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      Texas Man Charged With Threatening to Kill Georgia Election Officials

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      A man accused of using Craigslist to call for the assassination of election officials is the first to be charged by the Justice Department’s task force on election threats.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Friday charged a Texas man with publicly calling for the assassination of Georgia’s election officials on the day before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The case is the first brought by the department’s Election Threats Task Force, an agency created last summer to address threats against elections and election workers. Federal prosecutors accused the man, Chad Christopher Stark, 54, of Leander, Texas, of calling for “Georgia Patriots” to “put a bullet” in a Georgia election official the indictment refers to as Official A.Mr. Stark, according to the three-page indictment, made the threat in a post on Craigslist, the online message board, while then-President Donald J. Trump and his allies were putting public pressure on Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who certified Mr. Trump’s defeat in Georgia to Joseph R. Biden Jr.“Georgia Patriots it’s time for us to take back our state from these Lawless treasonous traitors,” Mr. Stark wrote, according to the indictment. “It’s time to invoke our Second Amendment right it’s time to put a bullet in the treasonous Chinese [Official A]. Then we work our way down to [Official B] the local and federal corrupt judges.”Mr. Stark was charged with one count of communicating interstate threats.The Craigslist posting came at a moment of intense political pressure against election officials in battleground states. Mr. Trump had phoned Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2 last year and demanded that he “find” nearly 12,000 votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia. The posting was published on Jan. 5, a day before a Trump-inspired crowd attacked the United States Capitol in an effort to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the next president.On Thursday, a district attorney in Atlanta asked a judge to convene a special grand jury to help a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. If the investigation proceeds, legal experts say that the former president’s potential criminal exposure could include charges of racketeering or conspiracy to commit election fraud.Mr. Raffensperger on Friday did not confirm if he was among the election officials targeted.“I strongly condemn threats against election workers and those who volunteer in elections,” he said in a statement. “These are the people who make our democracy work.”Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said on Friday that the task force is reviewing over 850 reports of threats to election officials and has opened dozens of criminal investigations.During the 2020 election cycle and in its immediate aftermath, election workers “came under unprecedented verbal assault for doing nothing more than their jobs,” Mr. Polite told reporters Friday. “As the attorney general and deputy attorney general have both emphasized previously: We will not tolerate the intimidation of those who safeguard our electoral system.”The task force, created last June by the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, developed a system to log and track all reported threats to election workers and F.B.I. agents, and federal prosecutors were trained to take in, assess and investigate the allegations. Mr. Polite said the task force has prioritized finding ways to enhance security for state and local election workers.The Texas case represents the task force’s first indictment and arrest. Mr. Polite declined to elaborate on what Mr. Stark may have planned to do.“The communication here speaks for itself,” Mr. Polite said, referring to Mr. Stark’s Craigslist post, which offered $10,000 and called for “Patriots” to “exterminate these people.”In addition to the two Georgia election officials, Mr. Stark’s Craigslist post also threatened a third Georgia official.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel and State Officials Seek Answers on Fake Trump Electors

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      Pressure is mounting on the Justice Department to investigate bogus electors who claimed that Donald J. Trump defeated Joseph R. Biden Jr. in their states.WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election.In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state.And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.“There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.The false slates, put forth in seven contested swing states, appear to have been part of a strategy by Mr. Trump’s allies to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College. After election officials in those states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed that Mr. Trump had won.“I’ve had people in my district ask me what’s being done with these folks,” said Mr. Pocan, who forwarded the names of the 10 fake pro-Trump electors from his state to Mr. Garland in his letter demanding an investigation. “Enough people kept bringing it up. If people think they can get away with some scam, they’ll try another and another.”Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan said this week that she believed there was enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state for submitting false certificates claiming Mr. Trump won her state’s electoral votes in 2020. She said she had handed over to federal prosecutors the results of a yearlong investigation into Republicans who signed documents in December 2020 falsely identifying themselves as Michigan’s electors. New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas Jr., referred similar allegations to federal law enforcement. And a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also recommended that state or federal prosecutors investigate fake electors in that state.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, called the fake electors a “concern.” They could also play a role as the committee considers making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.Mr. Raskin described the executive order as “right out of a dictator’s playbook in a banana republic.”“Slightly cooler heads may have prevailed in the moment,” he said, “but we are in the process of trying to reconstruct the history of all these events.”The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amend the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.But a review of the steps taken by Mr. Trump’s allies to push the plan suggests that the effort was widespread and that it caught on among influential players, including those in conservative law and media circles and with White House aides.At the heart of the plan was an effort to empower Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress to hand him the election. Under the Constitution, if the Electoral College deadlocks or if no candidate receives a majority of its votes, the House of Representatives decides the victor. Each state delegation casts a single vote in these so-called “contingent elections.” Under that scenario, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have won.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Igor Fruman, Former Giuliani Associate, Is Sentenced to One Year in Prison

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      Mr. Fruman was at the center of a campaign to damage then-President Donald J. Trump’s rivals, but was brought down by campaign finance charges.Well before the 2020 presidential election, when he was an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Igor Fruman was on the front lines of a shadowy diplomacy campaign to advance then-President Donald J. Trump’s interests and damage his political adversaries.But an unrelated and much more mundane matter brought down Mr. Fruman: federal campaign-finance laws.Last year, Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty to soliciting foreign campaign contributions by asking a Russian tycoon for $1 million for American political candidates. And on Friday a judge in Federal District Court in Manhattan fined Mr. Fruman $10,000 and sentenced him to one year and one day in prison, in addition to the more than two years Mr. Fruman has spent in home confinement since his arrest.Addressing Judge J. Paul Oetken, Mr. Fruman said he had spent the time since his arrest reflecting on his actions.“It’s a shame that will live with me forever,” he said. “But I can assure you, my family, and the government that I will never appear before yourself or another courtroom again.”The sentencing closed a chapter for Mr. Fruman, who was arrested in 2019 at Dulles International Airport, along with a business partner, Lev Parnas, as they were about to leave the country.The two Soviet-born businessmen had worked their way into Republican circles in 2018, donating money and posing for selfies with candidates. They had dinner with Mr. Trump at his hotel in Washington, D.C., and became friendly with Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.Eventually, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were connected to investigations and an impeachment, assisting Mr. Giuliani as he attempted to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr., who ended up defeating Mr. Trump in 2020.Mr. Giuliani credited Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas with arranging a meeting with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s former top prosecutor and a key figure in Republican attacks on Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.And Mr. Fruman’s connections helped lead to a meeting between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangements. Mr. Lutsenko, who was helping Mr. Giuliani unearth damaging information about the Bidens, also wanted Marie L. Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, to be removed from her post. She was recalled in 2019.Efforts to oust Ms. Yovanovitch became a focus of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial and led to a federal criminal investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He has denied wrongdoing.But before serving as foot soldiers in Mr. Giuliani’s campaign, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were entrepreneurs who decided to create a company that would import natural gas to Ukraine.Prosecutors said they wanted to bolster the company’s profile and began donating to Republican candidates and groups. Soon Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were fixtures at rallies and donor gatherings in places like Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida club. They were a memorable pair. Mr. Fruman, who was born in Belarus, spoke a mix of Russian and choppy English. The Ukrainian-born Mr. Parnas exuded sincerity.A donation of $325,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action, was reported as coming from the company formed by Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, called Global Energy Producers. That broke campaign finance law, prosecutors said, because the money did not come from the company but from a loan Mr. Fruman took out.Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were also accused of soliciting the Russian tycoon Andrey Muraviev to send one million dollars to them so they could make campaign donations. The goal, prosecutors said, was to influence candidates who would help a fledgling cannabis business the three had discussed.Communications obtained by prosecutors show that Mr. Fruman repeatedly pressed for that money, providing a bank account and routing number for a company controlled by his brother. Records assembled by prosecutors show that two companies owned by Mr. Muraviev wired $500,000 apiece to the company controlled by Mr. Fruman’s brother.Mr. Fruman also sent exuberant messages to Mr. Muraviev and others, at one point including a picture of himself with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who was then a candidate for the office, and writing: “Today Florida becomes ours forever!!!!” A week later Mr. Fruman wrote: “Everything is great!! We are taking over the country!!!!”According to prosecutors, more than $150,000 of Mr. Muraviev’s money went to Republican candidates in the 2018 election cycle, including Adam Laxalt, who was running for governor of Nevada and later supported an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there.Mr. Laxalt, who did not become governor, said he was suspicious of the donation and sent a check in that amount to the U.S. Treasury.After Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were arrested in 2019, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not know the two men.Aggrieved, Mr. Parnas broke publicly with Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, turning over material to House impeachment investigators. In October a jury in Manhattan convicted Mr. Parnas of several campaign finance charges including conspiracy to make contributions by a foreign national and falsifying records.A month before that trial began, Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty to a single count of soliciting a contribution by a foreign national.In a memorandum to the court, Mr. Fruman’s lawyers asked for lenience, arguing that their client should be sentenced to time served instead of prison.Because of the notoriety accompanying his offense, Mr. Fruman’s business had faltered, they wrote, adding that he had resorted to spending savings and selling assets and could ill-afford the fine of $15,000 to $150,000 that prosecutors said federal guidelines called for.The lawyers wrote that Mr. Fruman had no previous criminal record and would never again appear in court “in a criminal setting.” They also said that the financial hardship Mr. Fruman experienced, “irreparable reputational damage,” and the 27 months he has spent confined to his home since shortly after his arrest “serve as adequate deterrence.”“Mr. Fruman is a good, decent, and honorable man who puts his faith, family and country first,” his lawyers told the court, adding, “This is not a case where Mr. Fruman embarked on an effort to influence the outcome of American elections using foreign money.”Prosecutors countered that Mr. Fruman’s submission exhibited “a blatant contempt for the law,” writing: “He views this case as an inconvenience to evade, and not an opportunity for reformation.”Mr. Fruman, the prosecutors said, had been “trying to corrupt U.S. elections to advance his own financial interests.” More

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      The Mental Health Toll of Trump-Era Politics

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      In the last few years the hideous state of our politics has often kept me up at night, but until recently I thought I was an outlier. Even when I’ve written about political despair as a problem for Democrats, I assumed it was something that applied to activists and base voters, the sort of people who go through their days silently cursing Joe Manchin. But a striking new study from Kevin B. Smith, chair of the political science department at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, suggests the universe of people who find our politics a torment might be much larger than I’d realized.“Politics is a pervasive and largely unavoidable source of chronic stress that exacted significant health costs for large numbers of American adults between 2017 and 2020,” writes Smith in “Politics Is Making Us Sick: The Negative Impact of Political Engagement on Public Health During the Trump Administration.” “The 2020 election did little to alleviate those effects and quite likely exacerbated them.”Around 40 percent of Americans, he found, “consistently identify politics as a significant source of stress in their lives.” Shockingly, about 5 percent have considered suicide in response to political developments. Smith told me he was skeptical of that figure when he first calculated it, and still isn’t wholly sure it isn’t a statistical fluke, but it’s remained fairly consistent in three surveys. (After publishing results from the first survey a few years ago, he said, he got a call from someone who worked at a suicide hotline who reported experiencing an uptick in calls after the 2016 election.)I’m fascinated by Smith’s work for a couple of reasons. The first is partisan. People from both parties reported that political stress during the Trump years has damaged their health, but Democrats have, unsurprisingly, had it worse. While Donald Trump was in office, they were able to turn their rage and fear into fuel, but I’m not sure how sustainable this is. The more politics becomes a pageant of infuriating Democratic impotence in the face of relentless right-wing spite, the more I fear people will disengage as a means of self-protection.But I’m also interested in the role politics plays in the disastrous state of American mental health, which is one of the overarching stories in the country right now. For all our division, there’s a pretty broad consensus that the country is, psychologically, in an awful place. According to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, almost nine in 10 registered voters believe there’s a mental health crisis in the United States. The crisis expresses itself in all sorts of ways: in rising rates of youth suicide, record overdoses, random acts of street violence, monthslong waiting lists for children’s therapists, mask meltdowns, QAnon.I’ve long thought that widespread psychological distress — wildly intensified by the pandemic — contributes to the derangement of American politics. But maybe the causality works the other way, too, and the ugliness of American politics is taking a toll on the psyche of the citizenry.Smith first surveyed a sample of around 800 people about politics and mental health in March 2017. As he wrote in a 2019 paper, he found fairly high levels of affliction: Besides the 40 percent who said they were stressed out about politics, a fifth or more reported “losing sleep, being fatigued, or suffering depression because of politics.” As many as a quarter of respondents reported self-destructive or compulsive behaviors, including “saying and writing things they later regret,” “making bad decisions” and “ignoring other priorities.”At the time, he thought he might just be capturing the shock of Trump’s election. But his next two surveys, in October and November of 2020, showed similar or greater levels of misery. Now, those were also moments of febrile political activity; perhaps if Smith had surveyed people in 2018 or 2019, he’d have found less political angst. Nevertheless, his findings suggest that there are tens of millions of Americans who’ve felt themselves ground down by our political environment.In some ways, this is surprising. Most people aren’t political junkies. The majority of American adults aren’t on Twitter, which tends to drive political news microcycles. Even in an election year, more people watched the 30th season of “Dancing With the Stars” than the most successful prime-time shows on Fox News, the country’s most-watched cable news network. As the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan wrote in The New York Times, most Americans — “upward of 80 percent to 85 percent — follow politics casually or not at all.”Smith doesn’t dispute this. But he speculates that even those who aren’t intensely interested in politics are still affected by the ambient climate of hatred, chaos and dysfunction. “What I think is going on is that politics is unavoidable,” he said. “It is essentially a permanent part of the background noise of our lives.”Of course, the last thing a political scientist — or, for that matter, a liberal columnist — would tell you is that you should totally tune that noise out. It is depressing to live in a dying empire whose sclerotic political institutions have largely ceased to function; this is a collective problem without individual solutions. There’s an awful dilemma here. Any way out of the gloom of our current political situation will almost certainly involve even more politics.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). A list of additional resources is available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.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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      ‘I Will Not Sit Quietly’: 3 Black Senators in Spotlight on Voting Rights

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      Senators Cory Booker, Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock brought vastly different perspectives to proceedings that highlighted the Senate’s striking lack of diversity.Senators Tim Scott and Cory Booker clashed over calling Republican-backed voting legislation “Jim Crow 2.0.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The Senate has only three Black members, a paltry number that is unrepresentative of the country, so when the chamber took up a voting rights bill this week aimed at preventing the disenfranchisement of voters of color, Senators Cory Booker, Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock played an outsized role in the debate.During a more than 10-hour discourse on Wednesday that highlighted the Senate’s lack of diversity, the three men brought vastly different perspectives to an issue that each said had affected them in deeply personal ways, with the two Democrats — Mr. Warnock of Georgia and Mr. Booker of New Jersey — serving as self-described witnesses to Republican-engineered voter suppression, and Mr. Scott, Republican of South Carolina, countering that the real threat to democracy was coming from the left.The protracted proceedings underscored how heavily the white leaders of both parties lean on the few Black members of their rank-and-file when issues of race arise. When Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator from California who was the first Black woman to serve in that post, briefly presided over the debate on Wednesday night, nearly half of the 11 African Americans who have ever served in the Senate were present at once.But it also showed the power of representation and biography in a debate over policy.The moral force that the three senators could marshal to their causes was clear. The back-and-forth between Mr. Scott, the son of a struggling single mother in working-class North Charleston, S.C., and Mr. Booker, a former Rhodes Scholar and big-city mayor, provided a striking moment, as they fought over the meaning of Jim Crow in the present day.Mr. Scott used the elections of all three Black men — but especially himself and Mr. Warnock — to back up his case that America is a nation of expanding democratic opportunity, not voter suppression and inequity.“It’s hard to deny progress when two of the three come from the Southern states which people say are the places where African American votes are being suppressed,” he said.Mr. Warnock, who ministers from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the pulpit from which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, closed the debate with an appeal to every senator.“Let the message go out: You cannot honor Martin Luther King and work to dismantle his legacy at the same time,” Mr. Warnock said Wednesday night, two days after King’s holiday, when virtually every senator of every political stripe produced an obligatory tribute to the slain civil rights leader.“I will not sit quietly while some make Dr. King the victim of identity theft.”The groundbreaking positions of the men, no doubt, are at least part of the reason they were thrust onto center stage. Mr. Scott was the first Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Mr. Warnock is the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate by a former state of the Confederacy. Mr. Booker is his state’s first Black senator.Donna Brazile, a Black Democratic strategist who headed Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, recalled watching Wednesday’s debate and “thinking, ‘I thank God we have in 2022 three Black members of the United States Senate, regardless of party affiliation,’ because they all spoke uniquely from their own experiences of the journey of Black Americans.”But it can be a bit overwhelming, said Carol Moseley Braun, who was the first Black woman to serve in the Senate and the only Black person in the entire chamber when she served.“If it had to do with women, I got trotted out. If it had to do with Black people, I got trotted out,” she recalled in an interview on Thursday. “I couldn’t win.”In the end, no amount of pressure from Mr. Warnock could sway a single Republican to back the voting rights and election protection bill, or persuade the two balking Democrats, Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, to support weakening the filibuster to advance it over G.O.P. opposition.Nor could Mr. Scott save his party from the fallout of defending voting restrictions passed by Republican legislatures that Democrats say are intended to disenfranchise minority voters. The South Carolina senator’s ardent defense of Georgia’s new voting law may have been lost amid the repercussions from a faux pas uttered on Wednesday by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.Asked about protests from voters of color over new restrictions, Mr. McConnell said, “The concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Critics interpreted the comment as implying that either Black voters are not wholly American, or that the top Senate Republican considered “American” synonymous with white.Mr. Warnock is the obvious face of the Democratic cause, not because of his skin color but because his tight election victory in 2020 — along with an even tighter win by his colleague, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia — gave the party its Senate majority, and because Mr. Warnock must face Georgia voters again this November, now under new election rules signed into law by the state’s Republican governor.Indeed, in an evenly divided Senate where the net loss of a single seat would cost Democrats control, Mr. Warnock is perhaps the most endangered Democrat, and the party’s cause célèbre.“Reverend Warnock is the moral authority and conscience on this issue by virtue of his background, his election and his extraordinary rhetorical capabilities,” said Marc Elias, the party’s top election lawyer. “He speaks for so many people, and articulates what so many people feel in their hearts about the importance of voting rights.”Last year, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, but in the Senate on Wednesday, Georgia’s law was front and center.Mr. Scott fiercely defended the law — “supposedly the poster child of voter suppression” — as actually expanding access to the ballot, saying Democrats were distorting its effects to inject race into the voting rights fight when their real aim was political power.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia is perhaps the chamber’s most endangered Democrat.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesHe leaned in hard to his biography, which included a grandfather he escorted to the polls because he could not read, to burnish his credentials as he laid into the Democrats’ case for a far-reaching rewrite of election laws that have traditionally been the purview of state and local governments.Speaking for “Americans from the Deep South who happen to look like me,” the conservative Republican recounted the Jim Crow era that his grandfather had lived through, when literacy tests, job losses, beatings and lynchings kept Black Southerners from the polls. The Georgia law is nothing like the “Jim Crow 2.0” that President Biden and other Democrats have called it, he said.“To have a conversation and a narrative that is blatantly false is offensive, not just to me or Southern Americans but offensive to millions of Americans who fought, bled and died for the right to vote,” Mr. Scott said.That brought a sharp response from Mr. Booker. “Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow,” he said, adding: “It is 2022 and they are blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented. I’m not making that up. That is a fact.”But it was Mr. Warnock who brought to the debate the names of his own constituents: a woman who has not been able to vote for a decade because of long lines and constantly moving polling places; a student who could not vote for him in 2020 because the epic waits near her college would have made her miss class; another who waited eight hours in the rain to cast her ballot.“One part of being a first of any kind is thinking, ‘How do I educate people?’” said Minyon Moore, who was a political director in the Clinton White House and a senior aide to Hillary Clinton. “I see that as a badge of honor, not a burden, and I know that Senators Warnock and Booker do, too. They have a responsibility to educate and explain. If they don’t do it, who will?”Mr. Warnock, too, brandished his biography, which included growing up in the Kayton Homes housing project in Savannah, Ga., the youngest of 12 children. His mother picked cotton in Waycross, Ga., as a child, he said, and “the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton helped pick her youngest son as a United States senator” in 2021.It was difficult enough when he beat the incumbent Republican, Kelly Loeffler, by about 93,000 votes with a huge minority turnout; this November will be worse with the state’s new law, he said.Georgia’s legislators “have decided to punish their own citizens for having the audacity to show up,” Mr. Warnock said, adding, “Those are the fact of the laws that are being passed in Georgia and across the nation.”Democrats have been wowed by such rhetorical performances, but the senator’s first year in electoral politics has yielded little in the way of victories. The voting rights push that he has framed as a moral imperative has been blocked. Another effort, to secure health care for the working poor in states like Georgia that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, got a boost when it was included in the Build Back Better Act that passed the House. But that, too, has been stymied in the Senate.He was blunt on Wednesday, when he said during the voting rights debate that he believed in bipartisanship, but then asked, “Bipartisanship at what cost?”“Raphael Warnock feels that he went up there with this idea he can work with anyone,” said Jason Carter, a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter who was the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia in 2014 and speaks regularly to Mr. Warnock. “There may come a time where he throws up his hands and says we can’t get anything done. I haven’t heard the frustration boiling over yet.” More

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      Fact-Checking McConnell’s Comparison of Black Turnout Rates

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      The Republican leader’s claim about high voter turnout in previous elections wasn’t too far off base, but that doesn’t mean voting access is assured.Hours before a failed effort by Democrats to pass a voting rights bill in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was asked in a news conference on Wednesday for his message to voters worried about access to the polls during the midterm elections.Mr. McConnell described those worries as a ginned-up controversy, and misleadingly cited data on voter turnout.“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.“In a recent survey, 94 percent of Americans thought it was easy to vote,” he continued. “This is not a problem. Turnout is up. Biggest turnout since 1900. It’s simply they’re being sold a bill of goods to support a Democratic effort to federalize elections.”Mr. McConnell’s remarks were roundly criticized by the Congressional Black Caucus, Democratic lawmakers and others. Some accused the senator of racism in appearing to imply that Black voters are not American.“After centuries of building this nation, Republicans still don’t consider Black voters to be Americans,” tweeted Representative Ayana S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts. “We cannot pretend that the days of Jim Crow are behind us.”“Being Black doesn’t make you less of an American, no matter what this craven man thinks,” tweeted Charles Booker, a Kentucky Democrat running to unseat the state’s junior senator, Rand Paul.Still, Mr. McConnell’s comments raised questions about how turnout for Black voters compared with that of other demographic groups, and what that might say about voting access.In a statement provided to The New York Times on Thursday, Mr. McConnell sought to clarify his remarks, saying that he has “consistently pointed to the record-high turnout for all voters in the 2020 election, including African Americans.” A spokesman for Mr. McConnell also cited Census Bureau demographic data on voter turnout for the past four federal elections. In the 2020 election, for example, 62.6 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 66.8 percent of all eligible Americans, a difference of 4.2 percentage points. In the 2018, 2016 and 2014 elections, the gaps were even smaller, at about 2 percentage points.So while Black American voter turnout is not “just as high” as overall voter turnout, as Mr. McConnell said, it does seem comparable in several recent elections.But the disparity is more stark between Black and white voters. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Michael McDonald, a voter turnout expert at the University of Florida, Black Americans have almost always voted at lower rates than white Americans. The exceptions were in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Those were the only years in which Black turnout surpassed white turnout.The racial voting gap has fluctuated in recent decades. According to Mr. McDonald’s analysis, in the 1988 presidential election, 46.8 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 55.7 percent of eligible white Americans — a gap of 8.9 percentage points. That gap had shrunk by the 2016 presidential election to 4.8 percentage points, before increasing to 7 percentage points in 2020.But overall, the 2020 election attracted the highest voter turnout in more than a century. And in a Pew Research Center poll conducted just days after the election, 94 percent of those surveyed said it had been very or somewhat easy to vote, as Mr. McConnell said.However, high voter turnout and perceptions that voting was easy in past elections do not prove that concerns about voting access in future elections are “misplaced,” as Mr. McConnell suggested. At least 19 states passed laws in 2021 restricting voting access. Georgia’s efforts in particular may have an outsize impact on Black voters.And the high turnout in 2020 was fueled in part by unusually high voter engagement. In a Pew poll conducted in July and August 2020, 83 percent of respondents said it really matters who wins the presidency, the highest percentage to give that response in the survey’s 20-year history.“More people were voting in 2020 because more people were interested in voting. That is not a measure of how many were impacted because of voting restrictions,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It can’t be that we are satisfied with disenfranchising 10 percent of the population because 60 percent of the population showed up.” More

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      Atlanta D.A. Requests Special Grand Jury in Trump Election Inquiry

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      The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County, Ga., is investigating possible election interference by the former president and his allies.A district attorney in Atlanta on Thursday asked a judge to convene a special grand jury to help a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.The inquiry is seen by legal experts as potentially perilous for the former president. The grand jury request from the district attorney in Fulton County, Fani T. Willis, had been expected after crucial witnesses refused to participate voluntarily. A grand jury could issue subpoenas compelling those witnesses to provide information.The distinction of a special grand jury is that it would focus exclusively on the Trump investigation, while regular grand juries handle many cases and cannot spend as much time on a single one. The Georgia case is one of two active criminal investigations known to involve the former president and his circle; the other is the examination of his financial dealings by the Manhattan district attorney.“The District Attorney’s Office has received information indicating a reasonable probability that the State of Georgia’s administration of elections in 2020, including the State’s election of the President of the United States, was subject to possible criminal disruptions,” Ms. Willis wrote in a letter to Christopher S. Brasher, the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court; the letter was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Judge Brasher declined to comment.Ms. Willis added, “We have made efforts to interview multiple witnesses and gather evidence, and a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”The inquiry is the only criminal case known to have been taken up by a prosecutor that focuses directly on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. It is set to play out in a state taking center stage in the nation’s battle over voting rights, and one where a heated Republican primary for governor is testing Mr. Trump’s strength as a kingmaker in the Republican Party.If the investigation proceeds, legal experts say that the former president’s potential criminal exposure could include charges of racketeering or conspiracy to commit election fraud.The inquiry centers on Mr. Trump’s actions in the two months between his election loss and Congress’s certification of the results, including a call he made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Ms. Willis said that Mr. Raffensperger was among those who had refused to cooperate without a subpoena.“We already have cooperated,” Mr. Raffensperger said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “Any information that they’ve requested, we sent it to them. And if we’re compelled to come before a grand jury, obviously, we will follow the law and come before a grand jury and testify.”Representatives for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday, but the former president did release a statement characterizing his phone call with Mr. Raffensperger as “perfect.” He has cast other investigations, including one being conducted by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, as politically motivated. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia and a Democratic stronghold, and Ms. Willis is a Democrat.The Georgia inquiry is one of several criminal, civil and congressional investigations focused on Mr. Trump. He and his allies have been sparring in court with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee won a major victory on Wednesday when the Supreme Court refused a request from Mr. Trump to block the release of White House records, and on Thursday, the panel asked Ivanka Trump to cooperate in the inquiry.In addition to the criminal inquiry being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney, Ms. James is leading a civil fraud investigation into Mr. Trump’s business empire. She has issued subpoenas seeking interviews with two of his adult children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and her office previously interviewed a third, Eric Trump.In Atlanta, Ms. Willis said last year that she would consider racketeering charges, among others. An analysis released last year by the Brookings Institution that has been studied by Ms. Willis’s office concluded that Mr. Trump’s postelection conduct in Georgia had put him “at substantial risk of possible state charges,” including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      What’s Happening on the Left Is No Excuse for What’s Happening on the Right

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      American democracy has often confronted hostile forces from outside the United States; rarely has it been under as much of a threat from forces within the nation. The danger arises from illiberalism on the left and the right. Both sides are chipping away at the foundations of the American Republic; each side seems oblivious to its own defects.Again and again, we have heard conservatives argue that even if you believe that Donald Trump is flawed and the MAGA movement is worrisome, the left is much more dangerous. We disagree. Fears about the left’s increasingly authoritarian, radical tendencies are well grounded; but they have blinded many conservatives to the greater danger posed by the right, which we believe is a threat to our constitutional order and therefore to conservatism itself.We come to our view after writing and warning about the illiberal left for much of our careers. One of us wrote a book nearly 30 years ago criticizing those who would limit free thought by restricting free speech; the other has been sounding alarms about left-wing ideology since his days as an official in the Department of Education during the Reagan years.Since then, the left has grown more radical, more aggressive and less tolerant. With the help of social media and influence in academia — and sometimes in newsrooms and corporate H.R. departments — a small number of die-hard progressives (they make up only about 8 percent of the public, according to one recent survey) exert a hugely disproportionate influence on the culture. Progressives are “often imposing illiberal speech norms on schools, companies and cultural institutions,” the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait writes. There have been many examples of squelching arguments that although controversial deserve full and frank airing in a free society. Universities have attempted to kick off their campuses Christian ministries that require their leaders to be Christian, and we have written in these pages about efforts to weaken protections for religious liberty.Structural racism — the perpetuation of de facto discrimination by ingrained social arrangements and assumptions — is a reality in American life. But the hodgepodge of ideas in the bucket that has come to be known as “critical race theory” includes radical claims that deny the enduring value of concepts like equality of opportunity and objectivity and reject “the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy” as “a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” The most extreme versions of these ideas might not be taught in high schools (yet), but their influence is undoubtedly being felt.The progressive movement, then, is increasingly under the sway of a totalistic, unfalsifiable and revolutionary ideology that rejects fundamental liberal values like pluralism and free inquiry. And conservatives aren’t hallucinating about its influence. Surveys show that 62 percent of Americans and 68 percent of college students are reluctant to share their true political views for fear of negative social consequences. A Cato Institute study found that nearly a third of Americans — across the political spectrum, not just on the right — say they’re worried about losing a job or job opportunities if they express their true political views. Another study suggested that the level of self-censorship in America may be three times what it was during the McCarthy era.The left is not solely responsible for creating these fears, but it has played the most significant role. Yet even granting all that, the threat from the illiberal right is more immediate and more dangerous. If that wasn’t clear before the last presidential election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it should be clear now.Any account of the malignancy of the American right has to begin with Mr. Trump, whose twisted sensibilities continue to define the Republican Party. It was he who attempted what no president had ever tried: overturning an election. He based his effort on a huge campaign of disinformation. Mr. Trump pressured the vice president, governors, secretaries of state, election officials and appointees at the Department of Justice to join him in his efforts. One of his lawyers reportedly proposed a plan to nullify the election. Congress’s Jan. 6 committee will reveal more and possibly worse.The Republican Party, rather than spurning Mr. Trump and his efforts, has embraced them. Around the country, prospective Republican candidates, far from opposing #StopTheSteal lies and conspiracy theories, are running on them in 2022, according to a Washington Post tally. Any prominent Republican today who disputes #StopTheSteal can expect to be targeted by the base, booed at any large gathering of Republicans, censured by party apparatchiks and possibly threatened with physical violence.Dismayingly few Republican leaders stand foursquare against the base’s insistence that any election Mr. Trump and his followers might lose is rigged. The result is that Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns.Many Republicans are now openly hostile to the processes Americans rely on to separate fact from fiction. There’s also the deepening cult of despair that has led some on the right to believe that all means of resistance are appropriate. In fact, catastrophism is quite fashionable on the American right these days. Every election is a “Flight 93” confrontation against an apocalyptic enemy; every effort, no matter how extreme, is justified. That attitude is not merely at odds with reality; it is incompatible with liberal democracy’s foundational requirement that Americans compromise and coexist civilly in order to share the country.Partly as a result, the MAGA movement is drifting toward authoritarianism. The most important media personality on the right, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, released a disingenuous three-part documentary in November suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. He and others in MAGA World, including Mr. Trump, also promote Hungary, which Freedom House said in its 2018 report is “sliding into authoritarian rule,” as a model for the United States. The Republican Party is also drifting ever closer to the open embrace of political violence and martyrdom, not merely excusing but defending actions like Ashli Babbitt’s effort to break into the House’s inner sanctum on Jan. 6 — actions that came within seconds of succeeding.In a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of Republicans said that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard. Josh Mandel, a Republican running for the open Senate seat in Ohio and leading in the polls, said in the aftermath of President Biden’s vaccine mandate: “Do not comply with the tyranny. When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats. And while the progressive left undoubtedly has influence in the Democratic Party, if it exercised the near-total dominance that Republicans claim, Joe Biden would not have won the Democratic nomination. Conservatives certainly have their disagreements with President Biden, but he has not defunded the police, attempted to pack the Supreme Court or promoted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.But assume that your threat assessment is different from ours; that as a conservative Republican you believe the danger to the nation is greater from the far left than from the MAGA right. You should still speak out against what is happening to your movement and your party for two reasons: The sins of the left do not excuse the sins of the right; and what is happening on the right is wrecking authentic conservatism in ways the left never could.In his new book, “We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy,” a Wheaton College historian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, shows that the founders took a deeply conservative view of human nature. They believed that humankind is flawed and fallen, distracted by passions and swayed by parochial interests. Americans, the founders believed, were no exception. Yet they also believed that what John Adams called a “well-ordered Constitution” could go a long way to compensate for human flaws.In classic conservative fashion, they designed the U.S. Constitution, and its attendant institutions and norms, both to constrain us and to help us be our better selves. The MAGA right has no love for those institutions and norms. It inflames ugly passions and warps reality. It is profoundly anticonservative, capable of twisting in any direction for the sake of raw power. It represents a profound break with the American conservative tradition.And so to regard the radical left as a reason to excuse, minimize or ignore the malign movement on the right is an abrogation of conservative duty and principle. If MAGA prevails, conservatism will be gravely injured — and American democracy will be, too.Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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