Presidential Election of 2020

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      The Sunday Read: ‘The “Perfect Villain” for Voting Conspiracists’

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      Hans Buetow and Listen and follow ‘The Daily’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOver the past decade, Eric Coomer has helped make Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest providers of voting machines and software in the United States.He was accustomed to working long days during the postelection certification process, but November 2020 was different.President Trump was demanding recounts. His allies had spent months stoking fears of election fraud. And then, on Nov. 8, Sidney Powell, a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, appeared on Fox News and claimed, without evidence, that Dominion had an algorithm that switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden.This is the story of how the 2020 election upended Mr. Coomer’s life.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on Twitter: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with “The Daily,” write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Emma Kehlbeck, Parin Behrooz, Carson Leigh Brown, Anna Diamond, Elena Hecht, Desiree Ibekwe, Tanya Perez, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Margaret Willison and Kate Winslett. Special thanks to Mike Benoist, Sam Dolnick, Laura Kim, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Blake Wilson and Ryan Wegner. More

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      Trump Hotel Lost Money, Despite Lobbyist Spending, Documents Show

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      House investigators released data revealing that the hotel in Washington lost $74 million from 2016 to 2020, a figure disputed by the Trump Organization.WASHINGTON — Despite all the Republican-paid political events and big bar tabs from lobbyists, foreign dignitaries and other supporters of President Donald J. Trump, the Trump International Hotel in Washington lost an estimated $74 million between 2016 and 2020, according to data released on Friday by House investigators.The tally came from Mr. Trump’s own auditors, showing losses that generally increased through his tenure in the White House, even as Mr. Trump’s annual financial disclosure reports showed revenues of more than $40 million a year, at least until the pandemic hit.The new account of revenues and annual losses at the hotel — which is in a federally owned landmark known as the Old Post Office building — was released as House Democrats push the Biden administration to turn over additional documents to determine if Mr. Trump broke federal rules by continuing to operate the hotel through his family while serving as president.“The documents provided by G.S.A. raise new and troubling questions about former President Trump’s lease,” said a letter sent Friday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to the General Services Administration, asking for more information.The materials released by House investigators estimated that the hotel also generated nearly $3.8 million in revenue from foreign government officials during the first three years Mr. Trump was in office, be it hotel stays or meals or other business. The president drew in foreign dignitaries who often liked to be seen at his hotel, at times even meeting with Mr. Trump’s aides at the complex.Millions more were spent by the Republican National Committee and various election campaigns and other political groups backing Republican candidates, or supporting Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts, Federal Election Commission reports show. During his presidency, the Trump hotel became a showcase of special-interest lobbying and maneuvering by allies of Mr. Trump to draw his attention or support.Still, the overall message was that the Trump International Hotel, despite all the headlines, is a money-losing operation, said David J. Sangree, an accountant who runs a firm, Hotel & Leisure Advisors, that evaluates hotel industry performance and who looked at the audited reports at the request of The New York Times.“You would expect a hotel in Washington, D.C., to earn a profit,” he said.The Trump family often has various ways of counting revenues and losses, for example presenting one set of figures suggesting losses to property tax authorities in an effort to reduce tax bills and giving another to the public that suggests higher returns reflecting well on Mr. Trump’s business acumen.Prosecutors in New York are already investigating whether Mr. Trump essentially keeps two separate sets of books: one with glowing numbers that banks and insurers received and another bleaker set of data for tax collectors.Eric Trump, who has helped run the family business since his father started his campaign for president, called the $74 million tally of losses at the hotel between 2016 and 2020 “total nonsense,” since it includes a common accounting exercise that cuts actual business profits by considering the annual depreciation of the value of the property.The revenues collected from foreign government sources, Eric Trump added, would have been much higher if the Trump family had actively worked to solicit this business. Instead, the company attempted during most of the time Mr. Trump was in office to discourage it, he said.The Trump family made annual payments to the Treasury for the Trump hotel in Washington — totaling $355,687 between 2017 and 2019 — to attempt to return profits from these sales to foreign government officials. The payments from foreign governments led to accusations in court cases that Mr. Trump was in violation of the so-called emoluments clause of the Constitution, which seeks to bar federal officials from receiving payments from foreign governments.Eric Trump also disputed a suggestion by the House Oversight Committee that the Trump family had received preferential treatment from Deutsche Bank, which financed the renovation of the Old Post Office building before it reopened as a hotel. The committee questioned why the terms of loan were changed to interest-only payments in 2018, but Eric Trump said the relatively high assessed value of the hotel allowed the company to defer principal payments on the $170 million loan for several years.“They have written a narrative that is purposely false,” Eric Trump said in an interview Friday. “And they know it is false.”Former President Trump had filed annual public reports, as required under the law, providing only gross revenues from the hotel, not profits. The information released on Friday includes profitability figures calculated in a number of ways.Detailed financial reports prepared by Mr. Trump’s auditors, which were also released by the House on Friday, show a total loss of $74 million by including depreciation in the value of the hotel of about $8 million a year.But even taking out the losses from depreciation, the documents still show that year after year, once taxes, lease payments and rent paid to the federal government are factored in, the hotel still lost money. It just lost less by that standard than by the one highlighted by House Democrats on Friday.For example, the statement of operations as of August 2018 showed that the losses for the prior year were about $5.3 million, once depreciation was removed, compared with the $13.5 million loss for that year that the House committee said occurred.Losses in 2019, by this adjusted calculation, would have been $9.6 million, compared with the $17.8 million that the House Democrats cited.Mr. Sangree said the net income at the Trump hotel in Washington, even after depreciation and interest on the loan is removed from the calculation, is relatively poor compared with other luxury hotels in major cities.The financial reports released by House investigators provide once-confidential details on the operation of the hotel, showing that it earned an unusually high share of its revenues from its restaurant and bar, compared to its hotel rooms. Each category brought in about $25 million in 2018.Typically, room revenues are considerably larger than meals and bar service, Mr. Sangree said. But large crowds of lobbyists and friends of Mr. Trump’s gathered almost every night in the Trump hotel lobby while he was president, and were sometimes even greeted by Mr. Trump himself as he arrived at the hotel to have dinner at its steakhouse.Some allies of Mr. Trump were such frequent patrons of the hotel bar, like Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, that they had tables they considered their own.Still, the hotel would most likely post much higher profits under a different owner, Mr. Sangree said, because it would no longer be hard to sell to major corporations that have stayed away because of controversies related to Mr. Trump. Management costs at the hotel have also been abnormally high, he said, as a share of revenues.“This hotel should be doing better,” Mr. Sangree said, noting that the documents released Friday showed an average daily room rate of about $500, which should be high enough to produce considerable profit.The Trump family has moved twice in recent years to sell the lease it has with the federal government to operate a hotel at the site. Offers are still being considered, after about a dozen bids came in for the property, including from several major national hotel brands, one executive involved in the negotiations said.With Mr. Trump out of office, the hotel is now much less of a draw among prominent Republican players in Washington. Its lobby now often sits largely empty, as the search for a potential buyer of the lease continues. More

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      Jennifer Medina Asks Latino Trump Voters Open-Ended Questions

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      Jennifer Medina interviews her subjects multiple times — sometimes spending as many as 50 hours with them — to understand their complex political attitudes.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.From the 2016 to the 2020 elections, Donald Trump improved his performance among certain segments of Latino voters, prompting surprised reactions from many journalists and people who work in politics. But this phenomenon was clear to those carefully tracking Latino sentiment — and few were doing that more diligently than the Times political reporter Jennifer Medina, whose parents are Panamanian.Ms. Medina, who is based in Los Angeles, started working on campaign coverage in 2019, and that September she reported on Latinos attending a Trump rally, some of whom said they felt like political loners among their Democratic friends and family. In 2020, she followed up that work with accounts of Mr. Trump’s macho appeal and why evangelical Latinos considered him a defender of their religious values. She also recently looked at the role that Latino voters played in helping Gov. Gavin Newsom keep his job in the face of a recall election in California.Here, Ms. Medina talks about developing her beat, speaking to hundreds of voters and achieving depth in her conversations. This interview has been edited and condensed.How did you find yourself covering Latinos in the 2020 presidential campaign?The campaign was the first time in my career that I had covered national politics full time. Nobody ever explicitly assigned me the beat of covering Latino politics. I just followed where the story was, and that’s what the story was in 2020.The first Trump rally I went to was in New Mexico. The second was in Miami. In the audience of both rallies, there were tons of Hispanics. Just talking to them about why they supported him, what they thought about his statements against Mexicans and immigration, and how they grappled with that captivated me.On the flip side, when the Democratic primary was happening I was hearing people based on the East Coast saying, “Latinos are never going to support Bernie Sanders because they are scared of communism.” That’s true in Miami, but in Los Angeles and Las Vegas it couldn’t have been further from the truth.There was a lot of room for me to do good, nuanced coverage. That’s partly because Latinos have been largely overlooked by both parties and by the press. It’s only just dawned on people that this is a part of the electorate that can really decide elections.How were you able to characterize popular attitudes among a sprawling, diverse group like Latinos?During the election, I interviewed hundreds of voters. For every one person I quote, I talk to five other people.I’ll use a story on Latino Republican men as an example. I had phone numbers of men who had participated in a poll or men I had met reporting throughout the campaign. After I had spoken to 40 people, I started to see trends. I want to hear something over and over again before I describe it in The Times as a generalization.I’m also relying on conversations with political strategists and pollsters — not taking what they say at face value, but also not making generalizations without having other information to back them up.What does it take to achieve depth in these conversations?My approach with Trump supporters was the same as with any other voters: open-ended questions. “When did you first start to think this way?” “Would you talk about politics as a kid?” When you ask people questions like that, most are really eager to respond. People like to talk about themselves.There’s a pastor I interviewed who has a dear place in my heart. I became convinced that Latino evangelical churches were among the only places where Trump supporters and Democrats were interacting with each other on a regular basis. I set off to try to find a church I could profile, and I came across the Church of God of Prophecy in Phoenix and its pastor, Jose Rivera. I envisioned spending weeks there in person, but the church was the very last place I went last March before the shutdown.I knew I couldn’t spend time there the way I wanted to, but I called the pastor once every week. I realized he illustrated the support for Trump among Latino evangelicals, though he himself was not voting for him. He felt upset with his flock.I must have spent 50 hours on the phone with him.50 hours?Is that crazy?What do you learn in 50 hours that you couldn’t learn in 30?I was better able to articulate where Pastor Rivera was coming from, what he represented and what he didn’t represent, the more often that I spoke to him. He said different things at different times. There was one moment where he thought he might vote for Trump. He had these tortured conversations with his wife about why she was going to vote for Trump. I heard his thinking evolve and develop.This is like asking, “What do you learn in 50 years of life that you can’t learn in 30?” More

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      David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear

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      President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]That, at least, is what David Shor thinks. Shor started modeling elections in 2008, when he was a 16-year-old blogger, and he proved good at it. By 2012, he was deep inside President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, putting together the fabled “Golden Report,” which modeled the election daily. The forecast proved spookily accurate: It ultimately called the popular vote within one-tenth of a percentage point in every swing state but Ohio. Math-geek data analysts became a hot item for Democratic Party campaigns, and Shor was one of the field’s young stars, pioneering ways to survey huge numbers of Americans and experimentally test their reactions to messages and ads.But it was a tweet that changed his career. During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” Nonviolent protests, he noted, tended to help Democrats electorally. The numbers came from Omar Wasow, a political scientist who now teaches at Pomona College. But online activists responded with fury to Shor’s interjection of electoral strategy into a moment of grief and rage, and he was summarily fired by his employer, Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.A socially distanced arrangement for state delegates at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFreed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind, Shor was resurrected as the Democratic data guru who refused to soften an analysis the left often didn’t want to hear. He became ubiquitous on podcasts and Twitter, where Obama posts his analyses and pundits half-jokingly refer to themselves as being “Shor-pilled.” Politico reported that Shor has “an audience in the White House and is one of the most in-demand data analysts in the country,” calling his following “the cult of Shor.” Now he is a co-founder of and the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a progressive data science operation. “Obviously, in retrospect,” he told me, “it was positive for my career.”At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing.We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.”In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.Sit with that. Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate. You can see Shor’s work below. We’ve built a version of his model, in which you can change the assumptions and see how they affect Democrats’ projected Senate chances in 2022 and 2024. More

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      How Michael P. Farris Tried to Block 2020 Election Outcome

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      Drafts of a lawsuit filed with Supreme Court by Texas’ attorney general in December had been circulated by the leader of an anti-abortion group.WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s most prominent religious conservative lawyers played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the lawsuit that Republican state attorneys general filed in December in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election of President Biden, documents show.The lawyer, Michael P. Farris, is the chief executive of a group known as Alliance Defending Freedom, which is active in opposing abortion and gay rights. He circulated a detailed draft of the lawsuit that Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, ultimately filed against states including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin in an effort to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.Mr. Paxton filed the lawsuit on Dec. 7, after making some changes but keeping large chunks of the draft circulated by Mr. Farris.An additional 17 Republican attorneys general filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit. Within four days, the matter was rejected by the court.But Mr. Farris’s role highlighted how religious conservatives supported Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to retain power by blocking certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.“Please find a much-improved version of the complaint attached,” Mr. Farris wrote in an email on Nov. 30 to the chief deputy attorney general in South Carolina, one of several Republicans whom Mr. Farris and a team of other conservative lawyers were trying to convince to file the lawsuit. “I will call you and update you on the alternatives.”The email, obtained via an open records request by The New York Times and researchers at Mount Holyoke College, included a detailed 42-page legal complaint, accusing the states of violating the Constitution by changing the rules related to absentee ballots and other election details without formal approval from state legislatures.The complaint Mr. Farris sent had conveniently left the identification of the Republican attorney general’s office that would ultimately file the litigation blank, instead writing “000 Street Ave, Capitol City, ST 00000, (111) 222-3333, fsurname@oag.StateA.gov, Counsel of Record.”Read the documentHere is the draft lawsuit that Michael P. Farris, chief executive of a group known as Alliance Defending Freedom, sent to the South Carolina attorney general, as he searched for a Republican state attorney general willing to file the lawsuit with the Supreme Court.Read Document Page 2 of 46Mr. Farris’s involvement in the effort, which has not previously been reported, came as part of a broad push by religious conservatives to get Mr. Trump re-elected. Their role intensified after the pandemic hit in early 2020 and states began to loosen absentee ballot rules, which the religious conservatives feared would lead to a surge in participation by liberal voters.Mr. Farris made a name for himself in the 1980s as the founder of a legal group that successfully pushed states nationwide to allow children to be taught at home, based on a belief that only through home-schooling, away from secular influences in public schools, could a broad Christian movement rise in the United States.At the Alliance Defending Freedom, Mr. Farris has helped drive the organization’s campaign against abortion and gay rights, including the lawsuit litigated by Mr. Farris’s team that sought to defend the right of a Colorado cake shop to refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.Mr. Farris declined a request for an interview, but in an email he confirmed his role in the postelection effort, saying his involvement was not a part of his work at the Alliance for Defending Freedom, a nonprofit group that is prohibited under federal law from playing any role in a political campaign.“While it’s true that I care about this issue on a personal level, it is not something that ADF works on in any capacity,” he wrote. “As President and CEO, my charge is to focus on ADF’s mission, which is to protect Americans’ God-given freedoms. I have nothing to say about the details of the way forward on the issue of election integrity other than the hope that all Americans take the issue seriously.”A spokesman for Mr. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.Preparing mail-in ballots to send to voters in Texas last year. After the pandemic struck, religious conservatives feared a surge in absentee voting by liberals.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMr. Farris had not been a fan of Mr. Trump before his election, and publicly urged other conservative Christians to vote for another Republican candidate in 2016.“His candidacy is the antithesis of everything we set out to achieve,” Mr. Farris wrote in a Washington Post opinion column in June 2016. But Mr. Farris and other religious conservatives later told their followers that Mr. Trump had proven them wrong with his appointments of conservative judges, his efforts to block any federal spending on abortions, and his willingness to support efforts by certain business owners to discriminate against homosexuals. That included the Colorado cake shop, which won the right to refuse to sell to wedding cakes to gay couples — in a legal argument that the Trump Justice Department supported.Religious groups were active in publicly challenging the outcome of the November election from the start — even as a much more secretive campaign was underway, involving Mr. Farris and others, such as Mark D. Martin, the dean at Regent University School of Law, a self-described Christian institution.Mr. Martin, the former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, and Mr. Farris were both involved, emails obtained by The Times show, in attempts to recruit a Republican attorney general to file a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court to further the efforts by allies of Mr. Trump.Drafts of the lawsuit were also sent to the Louisiana attorney general, Jeff Landry, a Republican. But the most intensive efforts appear to have targeted South Carolina and Texas, the emails suggest, as conservative activists tried to convince South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, to serve as the lead plaintiff.Among those Mr. Farris pressed to file suit was Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s attorney general.Cliff Owen/Associated Press“Mike Farris, who is the President and CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) will be sending over reports, perhaps as early as this evening,” said one Nov. 27 email to Mr. Wilson, sent by conservative activist and author Don Brown, referring to reports examining the presidential election results and ongoing challenges.Three days later, Mr. Farris wrote to Mr. Wilson’s office, with a draft of the lawsuit he wanted Mr. Wilson to consider filing in U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Farris then spoke with Mr. Wilson about the possible lawsuit, according to the emails.“We have been having constant conversations with other state AGs and state AG staffs,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a Dec. 3 email, also obtained via an open-records request. “Had a follow-up conversation with Mike Farris yesterday morning prior to him flying back to Texas. Mike was very accommodating and knowledgeable about the legal issues raised in the pleading.”But Mr. Wilson raised objections to the legal arguments with Mr. Farris, he said, questioning whether one state had the right to sue another state over election procedures or what it might be reasonable to ask the Supreme Court to do as a “remedy” for such a legal dispute, given that it involved the outcome of the presidential election.“There were other issues that have been raised that have been difficult to overcome but our staff along with other states are still working through the issue,” Mr. Wilson said.Not discouraged, the team of conservative activists intensified their efforts to enlist Mr. Paxton, who within days moved forward with his suit on behalf of the State of Texas.“Our Country stands at an important crossroads,” the complaint filed by Mr. Paxton said in its opening argument. Those words were lifted verbatim from the draft Mr. Farris had sent, as was a subsequent passage asserting that “either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former.”Jim Rutenberg More

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      Read the document

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      39 tabulation of ballots within a State. Bush II, 531 U.S. at 107. 163. The actions set out in Paragraphs __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ created differential voting standards in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. COUNT III: EQUAL PROTECTION (ONE MAN, ONE VOTE) 164. Plaintiff State repeats and re-alleges the allegations of paragraphs 1-163, above, as if fully set forth herein. 165. The one-man, one-vote principle of this Court’s Equal Protection cases requires counting valid votes and not counting invalid votes. Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 554-55; Bush II, 531 U.S. at 103 (“the votes eligible for inclusion in the certification are the votes meeting the properly established legal requirements”). 166. The actions set out in Paragraphs __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ violated the one- man, one-vote principle by systemically excluding valid votes and those set out in Paragraphs __-__, __- __, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ violate that principle by systemically including invalid votes in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. COUNT IV: DUE PROCESS (INTENTIONAL NONCOMPLIANCE) 167. Plaintiff State repeats and re-alleges the allegations of paragraphs 1-__, above, as if fully set forth herein. More

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      Behind the Scenes of the Events of Jan. 6

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      More from our inbox:‘I Won’t Mount a Coup.’ Now Is That Too Much to Ask?Missing Yazidis, Captives of ISIS: ‘The World Must Act’Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic ChurchTaxing the UltrarichAn appearance in 2019 on Mark Levin’s Fox News show brought John Eastman, right, to President Donald J. Trump’s attention.via Fox News ChannelTo the Editor:Re “He Drafted Plan to Keep Trump in White House” (front page, Oct. 3) and “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked” (editorial, Oct. 3):Regarding my advice to Vice President Mike Pence in the days before the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6: Although I take issue with some statements in the front-page news article, its most important point, one backed up by very thorough reporting, is that I did not recommend “that Mr. Pence could simply disregard the law and summarily reject electors of certain key battleground states,” as your editorial contends.Rather, as your own reporters noted, I told Mr. Pence that even if he did have such power, “it would be foolish for him to exercise it until state legislatures certified a new set of electors for Mr. Trump.”That honest bit of reporting contradicts not only your editorial but also myriad other news accounts to the same effect.John C. EastmanUpland, Calif.The writer is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.To the Editor:Reading the excellent but frightening editorial “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked,” I was not surprised that the former president wanted to stay in power despite losing a fair election. What was staggering was the number of people who wanted to help him.Jana GoldmanHonor, Mich.To the Editor:Your editorial hit on a serious issue that worries us all, including your many friends in Australia. An independent electoral commission manages, scrutinizes, counts the votes and announces the results of all state and federal elections in Australia.No one ever doubts its word, and challenges are resolved by it quickly and based on evidence that is made publicly available, and only very rarely end up in the courts. The commission also draws electoral boundaries, according to statutory formulas, so there’s no possibility of gerrymandering.We find the heavy politicization of your system puzzling.Nuncio D’AngeloSydney, AustraliaTo the Editor:In “He Drafted Plan to Keep Trump in White House,” John Eastman’s influence is attributed to giving President Trump “what he wanted to hear.”The former F.B.I. director William Webster gave me the most important advice on leadership when I was a White House fellow serving as one of his special assistants. As the only nonlawyer on his executive staff, I was unsure about my job description until he explained, “Your job is to make sure I hear things people think I don’t want to hear or that they don’t want me to hear.” Within a day, it was clear what that entailed.I have shared that advice, and it has proved valuable for countless leaders. Mr. Eastman demonstrates the risks of disregarding it.Merrie SpaethPlano, Texas‘I Won’t Mount a Coup.’ Now Is That Too Much to Ask?  Jason Andrew for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Is there a chance that in the 2024 election all the presidential candidates would sign a pledge that if they lose the election they will not try to overthrow the government?William Dodd BrownChicagoMissing Yazidis, Captives of ISIS: ‘The World Must Act’The Sharya camp near Duhok in August.Hawre Khalid for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Yazidis Know Some of Their Missing Are Alive, as Captives” (news article, Oct. 4):As a Yazidi, I read this piece with a heavy heart, and I ache to do more for these women, children and families. I have been to the camps in Duhok, in northern Iraq, and met with many families hoping for their loved ones to return, but they can barely afford daily necessities, let alone ransoms.I believe that what we need is a task force, comprising Iraqi authorities, U.N. agencies and civil society organizations, formed with the sole goal of searching for and rescuing Yazidi captives of the Islamic State.Opportunities for asylum must be expanded and support given for their recovery. Every necessary resource should be committed to ensuring that survivors can live in freedom and safety for the first time in years.Seven years is an unthinkable amount of time to be held in sexual slavery. We must act. The world must act to rescue women and children from captivity.Abid ShamdeenWashingtonThe writer is executive director of Nadia’s Initiative, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence.Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic Church Benoit Tessier/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “Report Describes Abuse of Minors Permeating Catholic Church in France” (news article, Oct. 6):Clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church wasn’t imposed until the 12th century. How many more of these stories do we have to read until the church acknowledges that it made a dire, if well-intentioned, mistake by instituting that policy?Kate RoseHoustonTaxing the Ultrarich  Erik CarterTo the Editor:Re “This Is How America’s Richest Families Stay That Way,” by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Sept. 24):Mr. Kaiser-Schatzlein states that the ultrarich could pass on stock bought for $1 but worth $100 at death, and that the inheritors would pay tax only on gains above the $100. While that is accurate, it neglects to mention that instead of paying the federal capital gains rate of 20 percent on the $99 gain, the estate would pay the estate tax of 40 percent on the full $100 value (since we are discussing the ultrarich, the $11.7 million exclusion for the estate tax would be a rounding error).This omission gives the misleading impression that the inheritance would be untaxed, when in fact it would be taxed at a higher rate.Peter KnellPasadena, Calif.The writer is managing director of an investment management company. More

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      New Details of Trump Pressure on Justice Dept. Over Election

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      A Senate panel fleshed out how Donald Trump pursued his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to pursue unfounded reports of fraud.WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.The interim report, released publicly on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”The report by Mr. Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple Congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Mr. Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the District of Columbia Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys, to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More