Presidential Election of 2020

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      Republicans in Texas County, in Unusual Move, Upend Primary System

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      The G.O.P. in Potter County is planning to break away from a nonpartisan election board and hold its own primary next year, in a move criticized by election experts.The Republican Party in the second-largest county in the Texas Panhandle is planning to conduct its own election during the state primary in March, breaking away from a nonpartisan county election board in a highly unusual move.The G.O.P. in Potter County, which includes Amarillo, plans to use ballots that will be marked and counted by hand, rather than employ the electronic systems that the county has relied on for decades. Election experts said the changes would confuse voters and create more potential for fraud.Under Texas law, county parties are allowed to run their own primary elections, but the vast majority have contracted with local boards of election for decades. The decision, which was reported by Votebeat, an election news website, comes as Republicans nationally have continued to push baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and sow doubts about the reliability of election machinery.Daniel L. Rogers, the chairman of the Potter County Republicans, said that he made the decision this week because “a lot of voters have concerns” with the electronic counters and “don’t feel comfortable with them.” He did not cite evidence of any problems arising under the current system, and studies have shown that hand counting leads to more inaccuracies. He argued that paper ballots would be more secure.“The parties have become lazy and complacent, but the primaries are actually the party’s responsibility,” said Mr. Rogers, a real estate broker whose office was decorated with red Make America Great Again hats when a New York Times reporter interviewed him last year. “The counties are spending millions of dollars on electronic systems, but this way it’s a true secret ballot.”He said that “the voters are smarter than our elected officials, than administrators — they don’t trust the voters. I do.”Mark P. Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University in Houston, said the move “removes the Republican Party one more step away from the standard electoral procedure.”He added: “The integrity of our electoral system depends on institutionalizing and professionalizing election boards. There will be more doubts about the overall outcome, or it will lead to more slip-ups and more potential flaws and problems than if the professionals ran it.”Potter County has about 57,000 registered voters, and they are overwhelmingly Republican: Roughly 70 percent cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump in 2020.Mr. Rogers, when asked if the election results nationally were valid, responded, “I don’t have any idea and that’s the problem — I don’t know if it was accurate or not.”Under state law, the county elections board will still be responsible for absentee and early voting, which a majority of voters in Texas use to cast their ballots. But the two systems, experts said, could complicate the process and make it easier for voters to cast ballots twice.“It opens the door wide to fraud,” Dr. Jones said. “It doesn’t close the door to fraud.”The legal office of the Texas secretary of state, who oversees elections in the state and who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, raised several concerns about the move.“Any time that a party conducts their own election rather than contracting with a county, it is more confusing to voters,” said Sam Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for communications. Still, he added that “ultimately it’s their decision to go at it alone.”One risk, Mr. Taylor said, is that candidates in contested races could file election challenges to prompt a court to order a new primary election. “It’s not unprecedented,” he said. “But county parties usually do not invite that opportunity upon themselves.”“They have every legal right to do so,” he added. “We can’t really intervene.”Melynn Huntley, the Potter County elections administrator, said that she had been taken aback by Mr. Rogers’s decision and that she was most worried about the potential to make it easier to vote twice.“The biggest worry I have is that those two systems will not talk with each other,” Ms. Huntley said. “His desire is to eliminate fraud, but there is a vulnerability in the plan. I am concerned whether this can function with high integrity.”Ms. Huntley, who has served as elections administrator for eight years, said that when she took on the job, she pledged not to vote in either party’s primary so that she could maintain her role as a nonpartisan overseer.“I am truly trying to figure out how this is going to work,” she said. More

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      PowerPoint Sent to Mark Meadows Is Examined by Jan. 6 Panel

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      Mark Meadows’s lawyer said the former White House chief of staff did not act on the document, which recommended that President Donald J. Trump declare a national emergency to keep himself in power.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is scrutinizing a 38-page PowerPoint document filled with extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election that Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, has turned over to the panel.The document recommended that Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the election results and included a claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.A lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that Mr. Meadows provided the document to the committee because he merely received it by email in his inbox and did nothing with it.“We produced the document because it wasn’t privileged,” Mr. Terwilliger said.Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.Mr. Waldron said he was not surprised that Mr. Meadows had received a version of the document, which exists in varied forms on internet sites.“He would have gotten a copy for situational awareness for what was being briefed on the Hill at the time,” Mr. Waldron said.On Jan. 4, members of Mr. Waldron’s team — he did not identify them — spoke to a group of senators and briefed them on the allegations of supposed election fraud contained in the PowerPoint, Mr. Waldron said. The following day, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members; that discussion focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he made the document available to the lawmakers.Mr. Meadows is not known to have worked directly with Mr. Waldron, who has described his military background as involving “information warfare.” However, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer as he fought to stay in power, has cited Mr. Waldron as a source of information for his legal campaign.Mr. Meadows remains in a legal battle with the Jan. 6 committee, which is moving forward with holding him in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a scheduled deposition or to turn over documents he believes could violate Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive privilege. Mr. Trump has filed suit claiming he still has the power to keep White House documents secret, an assertion several courts have rejected, though the case appears headed for the Supreme Court.Mr. Meadows has responded by filing suit in an attempt to persuade a federal judge to block the committee’s subpoenas. His lawsuit accuses the committee of issuing “two overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas” against him, including one sent to Verizon for his phone and text-message data.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath.Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby. Mr. Meadows also turned over his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries More

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      Echoing Trump, David Perdue Sues Over Baseless Election Claims

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      The legal action by Mr. Perdue, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, was the latest sign that 2020 election falsehoods will be a main focus of his bid.Former Senator David Perdue of Georgia, a Republican who is running for governor with the backing of former President Donald J. Trump, filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking the inspection of absentee ballots in the 2020 election, reviving long-debunked claims in the latest sign that Mr. Trump’s election grievances will be central to his candidacy.The lawsuit draws on Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud in Georgia and across the country, which culminated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. In the months since, many Republican elected officials have pivoted from rebuking election conspiracy theories to embracing them vocally in an effort to win the affections of Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Perdue, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump soon after announcing his candidacy on Monday, is running against Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who is a staunch conservative but has come under withering attacks from the former president and his allies over Mr. Kemp’s unwillingness to help them overturn President Biden’s victory in Georgia. Mr. Perdue told news outlets this week that he would not have certified the results if he had been governor instead of Mr. Kemp.Republicans in states across the country have continued to cast doubt on the 2020 election’s legitimacy by trying to carry out partisan reviews of the results, which they often misleadingly label “audits” to lend them a greater sense of authority. G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states are pursuing reviews, and Republicans in states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida have introduced bills to begin new ones next year.Mr. Perdue’s suit, which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier reported and which was filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County, argues that through unlawful “acts and omissions,” election officials in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and a major source of Democratic votes, “circumvented the majority vote of the people of the State of Georgia and thereby affected the outcome of the statewide General Election on Nov. 3, 2020 in several races.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In the complaint, Mr. Perdue names a county election official and workers underneath him, claiming that they “negligently, grossly negligently or intentionally engaged in and/or permitted multiple unlawful election acts.”“David Perdue wants to use his position and legal standing to shine light on what he knows were serious violations of Georgia law in the Fulton absentee ballot tabulation,” Bob Cheeley, a lawyer for the candidate, told The Journal-Constitution.Georgia election officials have reviewed the 2020 results three times and have come to the same conclusion: Mr. Biden won the state, narrowly but decisively.Mr. Perdue lost his re-election bid in January to Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat.The legal effort by Mr. Perdue follows a similar lawsuit this year by a group of voters led by a known conspiracy theorist. That case, which sought to inspect all 147,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County, was thrown out after Judge Brian Amero of Henry County Superior Court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing and could not show any specific injury or harm.Mr. Perdue’s lawsuit could work around at least part of Judge Amero’s ruling, because he was a candidate in the 2020 elections.Several Republicans in Georgia criticized the suit.“David Perdue is so concerned about election fraud that he waited a year to file a lawsuit that conveniently coincided with his disastrous campaign launch,” Cody Hall, a spokesman for Governor Kemp’s campaign, said. “Keep in mind that lawsuit after lawsuit regarding the 2020 election was dismissed in part because Perdue declined to be listed as a plaintiff.”Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state — who, like Mr. Kemp, has come under attack from fellow Republicans for resisting Mr. Trump’s election pressure — said in a statement: “Fake Trumpers like Perdue are trying to curry favor with the Trump base by pushing election conspiracy theories that everyone — including the voters they are hoping to attract — knows they don’t really believe.”Georgia continues to be a hub of litigation and national attention over elections and voting rights. Two election workers in the state filed a defamation lawsuit last week against Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news outlet that falsely claimed they had manipulated ballots. On Friday, Reuters reported that one of the workers said she had been pressured by a publicist for Kanye West, the rapper who ran for president and previously supported Mr. Trump, to acknowledge manipulating votes.The Georgia Democratic Party, whose likely nominee for governor, Stacey Abrams, announced her campaign last week, reveled in the high-profile clash of Republicans and sought to lump them together.“It is reprehensible that David Perdue is peddling those same dangerous lies in a sad ploy for attention,” the party said in a statement. “From David Perdue’s frivolous lawsuit to Brian Kemp’s voter suppression laws — both based on the same fabricated lies — nobody who sows distrust in our free and fair elections deserves to lead our state.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      So You Lost the Election. We Had Nothing to Do With It.

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      Among Democrats, there is no question that the Democratic Party is sailing in rough waters. Yes, it assembled a winning national majority in the 2020 presidential election, but it has struggled to sustain itself at every other level of government.The Republican Party controls a majority of states and state legislatures, holds a modest advantage in the fight for control of the House ahead of the 2022 midterm elections and holds a substantial advantage in the fight for control of the Senate on account of the chamber’s rural bias. It also has a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court and can more easily win the Electoral College — and thus the presidency — without winning a majority of votes, as it did in 2000 and 2016.Everyone, within the Democratic Party, can see the problem. The question is who, or what, is to blame. For the past year, the answer from many moderate Democrats — and a sympathetic coterie of journalists, commentators and strategists — is that progressives have sailed the ship aground with their views on race, crime, immigration and education, which alienate potential swing voters, including working-class and blue-collar Hispanics.Writing on this problem for The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein quotes the demographer and election analyst Ruy Teixeira, who argues, “The more working class voters see their values as being at variance with the Democratic Party brand, the less likely it is that Democrats will see due credit for even their measures that do provide benefits to working class voters.”In a similar piece, my colleague Tom Edsall quotes William Galston of Brookings, who also argues that progressives threaten to limit efforts to win blue-collar support and that “Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”It is true that some progressives — either Democratic lawmakers or affiliated activists — hold unpopular views or use unpopular language. It is also true that Republicans have amplified this to some electoral success. But missing in this conversation is one inconvenient fact: Progressives are not actually in the driver’s seat of the Democratic Party.It’s easy to think otherwise. Even the most sober version of this critique makes it sound as if the Democratic Party is in the grip of its most left-wing officials and constituents. But it isn’t — to the dismay and frustration of those officials and constituents.The president of the United States, and leader of the Democratic Party, is Joe Biden, the standard-bearer for a bygone era of centrist governance and aisle-crossing compromise, who made his mark in domestic politics as a drug warrior in the 1980s and a “law and order” Democrat in the 1990s.The speaker of the House is Nancy Pelosi, a long-serving liberal establishmentarian. Her leadership team — the majority leader, Steny Hoyer; the majority whip, James Clyburn; the assistant speaker, Katherine Clark; and the Democratic caucus chairman, Hakeem Jeffries — are similarly positioned in the center-left of the Democratic Party. The same is true of Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, as well as the people who run the various organizations of the institutional Democratic Party.Although the share of progressives within the Democratic Party is much larger than the share of progressives writ large (12 percent of the party versus 6 percent nationally, according to the most recent political typology survey from the Pew Research Center), a large majority of Democrats are moderate to moderately liberal on most issues. That’s why — and how — Joe Biden won the nomination for president in the first place, easily beating his more left-wing opponents in the South Carolina primary and rallying much of the rest of the party behind him on Super Tuesday and beyond.In office, Biden has led from the center of the Democratic Party. His main legislative achievement so far, Covid relief notwithstanding, is a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The next phase of his agenda, the Build Back Better plan, now rests in the hands of the most conservative Democrats in Congress. He does not celebrate violent protests; he denounces them. He supports law enforcement and the criminal justice system — see his comments on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict — and avoids most cultural battles. This is true, as well, of most elected Democrats in Washington.There was a battle for control of the Democratic Party, and the moderates won. They hold the power and they direct the message. But despite this victory, moderate Democrats and their allies can’t seem to take responsibility for the party’s fortunes. When faced with defeats — as they were last month when Terry McAuliffe fell to Glenn Youngkin in the race to succeed Ralph Northam as governor of Virginia — they blame the left. It’s the same song, each time. If progressives would just stop alienating the public, then they could make gains and put power back in Democratic hands. Somehow, the people in the passenger’s seat of the Democratic Party are always and forever responsible for the driver’s failure to reach their shared destination.Writing for his newsletter, the journalist Osita Nwanevu made a version of this point earlier in the year. Progressive politicians and activists may be occasionally off-message but in the main, “The simple truth is that most of the things moderate liberals tend to argue Democrats should be doing and saying are, in fact, being done and said by the Biden administration, Democratic leaders in Congress, and the vast majority of Democratic elected officials.”If, despite their influence, moderate Democrats are not satisfied with the state of their party, then they might want to turn their critical eye on themselves. What they’ll find are a few fundamental problems that may help explain the party’s current predicament.After all, 2020 was not the first year that Democrats fell short of their expectations. They did so in 2010, when moderates had an even stronger grip on the party, as well as in 2014 and 2016. Here, again, I’ll echo Nwanevu. Despite pitching his administration to the moderate middle — despite his vocal critiques of “identity politics,” his enthusiastic patriotism and his embrace of the most popular Democratic policies on offer — Barack Obama could not arrest the Democratic Party’s slide with blue-collar voters. For the past decade, in other words, “the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects have been in decline for reasons unattributable to progressive figures and ideas that arrived on the political scene practically yesterday.”Perhaps the problem, then, lies less with the rhetoric (or existence) of progressive Democrats and more with any number of transformations in the material circumstances of American life and the response — or lack thereof — from the Democrats with the power to do something. What was the Democratic Party’s response to a generation of neoliberal economic restructuring? What was its response to the near-total collapse of private-sector unions? What was its response to the declining fortunes of American workers and the upward redistribution of American wealth?The answer, for most of the past 30 years, is that the moderate Democrats who led the party have either acquiesced in these trends or, as in the case of the Clinton administration, actively pushed them along. And to the extent that these Democrats offered policies targeted to working Americans, they very often failed to deliver on their promises.As a result, as David Dayen of The American Prospect notes in “The Case for Deliverism,” “cynicism finds a breeding ground. People tune out the Democratic message as pretty words in a speech. Eventually, Democratic support gets ground down to a nub, surfacing only in major metropolitan areas that have a cultural affinity for liberalism.” These Democrats, in their failure to deliver, lend credence to the view that Washington is more a hindrance than a help. We can see this right now, as moderate and conservative Democratic resistance to the most ambitious parts of Biden’s agenda has bogged down the entire party and hurt its overall standing.Read in this light, the frequent focus on progressives as the cause of Democratic woes looks less like hard-nosed analysis and more like excuse-making. And my sense is that this excuse-making will only get worse as Republicans weaponize the institutions of American politics to entrench their power and lay the conditions for durable minority rule.Right now, the moderate Democrats who run the party have a narrow and slipping hold on Congress against an opposition that relies on structural advantages, which could be mitigated, or at least undermined, with federal power. They have failed to act, and there’s no sign, so far, that anything will change.If and when Democrats lose one or both chambers of Congress — and when we all face the consequences of their failure — I am confident that we’ll hear, once again, how it’s everyone’s fault but their own.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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      William Hartmann, 63, Michigan Official Who Disputed Election, Dies

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      He refused to certify Joseph Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in Detroit but later relented. A foe of Covid vaccines, he was hospitalized with the virus.William Hartmann, one of two Republican election officials from Michigan who initially refused to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election in Wayne County, where Joe Biden had trounced Donald J. Trump, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital in Wyandotte, Mich., near Detroit. He was 63. About two weeks before Mr. Hartmann’s death, which was confirmed by the Michigan Republican Party, his sister, Elizabeth Hartmann, wrote on Facebook that he was “in ICU with Covid pneumonia and currently on a ventilator.” Mr. Hartmann had been outspoken in his opposition to Covid vaccines.He drew national attention after he and another Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, Monica Palmer, refused to certify the election results. Mr. Biden had won the county, which includes the city of Detroit, with 68 percent of the vote, compared with 31 percent for Mr. Trump.The two election officials pointed to minor recording discrepancies involving a few hundred votes, though the discrepancies had no effect on the outcome: Mr. Biden won the county by more than 330,000 votes. But their refusal to certify the results left the Wayne County board, made up of two Republicans and two Democrats, deadlocked. It also threatened to hold up the certification of Michigan’s entire vote.Their action, The New York Times wrote, “was a stunningly partisan move that would have potentially disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters from a predominantly Black city.”It also contributed to the chaos and confusion that spread across the nation as Mr. Trump became increasingly adamant in falsely asserting that he had actually won the election.The two officials’ stance prompted hundreds of outraged Michigan voters and civil rights activists to immediately hold a Zoom call and accuse the two of trying to subvert the election. A few hours later, Mr. Hartmann and Ms. Palmer certified the results and approved the official tallies.But that led Mr. Trump to personally call them, The Associated Press reported, and shortly thereafter, the officials tried to rescind their votes certifying the results, saying they had been bullied into doing so. They were unable to change their votes back, however, and the Board of State Canvassers went on to certify Michigan’s statewide results. Mr. Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes with 50.6 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump’s 47.8 percent.Mr. Hartmann was born on Aug. 30, 1958, but little other information about his background is publicly available, and attempts to reach his family were unsuccessful.On his Facebook page, he indicated a long involvement with the Republican Party. He listed his alias as “Taxed Enough Already” and called himself an “international man of mystery.”Mr. Hartmann described himself as the owner of the All In One Campaign, a collaboration of consultants who advise candidates on election strategy; the chief executive and technical engineer at Synergy Services, which calls itself a consulting firm “with a focus on federal and state contracting, along with political consultation”; and the owner and chief executive of Custom Renovation, a building renovation service, in Wyandotte.As The Times reported during the election dispute, Mr. Hartmann had filled his Facebook page with false allegations and conspiracy theories that the 2020 results had been manipulated against Mr. Trump. He said that he was harassed after the Nov. 17 episode, that law enforcement officers had to escort him away from his home to safety, and that he did not emerge for a week.“I was afraid that somebody might recognize me when I was out and want to beat me up,” he told the right-wing news organization The Epoch Times last December. He said he had been pursued by the news media and had received more than 1,500 hate emails.His sister began posting updates regarding his health on Facebook last month after he had contracted Covid. But she said she stopped once the news brought unwanted attention to her family.“Bill is fighting for his life and why someone would want to use this time for their political vomit is disgusting and sad,” she wrote. “My brother is a kind, giving, honest, outstanding man.”Online tributes called him a patriot and a true conservative.Mr. Hartmann made it clear on his own social media accounts that he did not believe in Covid vaccines. He suggested that vaccine passports, showing proof of vaccination, were something out of Nazi Germany. More

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      Evidence Muddles Durham’s Case on Sussmann’s F.B.I. Meeting

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      One disclosure dovetails with the special counsel John Durham’s indictment against Michael Sussmann, while several others clash with it.WASHINGTON — When a special counsel accused a prominent cybersecurity lawyer of lying to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about Donald J. Trump’s possible links to Russia, the indictment presented a lengthy narrative but the direct evidence appeared lean.The indictment said the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had made a false statement by telling an F.B.I. official that he was not representing a client in presenting the information. Mr. Sussmann, who has pleaded not guilty, has denied saying that. No one else was present and their conversation was not recorded, so the direct and clearly admissible evidence appeared to boil down to one witness.This week, additional pieces of evidence emerged into public view that were not in the indictment — one of which appears to dovetail with the accusation against Mr. Sussmann by the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed during the Trump administration, while several others appear to conflict with it. The material emerged in court filings and at a status conference before a judge on Wednesday.It is not clear whether all of the newly disclosed evidence will be admissible. But the jostling between prosecutors and defense lawyers could offer a preview of aspects of the trial, which they said on Wednesday would last about two weeks and Judge Christopher R. Cooper said could begin in May or early June.While the charge against Mr. Sussmann is narrow, it has received significant political attention in part because Mr. Durham concluded that the Hillary Clinton campaign had helped push the suspicions, which concerned possible secret communications between computer servers associated with Mr. Trump’s company and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. The F.B.I. decided the suspicions were unfounded.In accusing Mr. Sussmann of telling the F.B.I. official — James A. Baker, then the bureau’s general counsel — that he had no clients, Mr. Durham claimed that Mr. Sussmann was actually representing both a technology executive and the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann, via his lawyers, denied that he told Mr. Baker that he had no client, while maintaining he was there on behalf of only the executive, not the campaign.One piece of newly disclosed evidence, described in a filing by Mr. Durham’s team on Tuesday evening, consists of handwritten notes by an F.B.I. lawyer to whom Mr. Baker spoke about the meeting that day. The Durham filing quoted the notes as saying “no specific client.”That evidence is similar to another set of handwritten notes previously cited in the indictment by another F.B.I. official who also spoke to Mr. Baker after the meeting. The indictment quoted those notes as listing Mr. Sussmann’s name, then a dash, then the name of his law firm, then a dash, and then the words “said not doing this for any client.”It is not clear whether such notes — or testimony by the F.B.I. officials who took them — would be admissible at a trial under complex rules of evidence. Those rules generally ban statements made outside court as hearsay, but they make exceptions subject to judges’ interpretations.The indictment also said that in February 2017, Mr. Sussmann met with the C.I.A. and conveyed similar and related concerns, citing a post-meeting memorandum by two agency employees that said he was “not representing a particular client.” Mr. Durham portrayed that as showing Mr. Sussmann had repeated a false statement.But at the hearing on Wednesday, a lawyer for Mr. Sussmann, Sean Berkowitz, cited evidence turned over by the prosecutors last week that muddies that picture by suggesting he may instead have told them he had a client.Emails by agency personnel ahead of the meeting, Mr. Berkowitz said, included statements like “Sussmann said he represents a client who does not want to be known” and “the plan should be to convince Sussmann that it is in his and his client’s interest to go to the F.B.I.” A draft version of the agency’s post-meeting memo also referred to Mr. Sussmann having a client, he said.A prosecutor working for Mr. Durham, Andrew DeFilippis, told the judge that “although we’re not, you know, interested in a full factual debate before the court,” an agency employee had spotted the reference to a client in the draft memo and “corrected” it for the final version. Mr. De Filippis did not address references to a client in the earlier emails.Those disclosures followed a court filing on Monday by Mr. Sussmann’s defense team that revealed contradictory things Mr. Baker had said under oath about the key interaction in Justice Department interviews, which Mr. Durham’s team disclosed to them last week.In 2019 and 2020 interviews, Mr. Baker recalled the interaction in two different ways that each clashed with the indictment’s version. In the first, he said Mr. Sussmann told him the cyberexperts who developed the Alfa Bank theory “were his clients.” In the second, he said Mr. Sussmann never said if he was representing anyone and Mr. Baker didn’t ask, but assumed he had no client.In the Tuesday court filing, Mr. Durham’s team accused the defense of “cherry-picking” the evidence and putting forward a “skewed portrayal.”The 2019 and 2020 interviews “occurred years after the events in question, and Mr. Baker made these statements before he had the opportunity to refresh his recollection with contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous notes,” they said, adding that he had since “affirmed and then re-affirmed his now-clear recollection of the defendant’s false statement.” More

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      Rally Planner With Ties to G.O.P. Is Cooperating in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      Ali Alexander, who helped organize the gathering that drew Trump supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, could shed light on efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn the election.Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer of Stop the Steal rallies with ties to far-right members of Congress who sought to invalidate the 2020 election results, is cooperating with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, pledging to deliver a trove of documents that could shed light on the activities that preceded the attack.The participation of Mr. Alexander, who is scheduled to be deposed by the panel on Thursday, could provide insight into the nature and extent of the planning by President Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress for their bid to overturn the election on Jan. 6. It could also help clarify whether and to what degree the prospect of violence was discussed or contemplated before or during the rampage.Members of the panel said they wanted to dig into Mr. Alexander’s communications with Republican members of Congress and White House officials.Mr. Alexander, a provocateur who rose in right-wing circles in the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, was one of a handful of planners who put together marches and rallies around the country protesting the outcome. The events culminated with the one in Washington on Jan. 6 that brought together throngs of attendees who went on to storm the Capitol.He attended Mr. Trump’s incendiary speech at the Ellipse near the White House that day, then marched with the crowd toward the Capitol, along with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars. Mr. Alexander arrived, as he put it in his prepared remarks to the panel, “in the early stages of the lawbreaking.”Mr. Alexander, who has been banned from Twitter for spreading false statements about the election, denies he was to blame for the violence.“Anyone who suggests I had anything to do with the unlawful activities on Jan. 6 is wrong,” Mr. Alexander wrote in a memo to the committee. “They’re either mistaken or lying.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Late last month, the House committee issued subpoenas for both Mr. Alexander and Mr. Jones, suggesting that they might have knowledge of how the Stop the Steal rallies on Jan. 6 came together.“We need to know who organized, planned, paid for and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said at the time.Mr. Alexander planned to use his deposition on Thursday to proclaim his innocence, telling the select committee that he had “nothing to do with any violence or lawbreaking” that day and accusing other rally organizers of having done little or nothing as the mob stormed the Capitol, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by The New York Times.He also accused them of removing from an event program important instructions for where the crowd was to go and partying in an upscale Washington hotel during the violence.“While I was actively trying to de-escalate events at the Capitol and end the violence and lawlessness, it’s important to note that certain people were nowhere to be found,” Mr. Alexander planned to tell investigators, promising to turn over documents to respond to a congressional subpoena. “Press reports suggest they may have had their feet up drinking donor-funded champagne in a war room in the Willard. I don’t know where they were. But they weren’t working with police trying to de-escalate the chaos like I was.”Ali Alexander at President Donald J. Trump’s “social media summit” at the White House in 2019.Carlos Barria/ReutersIt is not clear where Mr. Alexander was or what he was doing during the riot. But in the weeks before the attack, Mr. Alexander repeatedly referred during Stop the Steal events to the possible use of violence to achieve his organization’s goals. He claimed to have been in communication with the White House and members of Congress about events planned to undermine Congress’s official count of the Electoral College results, the committee said.Mr. Alexander has said that he, along with Representatives Mo Brooks of Alabama, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Andy Biggs of Arizona, all Republicans, set the events of Jan. 6 in motion.“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video posted online, “so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”Mr. Brooks, who wore body armor onstage on Jan. 6 as he told the crowd to “start taking down names and kicking ass,” and Mr. Biggs, who provided a video message for Mr. Alexander to play at a Dec. 19 rally, have denied coordinating event planning with Mr. Alexander.Mr. Gosar’s chief of staff called Mr. Alexander “a solid organizer,” but said his office merely promoted Stop the Steal events and was not involved in planning them.In his opening statement to the committee, Mr. Alexander planned to give a flavor of his personal biography — his mother was Black and lived in public housing; his father, an Arab, disappeared from his life at a young age — and to suggest that he had become a target for those looking to blame the violence of Jan. 6 on someone.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      Can the Press Prevent a Trump Restoration?

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      There is a school of thought that holds that if Donald Trump sweeps back into power in 2024, or else loses narrowly but then plunges the United States into the kind of constitutional crisis he sought in 2020, the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to American democracy, chosen a disastrous evenhandedness over moral clarity and covered President Biden (or perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris) like a normal politician instead of the republic’s last best hope.This view, that media “neutrality” has a tacit pro-Trump tilt, is associated with prominent press critics like Jay Rosen of New York University and the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan (formerly this newspaper’s public editor) and it recently found data-driven expression in a column by The Post’s Dana Milbank. In a study “using algorithms that give weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story,” Milbank reported that after a honeymoon, Biden’s media coverage has lately been as negative, or even more negative, than Trump’s coverage through most of 2020. Given the perils of a Trump resurgence, Milbank warned, this negativity means that “my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”I think this point of view is very wrong. Indeed, I think it’s this view of the press’s role that actually empowers demagogues, feeds polarization and makes crises in our system much more likely.To understand why, let’s look at a case study where, at one level, the people emphasizing the press’s obligation to defend democracy have a point. This would be the Georgia Republican primary for governor, which will pit David Perdue, a former senator who lost his re-election bid in a 2021 runoff, against Brian Kemp, the conservative incumbent who is famously hated by Donald Trump.That hatred is the only reason this primary matchup exists: He is angry at Kemp for fulfilling his obligations as Georgia’s governor instead of going along with the “Stop the Steal” charade, he’s eager to see the incumbent beaten, and he’s hoping that either Perdue or Vernon Jones, a more overtly MAGA-ish candidate, can do the job for him.As a result, the Georgia governor’s primary will effectively be a referendum not just on Trump’s general power in the G.O.P. but also on his specific ability to bully Republican elected officials in the event of a contested election. And reporters have an obligation to cover the campaign with that reality in mind, to stress the reasons this matchup is happening and its dangerous implications for how Republican officials might respond to a future attempt to overturn a presidential vote.But now comes the question: Is that the only thing that a responsible press is allowed to report during the campaign? Suppose, for instance, that midway through the race, some huge scandal erupts, involving obvious corruption that implicates Kemp. Should Georgia journalists decline to cover it, because a Kemp loss would empower anti-democratic forces? Or suppose the economy in Georgia tanks just before the primary, or Covid cases surge. Should civic-minded reporters highlight those stories, knowing that they may help Perdue win, or should they bury them, because democracy itself is in the balance?Or suppose a woman comes forward with an allegation of harassment against Perdue that doesn’t meet the normal standards for publication. Should journalists run with it anyway, on the theory that it would be good for American democracy if Perdue goes the way of Roy Moore, and that they can always correct the record later if the story falls apart?You can guess my answers to these questions. They are principled answers, reflecting a journalistic obligation to the truth that cannot be set aside for the sake of certain political results, however desirable for democracy those results may seem.But they are also pragmatic answers, because a journalism that conspicuously shades the truth or tries to hide self-evident realities for the sake of some higher cause will inevitably lose the trust of some of the people it’s trying to steer away from demagogy — undercutting, in the process, the very democratic order that it’s setting out to save.I think this has happened already. There were ways in which the national news media helped Trump in his path through the Republican primaries in 2016, by giving him constant celebrity-level hype at every other candidate’s expense. But from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the self-understanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump — positioning itself as the guardian of democracy, a moral arbiter rather than a neutral referee, determined to make Trump’s abnormal qualities and authoritarian tendencies the central story of his presidency.The results of this mind-set, unfortunately, included a lot of not particularly great journalism. The emergency mentality conflated Trumpian sordidness with something world-historical and treasonous, as in the overwrought Russia coverage seeded by the Steele dossier. It turned figures peripheral to national politics, from Nick Sandmann to Kyle Rittenhouse, into temporary avatars of incipient fascism. It invented anti-Trump paladins, from Michael Avenatti to Andrew Cuomo, who turned out to embody their own sort of moral turpitude. And it instilled an industrywide fear, palpable throughout the 2020 election, of any kind of coverage that might give too much aid and comfort to Trumpism — whether it touched on the summertime riots or Hunter Biden’s business dealings.Now you could argue that at least this mind-set achieved practical success, since Trump did lose in 2020. But he didn’t lose overwhelmingly, he gained voters in places the establishment did not expect, and he was able to turn media hostility to his advantage in his quest to keep control of his party, even in defeat. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in the national press declined during the Trump era and became radically more polarized, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents maintaining a certain degree of confidence in the media and Republicans and Republican-leaning independents going very much the other way.This points to the essential problem with the idea that just a little less media neutrality, a little more overt alarmism, would put Trumpism in its place. You can’t suppress a populist insurgency just by rallying the establishment if suspicion of the establishment is precisely what’s generating support for populism in the first place. Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism’s dangers while convincing skeptical readers that you can be trusted to describe reality in full.Which brings us to Joe Biden’s press coverage. I have a lot of doubts about the Milbank negativity algorithms, both because of the methodological problems identified by analysts like Nate Silver and also because, as a newsreader, my sense is that Trump’s negative coverage reflected more stalwart opposition (the president we oppose is being terrible again) while in Biden’s case the negativity often coexists with implicit sympathy (the president we support is blowing it, and we’re upset). But still, there’s no question that the current administration’s coverage has been pretty grim of late.But it’s turned grim for reasons that an objective and serious press corps would need to acknowledge in order to have any credibility at all. Piece by piece, you can critique the media’s handling of the past few months — I think the press coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal was overwrought, for instance — but here’s the overall picture: A president who ran on restoring normalcy is dealing with a pandemic that stubbornly refuses to depart, rising inflation that his own White House didn’t predict, a border-crossing crisis that was likewise unanticipated, increasing military bellicosity from our major adversaries, stubbornly high homicide rates in liberal cities, a party that just lost a critical gubernatorial race and a stalled legislative agenda.And moreover, he’s confronting all of this while very palpably showing the effects of advancing age, even as his semi-anointed successor appears more and more like the protagonist of her own private “Veep.”Can some of these challenges recede and Biden’s situation improve? No doubt. But a news media charged with describing reality would accomplish absolutely nothing for the country if it tried to bury all these problems under headlines that were always and only about Trump.And one of the people for whom this approach would accomplish nothing is Biden himself. We just had an object lesson in what happens when the public dissatisfied with liberal governance gets a long lecture on why it should never vote Republican because of Trump: That was Terry McAuliffe’s argument in a state that went for Biden by 10 points, and McAuliffe lost. Having the media deliver that lecture nationally is likely to yield the same result for Democrats — not Trumpism’s defeat but their own.Far wiser, instead, to treat negative coverage as an example of the press living up to its primary mission, the accurate description of reality — which is still the place where the Biden administration and liberalism need a better strategy if they hope to keep the country on their side.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