referral to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress, the people said.The committee has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and has recommended criminal contempt of Congress charges against four of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, who have refused to cooperate fully.Mr. Giuliani was one of the last major witnesses the committee had pressed to interview in the final weeks before it begins holding public hearings in June. Others include more than a half-dozen Republican members of Congress, such as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader.The panel has not yet made final decisions about whether to call Mr. Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence or Virginia Thomas, a right-wing activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election and who is the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. The chairman of the panel, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, recently indicated the committee might not ultimately summon any of the three.Mr. Giuliani was a key figure in Mr. Trump’s attempts to stave off electoral defeat and was involved in plans to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College by persuading lawmakers in contested swing states to draw up alternate slates of electors showing Mr. Trump as victorious in states actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Giuliani was also instrumental in vetting a plan to use the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines and examine the data housed inside them for supposed evidence of fraud. At Mr. Trump’s direction, Mr. Giuliani asked a top homeland security official if the department could legally take control of the machines — a notion the official shot down. Mr. Giuliani later opposed an even more explosive proposal to have the military seize the machines.Mr. Giuliani was subpoenaed with other members of a legal team that billed itself as an “elite strike force” and pursued a set of lawsuits on behalf of Mr. Trump in which they promulgated conspiracy theories and made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the election.The committee’s subpoena sought all documents that Mr. Giuliani had detailing the pressure campaign that he and other Trump allies initiated targeting state officials, the seizure of voting machines, contact with members of Congress, any evidence to support the conspiracy theories he pushed and any arrangements for his fees.On Jan. 6, speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Later, after the building was under siege, both he and Mr. Trump called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. More

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      Ginni Thomas Urged Arizona Lawmakers to Overturn Election

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      The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote to legislators in a crucial swing state after the Trump campaign’s loss in 2020.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, twice lobbied the speaker of the Arizona House and another lawmaker to effectively reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s popular-vote victory and deliver the crucial swing state to Donald J. Trump.Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, a right-wing political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency, made the entreaties in emails to Russell Bowers, the Republican speaker, and Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative. Ms. Bolick’s husband, Clint, once worked with Justice Thomas and now sits on the Arizona Supreme Court.The emails came as Mr. Trump and his allies were engaged in a legal effort to overturn his defeats in several battleground states. While the Arizona emails did not mention either presidential candidate by name, they echoed the former president’s false claims of voter fraud and his legal team’s dubious contention that the power to choose electors therefore rested not with the voters but with state legislatures.“Do your constitutional duty,” Ms. Thomas wrote the lawmakers on Nov. 9. On Dec. 13, with Mr. Trump still refusing to concede on the eve of the Electoral College vote, she contacted the lawmakers again.“The nation’s eyes are on you now,” she warned, adding, “Please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.”After she sent her first round of emails, but before the second round, Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, more directly pressured Mr. Bowers. They called him and urged him to have the state legislature step in and choose Arizona’s electors.Mr. Bowers could not be reached for comment on Friday. In a statement to The Arizona Republic, a spokesman said that Mr. Bowers never saw Ms. Thomas’s email. He ended up rebuffing all the requests to intervene, even in the face of protests outside his house.Ms. Bolick, who did not return requests for comment and is now running to become Arizona’s next secretary of state on a platform to “restore election integrity,” proved more of an ally. She thanked Ms. Thomas for reaching out, writing that she hoped “you and Clarence are doing great!” Among other things, she would go on to urge Congress to throw out Arizona’s presidential election results and award the state’s Electoral College votes to Mr. Trump.The emails, reported earlier by The Washington Post and obtained by The New York Times, were part of a letter-writing campaign hosted on FreeRoots, a political advocacy platform. On Friday, Mark Paoletta, a lawyer and close friend of the Thomases, said on Twitter that Ms. Thomas “did not write the letter and had no input in the content,” but rather merely “signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens.”“How disturbing, what a threat!” he wrote, dismissing the revelations as a “lame story.” He added: “A private citizen joining a letter writing campaign, hosted by a platform that served both conservative and liberal causes. Welcome to America.”In fact, the emails are a reflection of the far broader and more integral role that Justice Thomas’s wife played in efforts to delegitimize the election and install Mr. Trump for a second term — efforts that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, with a protest called the “March to Save America” that turned into a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.As a string of revelations by The Times and other outlets in recent months has demonstrated, Ms. Thomas actively supported and participated at the highest levels in schemes to overturn the election. Those efforts have, in turn, cast a spotlight on her husband, who from his lifetime perch on the Supreme Court has issued opinions favoring Mr. Trump’s efforts to both reverse his loss and stymie a congressional investigation into the events of Jan. 6.This February, The New York Times Magazine reported on Ms. Thomas’s role on the board of C.N.P. Action, a conservative group that had instructed members to adopt letter-writing tactics — of the kind she personally used in Arizona — to pressure Republican lawmakers in swing states to circumvent voters by appointing alternate electors.C.N.P. Action had also circulated a newsletter in December 2020 that included a report targeting five swing states, including Arizona, where Mr. Trump and his allies were pressing litigation. It warned that time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void.” The report was co-written by one of Mr. Trump’s leading election lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, a friend of Ms. Thomas.And in the lead-up to the rally on Jan. 6, Ms. Thomas played a mediating role, uniting feuding factions of planners so that there “wouldn’t be any division,” one of the organizers, Dustin Stockton, later told The Times.Ms. Thomas declined to speak to The Times for that article, but a few weeks later, in an interview with a friendly conservative outlet, she denied playing any role in the organization of the rally, even as she acknowledged attending it. (She said she left before Mr. Trump addressed the crowd.)But she has adamantly opposed a fuller inquiry into the insurrection. Last December, she co-signed a letter calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the committee investigating the Capitol riot, saying it brought “disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong.”And in late March, The Post and CBS reported that she had sent a series of text messages to Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, imploring him to take steps to reverse the election. Ms. Thomas urged him to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a set of conspiratorial claims that Trump supporters believed would overturn the vote. In the text messages, she also indicated that she had been in contact with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, about a post-election legal strategy.Democrats expressed outrage. In a letter after the text messages were reported, two dozen Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, wrote: “Given the recent disclosures about Ms. Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election and her specific communications with White House officials about doing so, Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements.”Still, it remains an open question whether the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack will seek an interview with Ms. Thomas. In March, people familiar with the committee’s work signaled a desire to ask Ms. Thomas to voluntarily sit for an interview. But the committee has yet to do so, and its chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, told reporters that Ms. Thomas had not come up recently in the panel’s discussions.Justice Thomas has remained defiant amid questions about his own impartiality, resisting calls that he recuse himself from matters that overlap with his wife’s activism. Earlier this year, when the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to Jan. 6, Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter. In February last year, he sharply dissented when the court declined to hear a case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to disqualify certain mail-in ballots.The latest revelations about his wife follow a speech last week in which he lambasted protests in front of the houses of justices after a draft opinion was leaked that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” he told a conference of fellow conservatives. “And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country.”And he flashed at his own partisanship in claiming that the left’s protests lacked the decorum of the right — while failing to mention last year’s attack on the Capitol, or protests like those in front of Mr. Bowers’s house.“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” he said. “We didn’t throw temper tantrums. It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately and not to repay tit for tat.”Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife have frequently appeared at political events despite longstanding customs of the Supreme Court.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe Thomases have long defied norms of the high court, where justices often avoid political events and entanglements and their spouses often keep low profiles. No spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has ever been as overt a political activist as Ms. Thomas. C.N.P. Action, where she sits on the board, is a branch of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative organization that includes leaders from the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group. Ms. Thomas also founded an organization called Groundswell that holds a weekly meeting of influential conservatives, many of whom work directly on issues that have come before the Supreme Court.Justice Thomas, for his part, has frequently appeared at political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society.“It’s very exciting,” Ms. Thomas said during a 2018 Council for National Policy meeting, “the fact that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.”Luke Broadwater More