Presidential Election of 2020

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      Giuliani and Prosecutors Agree on Former Judge to Review Seized Materials

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      Barbara S. Jones conducted a similar screening during the investigation into Michael D. Cohen.Federal prosecutors and lawyers for Rudolph W. Giuliani have recommended that Barbara S. Jones, a former judge in Manhattan, be appointed to review materials seized by the F.B.I. during recent searches of Mr. Giuliani’s home and office, according to a government court filing late Thursday.The proposal, which still must be approved by a federal judge, would require Ms. Jones to determine what seized materials might be covered by attorney-client privilege and should be kept from the authorities who are investigating Mr. Giuliani.Ms. Jones, who is now in private practice, filled a similar role three years ago when she was appointed to oversee a review of materials seized by the authorities during the investigation of Michael D. Cohen, former President Donald J. Trump’s onetime personal lawyer and fixer.Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who also once served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, has been under investigation over his dealings in Ukraine before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times has reported.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the F.B.I. have been examining whether Mr. Giuliani lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were assisting him in his efforts to unearth damaging information about President Biden, who was then a leading Democratic candidate. Federal law prohibits lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of foreign officials without registering with the Justice Department, and Mr. Giuliani never registered.Mr. Giuliani has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and he has said he never lobbied on behalf of the Ukrainians. He has denounced the F.B.I. searches as a “corrupt double standard” by the Justice Department, which he said had ignored “blatant crimes” by Mr. Biden and other Democrats.On April 28, the F.B.I. seized 18 electronic devices, including cellphones and computers, in searches of Mr. Giuliani’s Madison Avenue apartment and his Park Avenue office in Manhattan, according to court filings.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, citing what they called “unusually sensitive privilege issues” raised by searches of a lawyer whose clients included a former president, had asked for the appointment of a “special master” — a neutral authority who would determine whether any of the seized materials were protected by attorney-client privilege and should be kept from investigators.Mr. Giuliani is under investigation over his dealings in Ukraine before the 2020 election.Jeff Kowalsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe recommendation of Ms. Jones was agreed upon by federal prosecutors and lawyers for Mr. Giuliani, the office of Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a letter to Judge J. Paul Oetken of Federal District Court, who has been overseeing the Giuliani matter.Ms. Jones, a partner at the law firm Bracewell, had served for 17 years on the Federal District Court in Manhattan — the same court where Judge Oetken sits — after she was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1995.From 1977 to 1987, she worked as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the office that is investigating Mr. Giuliani. (During several of the years Ms. Jones was in the office, it was led by Mr. Giuliani, who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District from 1983 to 1989.) She later served as a senior aide to Robert M. Morgenthau, the late Manhattan district attorney.Though Mr. Giuliani was once a partner at the firm where Ms. Jones now works, formerly known as Bracewell & Giuliani, he left before Ms. Jones arrived.“None of the parties believe that Mr. Giuliani’s prior affiliation with Bracewell & Giuliani presents a conflict that would disqualify Judge Jones from being appointed as the special master or her firm assisting in her review,” Ms. Strauss’s office said in the letter to Judge Oetken.While in private practice, Ms. Jones has served as a special master, a monitor or a compliance officer in a variety of court cases and other disputes, according to her website. In Mr. Cohen’s case, her review found that only a fraction of the seized materials were privileged and should be kept from investigators. Mr. Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to campaign finance and financial crimes.Ms. Strauss’s office, in the letter to Judge Oetken, said that in the Cohen matter, Judge Kimba M. Wood, who had appointed Ms. Jones, said she had “performed her review with extraordinary efficiency and speed, while giving the parties a full opportunity to be heard.” More

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      Pence Calls Systemic Racism A ‘Left-Wing Myth'

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      Former Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday described systemic racism as a “left-wing myth” during a speech hosted by a Republican group in New Hampshire, adopting the racial politics of his former boss, President Donald J. Trump.But Mr. Pence, a potential candidate for a 2024 presidential run, also distanced himself from the former president, describing the Jan. 6 attack as “a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol.”“President Trump and I’ve spoken many times since we left office,” Mr. Pence said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye-to-eye on that day.”The speech illustrated the careful balance Mr. Pence is aiming to strike in squaring the rhetoric of the Republican Party under Mr. Trump while standing by his opposition to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.After focusing much of his speech on touting the achievements of the Trump administration, Mr. Pence took aim at “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education, asserting that young children are being taught “to be ashamed of their skin color.”“It is past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism,” Mr. Pence said at the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner hosted by the Hillsborough County Republicans in Manchester, N.H.“America is not a racist country,” Mr. Pence said to raucous applause, two days after President Biden commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.Republicans have launched an energetic campaign in recent months aiming to dictate how historical and modern racism in America is taught in schools, and Mr. Pence indicated his support of efforts to ban critical race theory through legislation advanced in Republican-led states. Mr. Pence had previously targeted critical race theory in tweets and in his first speech in April after leaving office.Mr. Pence’s appeal to racial politics went beyond education. Discussing efforts to defund law enforcement agencies, the former vice president said “Black lives are not endangered by police, Black lives are saved by police,” co-opting the language of Black Lives Matter — a movement he had shunned in office. More

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      Obama Sees Hope in Changes Under Biden

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      “My entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space,” Barack Obama told me, sitting in his office in Washington, D.C.To be fair, I was the one who had introduced the cosmic scale, asking how proof of alien life would change his politics. But Obama, in a philosophical mood, used the question to trace his view of humanity. “The differences we have on this planet are real,” he said. “They’re profound. And they cause enormous tragedy as well as joy. But we’re just a bunch of humans with doubts and confusion. We do the best we can. And the best thing we can do is treat each other better, because we’re all we got.”Before our interview, I’d read “A Promised Land,” the first volume of Obama’s presidential memoirs. It had left me thinking about the central paradox of Obama’s political career. He accomplished one of the most remarkable acts of political persuasion in American history, convincing the country to vote, twice, for a liberal Black man named Barack Hussein Obama during the era of the war on terror. But he left behind a country that is less persuadable, more polarized, and more divided. The Republican Party, of course, became a vessel for the Tea Party, for Sarah Palin, for Donald Trump — a direct challenge to the pluralistic, democratic politics Obama practiced. But the left, too, has struggled with the limits of Obama’s presidency, coming to embrace a more confrontational and unsparing approach to politics.So this is a conversation with Obama about both the successes and failures of his presidency. We talk about his unusual approach to persuasion, when it’s best to leave some truths unsaid, the media dynamics that helped fuel both his and Trump’s campaigns, how to reduce educational polarization, why he believes Americans have become less politically persuadable, the mistakes he believes were made in the design of the 2009 stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, the ways in which Biden is completing the policy changes begun in the Obama administration, what humans are doing now that we will be judged for most harshly in 100 years, and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts or Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. An edited transcript follows.Something I noticed again and again in the book is this very particular approach to persuasion that you have.I think the normal way most of us think about persuasion is you are trying to win an argument with someone. You seem to approach it with this first step of making yourself a person that the other person will feel able to listen to, which means sympathizing with their argument, sanding off some of the edges of your own. Tell me a bit about how you think about that.Now, that’s interesting. I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. For me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview.And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.Now why that is the way I think about things generally is no doubt partly temperament. Partly it’s biographical. If you’re a kid whose parents are from Kansas and Kenya, and you’re born in Hawaii, and you live in Indonesia, you are naturally having to figure out, well, how did all these pieces fit together?How do all these perspectives, cultures, blind spots, biases, how do you reconcile them to approximate something true? And I think that carries over into my adulthood and into my politics. It’s how I approach the world generally.It presumes that none of us have a monopoly on truth. It admits doubt, in terms of our own perspectives. But if you practice it long enough, at least for me, it actually allows you to not always persuade others, but at least have some solid ground that you can stand on — you can, with confidence say, I know what I think. I know what I believe. It actually gives me more conviction, rather than less, if I’d listened to somebody else’s argument rather than just shutting it off.One of the things that strikes me about it, though, is it sometimes means not calling out arguments that you think are kind of really wrong. In a section of the book about the Tea Party, you mull over whether the reaction they had to you was racist. It’s clear that it at least partly was. And then you say “whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truth the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.” How do you decide when the cost of that kind of truth outweighs the value of it?Well, now you’re describing something a little bit different, which is how do you move large segments of the population politically towards an outcome you want? Versus, how I might persuade somebody one on one?The premise of persuading somebody who you can build some trust with and have a history with — there might be times where you say, you know what, you’re just full of it and let me tell you why. And you can be very logical and incisive about how you want to dismantle their arguments. Although I should add, by the way, don’t, do not try that at home. Because that’s not a recipe for winning arguments with Michelle. But when you’re dealing with 300 million people, with enormous regional, and racial, and religious, and cultural differences, then now you are having to make some calculations.So let’s take the example you used. I write extensively about the emergence of the Tea Party. And we could see that happening with Sarah Palin — she was a prototype for the politics that led to the Tea Party, that, in turn, ultimately led to Donald Trump, and that we’re still seeing today. There were times where calling it out would have given me great satisfaction personally. But it wouldn’t have necessarily won the political day in terms of me getting a bill passed.I think every president has to deal with this. It may have been more noticeable with me — in part because, as the first African American president, there was a presumption, not incorrect, that there were times wher e I was biting my tongue. That’s why the skit that Key and Peele did with the anger translator, Luther, was funny. Because people assumed Barack’s thinking something other than what he’s saying in certain circumstances.A lot of times, one of the ways I would measure it would be: Is it more important for me to tell a basic, historical truth, let’s say about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before?There’s a psychic cost to not always just telling the truth. And I think there were times where supporters of mine would get frustrated if I wasn’t being as forthright about certain things as I might otherwise be. Then there are also just institutional constraints that I think every president has to follow on some of these issues. And it was sort of on a case-by-case basis where you try to make decisions.Sometimes you’d get sufficiently disappointed, let’s say, for example, with gun-safety issues. But after Newtown, for example, and Congress’s complete unwillingness to do anything about the slaughter of children, here were times where I would just go off. Because I felt that deeply about how wrongheaded we were in a basic fundamental way. But that was, let’s face it, after I had exhausted every other possibility of trying to get Congress to move on those issues.Something that really struck me about the book is how much it lives in paradoxes. How much you’re comfortable with the idea that something and its opposite are true at the same time. And I think of persuasion as being the central paradox of your presidency.So you’ve accomplished this massive act of persuasion, winning the presidency twice as a Black man with the middle name Hussein. Now, in retrospect, it’s like, ‘Of course, Barack Obama was president.’I think it’s fair to say that wasn’t a given.It wasn’t as obvious then. But your presidency also made the Republican Party less persuadable. It opened the door in some ways to Sarah Palin, to Donald Trump. And it further closed the door on the kind of pluralistic politics that you try to practice. I’m curious how you hold both of those outcomes together.That’s been the history of America, right? There is abolition, and the Civil War, and then there’s backlash, and the rise of the K.K.K., and then Reconstruction ends, and Jim Crow arises, and then you have a civil rights movement, a modern civil rights movement, and desegregation. And that in turn leads to push back and ultimately Nixon’s Southern strategy. What I take comfort from is that in the traditional two steps forward, one step back, as long as you’re getting the two steps, then the one step back, you know, is the price of doing business.In my case, I get elected. We have a spurt of activity that gets things done. Even after we lose Congress during the course of those eight years, we manage the government, restore some sense that it can work on behalf of people. We regain credibility internationally. But you’re right, it helps to precipitate a shift in the Republican Party that was already there, but probably accelerates it.On the other hand, during that period, you’ve got an entire generation that’s grown up and taking for granted, as you just described, that you’ve got a Black family in the White House, taking for granted that administration can be competent, and have integrity, and not be wrought with scandal. And it serves as a marker, right? It’s planted a flag from which then the next generation builds. And by the way, the next generation can then look back and say, yeah, we do take that for granted. We can do a lot better and go even further.And that is, I wouldn’t say an inevitable progression. Sometimes the backlash can last a very long time and you can take three steps back after two steps forward. But it does seem to be sort of in the nature of things that any significant movement of social progress, particularly those aspects of social progress that relate to identity, race, gender — all the stuff that is not just dollars and cents, and transactional — that invariably will release some energy on the other side by folks who feel threatened by change.But one lesson I’ve seen a lot of folks on the left take, I think particularly in the Trump years, is that you simply need more confrontation. This can’t just be done through pluralism. I think somewhat people often call cancel culture is part of that reaction. It’s a belief that you really do have to confront the country with the ugliest parts of itself so light can get in and it can heal. Do you think they have a point or that’s the wrong lesson to take?No, I don’t think it’s — well, since we’re on the topic of race, what we saw after George Floyd’s murder was a useful bit of truth telling that young people led. And I think it opened people’s eyes to a renewed way of thinking about how incomplete the process of reckoning has been in this country when it comes to race.But even after I think a shift in perspective around George Floyd, we’re still back into the trenches of how do we get different district attorneys elected? How do we actually reform police departments?Now we’re back in the world of politics. And as soon as we get back into the world of politics, now it’s a numbers game. You have to persuade and you have to create coalitions.So I don’t think it’s an either-or proposition. I think there are times where because of events and moments there’s what we might describe as a teachable moment, and George Floyd’s tragic death was an example of that in very stark terms. A part of what happens as a result of the pandemic is there’s a teachable moment about, maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government, just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering — maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics. Again, a teachable moment. So there are times when that’s presented. I think you try to drive it home as much as possible and get a reorientation of the body politic.But at some point in this country, in our democracy, you still have to cobble together majorities to get things done. And that is particularly true at the federal level, where — although reconciliation has now presented a narrow window to do some pretty big things — the filibuster, if it does not get reformed, still means that maybe 30 percent of the population potentially controls the majority of Senate seats. And so if you say that 30 percent of the country is irreconcilably wrong, then it’s going to be hard to govern.There’s a pretty fundamental asymmetry that brings out. So I think at the presidential level, you have a three or four-point advantage for Republicans in Electoral College. At the Senate level, it’s playing the range of five points. And the House level, it’s about two. So you have this real difference now between the parties, where Democrats need to win right-of-center voters to win national power, and Republicans do not need to win left-of-center voters to win national power. And that really changes the strategic picture for the two of them.It’s enormous. It’s one of those things that’s in the background of the folks in Washington and people who follow politics closely. But the average American, understandably, isn’t spending a lot of time thinking about Senate rules and gerrymandering and ——How dare you.I’m sorry, Ezra, but you’re on the nerd side of the spectrum on this stuff. As am I. So people don’t understand — well, if the Democrats win the presidency or if they’re in control of the Senate, why aren’t all these things that they promised happening? Or why are they trimming their sails on their single-payer health care plans or what have you?And the answer is, well, the game is tilted in a way that partly arises out of a very intentional desire for Southern states, for example, to maintain power and reduce the power of the federal government. Some of it has to do with demographic patterns, and where populations are distributed. It’s not surprising that the progressive party, the Democratic Party, is more of an urban party. Because by necessity, you got more different kinds of people, right? Immigrants flooding urban areas and settling, and having a different perspective than folks who live in more rural, more homogeneous areas. And once you get Wyoming having the same number of senators as California, you’ve got a problem.That does mean Democratic politics is going to be different than Republican politics. Now the good news is, I also think that has made the Democratic Party more empathetic, more thoughtful, wiser by necessity. We have to think about a broader array of interests and people. And that’s my vision for how America ultimately works best and perfects its union. We don’t have the luxury of just consigning a group of people to say you’re not real Americans. We can’t do that. But it does make our job harder when it comes to just trying to get a bill passed, or trying to win an election.One of the ways that our politics have reoriented since your presidency is around education. For reasons that are too complicated to go into here, when polarization splits along educational lines, as it did in 2016 and 2020, the Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College gets a lot worse.But you did something really unusual in 2008 and 2012: Educational polarization went down.In 2012, you won noncollege whites making less than $27,000 a year. Donald Trump then won them by more than 20 points. He kept them in 2020. What advice do you have to Democrats to bring educational polarization back down?I actually think Joe Biden’s got good instincts on this. If you’re 45, and working in a blue collar job, and somebody is lecturing me about becoming a computer programmer, that feels like something got spit out of some think tank as opposed to how my real life is lived.People knew I was left on issues like race, or gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and so forth. But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.The challenge is when I started running in 2007-2008, it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. They might say what kind of name is that? They might look at me and have a set of assumptions. But the filter just wasn’t that thick.The prototypical example is I show up in a small town in Southern Illinois, which is closer to the South than it is to Chicago, both culturally as well as geographically. And usually, the local paper was owned by a modestly conservative, maybe even quite conservative usually, guy. He’d call me in. We’d have a cup of coffee. We’d have a conversation about tax policy, or trade, or whatever else he cared about. And at the end of it, usually I could expect some sort of story in the paper saying, well, we met with Obama. He seems like an intelligent young man. We don’t agree with him on much. He’s kind of liberal for our taste, but he had some interesting ideas. And you know, that was it.So then I could go to the fish fry, or the V.F.W. hall, or all these other venues, and just talk to people. And they didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value. If I went into those same places now — or if any Democratic who’s campaigning goes in those places now — almost all news is from either Fox News, Sinclair news stations, talk radio, or some Facebook page. And trying to penetrate that is really difficult.It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through. And that is one of the biggest challenges I think we face.At the end of the day, I actually have found that — and this still sounds naïve. I think a lot of people would still question this. But I’ve seen it. Most folks actually are persuadable in the sense of they kind of want the same things. They want a good job. They want to be able to support a family. They want safe neighborhoods. Even on really historically difficult issues like race, people aren’t going around thinking, Man, how can we do terrible things to people who don’t look like us? That’s not people’s perspective. What they are concerned about is not being taken advantage of, or is their way of life and traditions slipping away from them? Is their status being undermined by changes in society?And if you have a conversation with folks, you can usually assuage those fears. But they have to be able to hear you. You have to be able to get into the room. And I still could do that back in 2007, 2008. I think Joe, by virtue of biography and generationally, I think he can still reach some of those folks. But it starts getting harder, particularly for newcomers who are coming up.We had a conversation related to this in 2015, where we were talking about polarization and how it had gone up during your presidency. And something you said to me is something I wrestled a lot with in my own book, which is that people are pretty polarized when you start talking about national politics. But then you talk to them a bit more, you find they have other identities: they’re soccer coaches, they go to church, they own a business. And those identities aren’t so politically polarized.I found that persuasive and hopeful at the time But since then, our politics have become that much more nationalized. Our political identities become that much stronger. And this idea that these other identities are deeper seems less and less true. When the political cue comes, you really know what side you’re on. Do you think Americans have just become less persuadable?I think that is what you just identified — in part because of the media infrastructure I described and the siloing of media. In part because of the Trump presidency and the way both sides went to their respective fortresses. Absolutely, I think it’s real. I think it’s worse. I think polling shows it. Anecdotes show it. Thanksgiving becomes a lot more difficult, what we’re seeing right now with respect to vaccines.I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the difference in how George H.W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations approached the basic issue of a pandemic and vaccines — there might be differences in terms of efficacy, or how well programs were run, etc. But it’s hard to imagine a previous Republican administration completely ignoring science, right?Yeah, I’ve thought about what if this were a second term Mitt Romney.Exactly. So that is a fundamental shift. And I think people’s identities have become far more invested as a result in which side are you on politically. It spills over into everyday life, and even small issues that previously were not considered, even political issues.So if you’re a soccer coach now, there might be a conversation about why are all the refs white? Right? And suddenly there’s a long argument, and you’ve got each side immediately tweeting about it. And then Fox News might grab the story and run with it in the most sensational way, and next thing you know, Joe Biden is being asked about a soccer game in Maryland. Right? And when we see that pattern playing itself out in our daily lives, in a way, that’s unhealthy.I think there’s some merit to this, that the decline of other mediating institutions that provided us a sense of place and who we are, whether it was the church or union or neighborhood — those used to be part of a multiple set of building blocks to how we thought about ourselves. And the way that the national conversation evolves, suddenly there’s a right answer across all those lines, right? Which is part of the reason why you don’t get ticket-splitting these days, right?Even when I first came in. what was striking was the degree to which the conservative Democrat or the pro-choice Republican were getting winnowed out of each respective party. What’s interesting is how it filtered. Rather than the public saying we don’t like that, let’s try something else. In some ways, the public’s come to see themselves individually in those terms as well.Also, the choices get starker for them. Something I was thinking about while you were talking was this idea that I think about sometimes that I call “ricochet polarization.” And I’m not asserting symmetry between the two sides. I don’t want to get flak on that.I would jump on you in a second, don’t worry.You were saying a couple minutes ago, that you thought people knew you were pretty left on social issues, on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, on a bunch of issues, but they thought you respected them. But you also — because of what you believed, or also because you thought folks were movable — were restrained on a lot of these issues.You ran in 2008 and you were opposed to gay marriage. You talk in the book about how Axelrod and Plouffe were very careful about avoiding issues that would exacerbate racial conflict. And you guys focused a lot on economics.But then, as people feel persuasion is not working and they see the worst of the other side coming at them, there’s a dynamic that happens, and I see it among Democrats, too, where people are more willing to say, Well, here’s what I really believe. And here’s what I really believe about you. If they’re still going to say I’m a socialist. Then well, maybe I am a socialist. They’re going to say I want to raise taxes on middle-class people, then maybe I do, actually. And each day the parties become a little less restrained because the benefits of restraint seem lower.First of all — and you already offered this caveat, but I want to re-emphasize — it’s not symmetrical because Joe Manchin is still a Democrat in our party. And I think a lot of people look and say the guy’s got to run in West Virginia, a state that Joe Biden lost by 30 percent. And we understand that his politics are not going to be the same as Nancy Pelosi’s. So just by virtue of the fact that we have to earn votes from a lot of different places.And needing center-right voters.And needing center-right voters. Look, the challenge we have is that the other side just did not function that way. And that’s not because there aren’t people in the Republican Party who thought that way.You mentioned Mitt Romney earlier. Well, Mitt Romney was the governor of Massachusetts. And when he was, he made all kinds of sensible compromises. He didn’t approach things the way I would approach things, but there was some sense of what the other side thinks matters. He’s the governor of a Democratic state. I’ve got to recognize that I’m probably more conservative than most people in the state, which means I have to make some accommodations. But as soon as he started running for the presidency, suddenly he’s got to pretend that he’s this hard-right, gun-toting, varmint-killing guy.Severely conservative.Severely conservative. Well, why is that? It’s because a dynamic has been created. And that dynamic, in part, has to do with public officials being lazy, and just saying, this is the easiest way for us to get our folks riled up is to suggest that Obama is a Muslim socialist who is going to take away your guns.But some of it is a media infrastructure that persuaded a large portion of that base that they had something to fear. And fed on that politics of fear and resentment in a way that ironically ended up being a straitjacket for the Republican officials themselves. And some of them were gobbled up by the monster that had been created. And suddenly found themselves retiring because they weren’t angry or resentful enough for the base they had stoked.I think it’s fair to say that you’re critical of the media at points in the book. In your experience watching it, how much do you feel the media reflects politics, and how much do you feel it shapes politics?Well, look, there are certain bad habits that the media cultivated, and had to then re-examine during the Trump era. The classic being what constitutes objectivity.I joke about “President Obama today was savagely attacked by the Republicans for suggesting the earth is round,” right? Republicans suggested that there’s some hidden documents showing the earth is, in fact, flat. In response, Obama said, well — and then it goes on. But it’s presented as he said, they said, and that’s reporting. And you’d have some vague corner of the press room engaged in fact-checking after the fact. But that’s not what appeared on the nightly news.And that taught somebody like a Mitch McConnell that there is no downside for misstating facts, making stuff up, engaging in out-and-out obstruction, reversing positions that you held just a few minutes ago, because now it’s politically expedient to do so. That never reached the public in a way where the public could make a judgment about who’s acting responsibly and who isn’t.I think that the media was complicit in creating that dynamic in a way that understandably is difficult, because, as we discovered during the Trump administration, if an administration is just misstating facts all the time, it starts looking like, gosh, the media’s anti-Trump. And this becomes more evidence of a left wing conspiracy and liberal elites trying to gang up on the guy.Yeah, there’s the objectivity critique, which I actually think, in many ways, the media got better on. But there’s another one laced through the book. And it’s interesting because I think you both benefited from it and become wary of it, which is that in the media, one of our central biases is towards exciting candidates. And you were an exciting candidate in 2008.I stayed exciting. Come on, now.But later on that’s also something that Donald Trump activates in a different way. You have a big set piece at the White House Correspondents Dinner where the Washington Post invites Donald Trump after a year of birtherism. And even in a broader sense, exciting candidates usually shape perceptions of parties. On the right, they tend to be quite extreme. They tend to be, in both parties, either more liberal or more conservative. But part of the dynamic is the media is pressured by social media, and like you look around at who’s up there on Facebook and on Reddit.Conflict sells.Conflict sells. And that’s a way in which I think the perceptions of the parties are changing for people. Because whoever is chair of the House Ways and Means Committee —Who’s considered the voice of —Exactly. Who becomes the voice? How do you reflect on that? You came up, social media is great for you. It seems to me you’ve got some different views on it now. How do you think about that trade-off between excitement and some of the other qualities that are a little bit more nuanced that you worry people are losing sight of?Yeah, I think it is entirely fair. And you’re right, even during my campaign I got weary of it. What my political adviser David Axelrod called — the Obama icon, right? You got the posters, and you got the crowds. And very much focused on me as this comet bursting onto the scene.But I have to tell you that there’s a difference between the issue of excitement, charisma versus rewarding people for saying the most outrageous things. I don’t think anybody would accuse me of just creating controversy, just for the sake of it. The excitement I brought was trying to tell a story about America where we might all start working together and overcome some of our tragic past. And move forward and build a broader sense of community. And it turns out that those virtues actually did excite people.So I don’t agree that that’s the only way that you can get people to read newspapers or click on a site. It requires more imagination and maybe more effort. It requires some restraint to not feed the outrage-inflammatory approach to politics. And I think folks didn’t do it.The birtherism thing, which I was just a taste of things to come, started in the right wing media ecosystem. But a whole bunch of mainstream folks booked him all the time because he boosted ratings. And that wasn’t something that was compelled. It was convenient for them to do, because it was a lot easier to book Donald Trump to let him claim that I wasn’t born in this country than it was to actually create an interesting story that people will want to watch about income inequality? That’s a harder thing to come up with.Let me get at that piece of it, too. So I covered the Affordable Care Act pretty closely. And I’ve thought a lot about its political afterlife. It survived the Republican attempts to gut it. It did become popular.Yeah, my timeline — I thought it was going to happen a little bit quicker. But it did happen.But at the same time, the thing that is striking to me is it didn’t convert many voters over to the Democratic side, including Republican voters who relied on it, who would have lost it if the folks they were voting for got their way.Do you think, given how intense political identities are now, that policy can persuade people to vote differently? Or is partisanship now almost immune to the material consequences of governance?I think over time it does. I think it’s not as immediate. And look, I think it’s important to just remember that when we came into office, the economy was in a free fall. We had to scramble and do a bunch of stuff, some of which was inherited, some of which we initiated to stabilize the financial system. People hated it.It’s hard to just underscore how much the bank bailouts just angered everyone, including me. And then you have this long, slow recovery. Although the economy recovers technically quickly, it’s another five years before we’re really back to people feeling like, OK, the economy is moving and working for me.And the truth is that if Donald Trump doesn’t get elected — let’s say a Democrat, a Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton had immediately succeeded me, and the economy suddenly has 3 percent unemployment, I think we would have consolidated the sense that, oh, actually these policies that Obama put in place worked. The fact that Trump interrupts essentially the continuation of our policies, but still benefits from the economic stability and growth that we had initiated, means people aren’t sure. Well, gosh, unemployment’s 3.5 percent under Donald Trump.Now I would argue, and I think a lot of economists that I know would suggest, that mostly that had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s policies, and mostly had to do with the fact that we had put the economy on a footing where he essentially just continued the longest peacetime recovery and sustained job growth in American history. But if you’re the average voter you’re kind of thinking, well, you know, looks like Republican policies are working for me to some degree, which probably explains why Trump was able to make some inroads — modest, overstated but real inroads — among non-white voters who were feeling like, what, I’m working and making decent money, and things feel pretty good. So that clouds what I think would have been a more impactful shift in political views towards Democrats as a result of my presidency.I think that what we’re seeing now, is Joe and the administration are essentially finishing the job. And I think it’ll be an interesting test. Ninety percent of the folks who were there in my administration, they are continuing and building on the policies we talked about, whether it’s the Affordable Care Act, or our climate change agenda, and the Paris [climate accord], and figuring out how do we improve the ladders to mobility through things like community colleges.If they’re successful over the next four years, as I think they will be, I think that will have an impact. Does it override that sort of identity politics that has come to dominate Twitter, and the media, and that has seeped into how people think about politics? Probably not completely. But at the margins, if you’re changing 5 percent of the electorate, that makes a difference.Most importantly, I think it does have an impact for young people as they are forming their ideas about politics and who they are. I was both a manifestation of the more progressive views that young people brought to politics in 2008, and 2009, 2010, and I think my presidency helped to solidify a huge tilt in the direction of progressive politics among young people that is now continuing into their 30s as the millennials, and even the Gen Zers, are starting to marry and have families, who know their political identity has been shaped and changed in pretty significant ways.One area where you’re more optimistic than in the book is the idea that better political communication can really change the way people receive policy. I tend to think more about, How could you do policy design so the policy itself could speak more clearly?I actually think we agree on that. I think you hear in the book arguments that we would have — there’d be a bunch of bad reporting around the economy. And I’d get all grumpy, and call in my advisers. I’d say, I need to do more press conferences. I need to give another speech. And they actually were pretty clear to me. They were all, like, look, as long as unemployment’s still at 9 percent, it doesn’t matter how many speeches you give. It’s not going to change things.On the other hand, when people ask me what would I do differently, a lot of times I’ll give broad generalizations, because I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds. But being a policy nerd, you’ll appreciate this: the Making Work Pay tax cut, that was part of our stimulus — where Larry Summers talks me into the idea that we should spread out the tax cut in people’s weekly paychecks, in the drip, drip, drip fashion because the social science shows that they’re more likely to spend it. But if they get a big lump sum, then they might just pay down debt.And we needed more stimulus. And I thought, well, that makes sense. But of course, as a result, nobody thought I’d cut taxes. Or everybody was confident that I had raised their taxes. That’s an example of a policy design where we were too stubborn, I think, initially, around — we’ll just get the policy right and the politics will take care of itself. And as I point out in the book, I should have done a deeper dive in F.D.R., in recognizing that you’ve got to sell the sizzle as well as the steak because that creates the political coalition to continue it.The New Deal had all kinds of policies that actually didn’t work as well as they should have. We get political phrases like pork barrel, and logrolling, and a lot of that comes out of the mismanagement of the federal programs. But you know what? People saw it. They felt it. And they associated their lives getting better with those policies. That’s important.I think a fair critique of us when I look back is the fact that I was sometimes too stubborn about, no, we’re going to just play it straight. And let’s not worry about how the policy sells if it works. Then that’s what we should do.Are there other design ideas that you would advise people to take seriously? I realize there are technical reasons this happened, but I think a lot about how the Affordable Care Act took four years to begin delivering the bulk of health insurance benefits.It’s a good example. I think that there’s no doubt that the team that is now in the Biden administration and thinking about, whether it’s the Covid stimulus package, or how do you build off the Affordable Care Act, they’re mindful of these lessons and they’re saying to themselves, all right, we’ve got to sell this.So on health care in particular, how do we make this simple and stupid so that it’s easily explained, it’s easily understood? The expansion of Medicaid, for example, was probably the part of the Affordable Care Act that had the biggest impact. Quick, easy to administer, didn’t have a lot of moving parts because it was building off an existing program.And look, there are times where it is important in fact to go ahead and plant some seeds even if it doesn’t yield quick political benefits. I use the example, in our stimulus, of the $90 billion we invested in the green economy. Politically that wasn’t a winner for us. We knew that we were going to get some Solyndras, for example, the famous example that the Republicans beat us over the head with where we gave a loan to a solar company that goes belly up.But the truth is, that the reason now we’re seeing such enormous breakthroughs in terms of everything from electric cars to solar efficiency to wind power — all those things that we can now build on in pursuit of future climate policy — a lot of that relied on those programs we started that didn’t have a lot of political benefit. And so you’ve got to calculate.Sometimes I have my friends in the Democratic Party who criticize us, who misapprehend this idea that we had sort of a — what’s it called? Neoliberal perspective. That we had some ideological aversion to pushing the envelope on policy. That’s not the case. We had just political constraints we had to deal with, and we had an emergency we had to deal with.But one thing I was pretty clear about early on, and showed with the Affordable Care Act, was that given we were in a hole economically anyway there was no point in us trying to go small bore. Bill Clinton was able, in his second term, to politically go small because the economy was humming and people were feeling good. We were dealing with what at that point was the worst recession since the Great Depression. Politically, we were going to get clobbered in the midterms. It really didn’t matter what we did. And so we just tried to do as much as we could within the political constraints that we had.And I think that the environment now is such, partly because Republicans spent $2 trillion of their own stimulus — and shockingly weren’t concerned about deficits when they were in power — partly because of the urgency of Covid, and the pandemic, and people recognize they just needed immediate relief and help now. I think we’re now in an environment where if we just get some big pieces in place, building on what we did before, people will notice. And it will have a political impact.It doesn’t override all the deep subterranean political dynamics of our culture — race obviously being at the top of that list, but also changing gender roles, and those who still are engaged in organized religion feeling attacked by sort of an atheist culture. Those things are deep. They’ve always been here. They’re not going away anytime soon. But I guess what I am still confident about is, if we can get some stuff done that works, and we give people the benefit of the doubt, and we continue to reach out, as opposed to yell, that we get better outcomes rather than worse outcomes.I heard you say the other day that you’d like to know what those U.F.O. objects are, too.Absolutely.If it came out that they were alien, if we got an undeniable proof of that, how would that change your politics, or your theory about where humanity should be going?That is an interesting question.Thank you.Well, first of all, depends. Have we made contact with them? Or we just know.We just know —These probes have been sent?Yeah.But we have no way of reaching out?We can’t get in touch. We just know we’re not alone and someone’s been here.It’s interesting. It wouldn’t change my politics at all. Because my entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space. When we were going through tough political times, and I’d try to cheer my staff up, I’d tell them a statistic that John Holdren, my science adviser, told me, which was that there are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on the planet Earth.Your staff must have loved that.Well, sometimes it cheered them up; sometimes they’d just roll their eyes and say, oh, there he goes again. But the point is, I guess, that my politics has always been premised on the notion that the differences we have on this planet are real. They’re profound. And they cause enormous tragedy as well as joy. But we’re just a bunch of humans with doubts and confusion. We do the best we can. And the best thing we can do is treat each other better because we’re all we’ve got. And so I would hope that the knowledge that there were aliens out there would solidify people’s sense that what we have in common is a little more important.But no doubt there would be immediate arguments about like, well, we need to spend a lot more money on weapons systems to defend ourselves. New religions would pop up. And who knows what kind of arguments we get into. We’re good at manufacturing arguments for each other.Here’s another wonky question. What do we do now that humanity will be judged for most harshly in 100 years?Well, if we don’t get a handle on climate change, then if there’s anybody around to judge us, they’ll judge us pretty harshly on it, because the data is here. We know it. And we have the tools to make real progress with it.One thing that the pandemic has done is to start getting people to think in scale. You can actually put a dollar figure to what it would take to transition to a clean economy. It’s in the trillions of a year globally. But when you think about how much was spent and how much was lost in one year as a result of the pandemic, suddenly making investments in public health systems seem like a pretty good investment.Similarly, maybe it opens up people’s imaginations to say we can actually afford to make this transition. There are some sacrifices involved, but we can do it.And then finally, what three books do you recommend to the audience?A book I just read is “The Overstory,” by Richard Powers. It’s about trees and the relationship of humans to trees. And it’s not something I would have immediately thought of, but a friend gave it to me. And I started reading it, and it changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.You’ll never walk through a forest the same way.You really don’t. It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.“Memorial Drive,” by Natasha Tretheway, a poet. It’s a memoir, just a tragic story. Her mother’s former husband, her former stepfather, murders her mother. And it’s a meditation on race, and class, and grief. Uplifting, surprisingly, at the end of it. But just wrenchingAnd then this one is easier. I actually caught up on some past readings of Mark Twain. There’s something about Twain that I wanted to revisit because he’s that most essential of American writers. His satiric eye, and his actual outrage that sometimes gets buried under the comedy, I thought was useful to revisit.(You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher; or wherever you get your podcasts. A full transcript of the episode will be available midday.)Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lin. More

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      Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

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      Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”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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      Death of QAnon Follower at Capitol Leaves a Wake of Pain

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      Rosanne Boyland had never voted before 2020, but she fell prey to dark conspiracy theories, family members said. She died on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and they are still not sure why.For months, Rosanne Boyland had been worrying her family with bizarre notions she had picked up on the internet: The actor Tom Hanks might be dead, she said. A national furniture chain was trafficking children. Many prominent Democrats were pedophiles.Then, early in January, she texted her older sister that she was heading to Washington with a friend to support President Donald J. Trump and protest what was happening in the country. “I’m going to dc,” she wrote. “I dont know all the deets yet.”Ms. Boyland, 34, was one of five people who never made it home from the Jan. 6 protest, which erupted in violence when hundreds of people stormed into the Capitol. Her death has left her family grappling to understand how Ms. Boyland, who they say had never voted before 2020, wound up waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag amid a crowd of fanatic supporters of the former president before walking up the steps of the Capitol to her death.Their frustration deepened further this week when Republicans in the Senate blocked an effort to establish an independent commission to look into the origins and the handling of the attack on the Capitol.Five people died, including Ms. Boyland, at the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol that followed the Jan. 6 rally.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“Why anyone would NOT want to find out what happened, even just to prevent it from happening again, is beyond me,” Ms. Boyland’s older sister, Lonna Cave, said in a text message after the vote.For months before the rally, Ms. Boyland had bombarded her friends and relatives with messages and links to long videos about the fantastical theories she had come to accept as fact. Many of the false claims spilled from QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement that rose in popularity over the course of his presidency and promoted the idea that many Democrats and celebrities are part of a global pedophile ring — a theory that 15 percent of Americans believe, according to one poll this week. Many of its supporters falsely believed that President Biden had stolen the election, and some attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Jan. 6.Ms. Boyland’s sudden fixation so alarmed her family members and friends that some of them asked her to stop talking to them about politics — or just to stop talking altogether.Some of her closest friends believe that Ms. Boyland was a vulnerable target for the conspiracy theorists. After a stint in drug rehabilitation, she had returned to her parents’ home and largely avoided drugs for several years, her family said. But the isolation brought about by the pandemic was making it harder. QAnon filled a void in her life, they said, helping distract her from thoughts of returning to drugs even as it acted as a different kind of hallucinogen.“I was worried that she was trading one addiction for another,” said Blaire Boyland, her younger sister. “It just seemed like, yes, she’s not doing drugs, but she’s very obsessively online, watching all these YouTube videos and going down the rabbit hole.”The family is also still struggling to understand how she died. From the video of the chaotic siege, it appeared that she had died after being caught in a crush of rioters. But the autopsy by the Washington medical examiner’s office did not find evidence of trampling and concluded that she had overdosed on amphetamines.Family members said it was likely that the only amphetamine in her body was the Adderall she took every day by prescription, though it appeared that she might have taken at least twice her prescribed dose.“We just want to find out what happened, to be able to rest,” Ms. Cave said. “This has been so messed up. We just want to grieve the normal way.”A descent into conspiracy theoriesFor years, Ms. Boyland had been barred from voting because she had been convicted of felony drug possession, but she had also shown little interest in politics until 2020. In the fall, though, free from probation, she made it clear early on that she planned to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump. She registered to vote on Oct. 3, a month before the election, records show.“She was so happy that she was able to vote,” recalled Stephen Marsh, 36, a friend of Ms. Boyland’s who said that she had been so thrilled that she had called his mother. “She was so excited about it because her past made it difficult for her to participate.”Rosanne Boyland texted her older sister that she was heading to Washington with a friend to support President Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6.Justin Cave, via Associated PressBut her increasing absorption in the QAnon community was by that time pushing some of her closest friends away.“I care about you, but I think it would be best if we didn’t talk for a while,” one friend since childhood, Sydney Vinson, texted her on Oct. 3 after Ms. Boyland had sent her a long text message and screenshots about purported government manipulation of the news media. “Please don’t send me any more political stuff.”Ms. Boyland was the middle of three sisters, growing up in Kennesaw, Ga., a city of 34,000 people about 25 miles northwest of Atlanta. She and her sisters were close as children, and her younger sister said she had been inspired by Ms. Boyland’s assertiveness and confidence. Even then, she had a penchant for conspiracy theories, her sisters said, but harmless ones, like the existence of extraterrestrials or of Bigfoot.But when she was about 16, her life took a turn when she began dating an abusive boyfriend, her sisters said. She would blame black eyes on soccer practice and once came home with an unexplained shoulder injury. Around that time, she also got hooked on opioids.She eventually dropped out of high school, and her relationship with her family became strained. In 2009, when she was 23, she was charged with felony drug possession. Several other cases would follow, the most recent in April 2013, after which she was given five years of probation. It was only in July 2014, when she learned about the pregnancy of her older sister, Ms. Cave, that she pledged to be a better role model for her niece, her sisters said — and from that moment on, with a few brief relapses, she was largely sober.“She was always talking about how she couldn’t wait to be the aunt that was the cool aunt,” said Ms. Cave, who gave birth to her first daughter in March 2015. She now has two daughters, 5 and 6.Ms. Boyland grew close to both of them, often picking them up from school and documenting milestones in their lives. She spent much of her time going to group meetings and counseling other people who were struggling with drugs. At one point, she hoped to become a counselor herself.Ms. Boyland was the middle of three sisters, growing up in Kennesaw, Ga., about 25 miles northwest of Atlanta. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic arrived, though, she had to spend much of her time alone at her parents’ house, and her in-person group meetings were canceled. She told her sisters that she frequently felt an urge to begin using drugs again.“She was really struggling,” Blaire Boyland said. “She tried doing the Zoom meetings, but she wasn’t getting anything out of it. She felt out of control.”Her friends began noticing that she was posting about conspiracy theories and Mr. Trump. Before long, she was texting them about PizzaGate, the conspiracy theory that included false claims about Democrats’ trafficking of children in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington.“I’ve mostly been watching it all on youtube,” Ms. Boyland said in a text message to Ms. Vinson, her childhood friend. What most captured her attention, Ms. Vinson said, was the “Save the Children” slogan that QAnon members used to spread false claims about Democrats’ trafficking of children.“She cared about kids a lot,” Ms. Vinson said. “She thought she was fighting for children, in her own way, and just trying to spread the word about underground pedophile rings and just all of these things. I think QAnon had this way of making these things seem really believable.”At about 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, Ms. Boyland began the roughly 10-hour drive to Washington with a friend, Justin Winchell. They parked in Virginia and took a bus into the city to see Mr. Trump at the rally, where he riled up the crowd with unsubstantiated claims that his election loss had been rigged. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.Ms. Boyland headed with many of the other protesters down the street to the Capitol.The chaotic siegeMs. Boyland could barely be made out at first in the footage of the crowd’s surge up the Capitol steps — a short figure, outfitted in a black hoodie and American flag sunglasses.She disappeared into the mob inside the tunnel presidents use when they emerge for their inaugurations. It was the scene of some of the day’s most brutal hand-to-hand fighting, and videos showed rioters crushing police officers between doors and warning that the crowd could become dangerously packed.Just minutes later, after a push by the police that sent the crowd tumbling back out of the tunnel, she could be seen lying on her side, after which two men dragged her away from the door and began trying to resuscitate her.It appeared to be a case of trampling. But then the medical examiner concluded that she had died of “acute amphetamine intoxication,” a ruling that left her family, convinced that she had not relapsed into drug abuse, flummoxed. She had been taking Adderall regularly under a doctor’s prescription and had not been seen to have any adverse effects, they said.Several forensic pathologists and toxicologists who reviewed the autopsy report said in interviews that the level of amphetamine in her blood — most likely from the Adderall — had been enough to be potentially fatal.Iain M. McIntyre, the former chief toxicologist at the San Diego County medical examiner’s office, said the level could be consistent with her having taken both of her 30-milligram daily doses at the same time, something Ms. Cave said her sister sometimes did. Mr. McIntyre said the high dosage of amphetamine, along with the raucous scene, her heart disease and obesity, could have been enough to make her heart stop.Rosanne Boyland’s sister Lonna Cave and her husband, Justin Cave, were left wondering what they might have missed.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe day after her death, Ms. Cave’s husband, Justin Cave, told reporters that Mr. Trump had “incited a riot last night that killed four of his biggest fans.” Then came a spate of cruel messages to the family from all sides — people who said they were glad Ms. Boyland had died, and others who had been infuriated by Mr. Cave’s comments.Ms. Cave and her husband were left wondering what they had missed, how they could have helped Ms. Boyland before she fell too deeply into the conspiracy theories.“That’s part of the reason I feel guilty, because none of us thought too much about it when she started looking into it,” Ms. Cave said. “I understand that she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been. But she would not have been here if it weren’t for all the misinformation.” More

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      Texas Voting Bill Nears Passage as Republicans Advance It

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      The bill, which includes some of the strictest voting measures in the country, would head to the desk of Gov. Greg Abbott if it passes. He is expected to sign it into law.The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives is poised to take up a bill on Sunday that would impose a raft of new voting restrictions in the state, moving a step closer to the expected full passage of what would be among the most far-reaching laws in Republicans’ nationwide drive to overhaul elections systems and limit voting.The bill, which passed the State Senate early Sunday, would tighten what are already some of the country’s strictest voting laws, and it would specifically target balloting methods that were employed for the first time last year by Harris County, home to Houston. In addition to banning drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, which were used by nearly 140,000 voters in Harris County during the 2020 election, the bill would prohibit election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters, regardless of whether they had requested them; ban using tents, garages, mobile units or any temporary structure as a polling location; further limit who could vote absentee; and add new identification requirements for voting by mail. Partisan poll watchers would also have more access and autonomy under the bill’s provisions, and election officials could be more harshly punished if they make mistakes or otherwise run afoul of election codes and laws. The bill, which was hashed out in a closed-door panel of lawmakers over the past week as the spring legislative session neared its conclusion on Monday, was rushed to the State Senate floor late Saturday in a legislative power play orchestrated by Republican lawmakers and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Suspending rules that require a bill to be public for 24 hours before a final vote, they set off hours of debate before the Senate passed the bill just after 6 a.m. on Sunday by an 18-to-13 vote. Democrats denounced the dark-of-night legislative maneuver on a measure that Senator Borris L. Miles, a Democrat from Houston, said people in his largely Black and Latino district called “Jim Crow 2.0.”“They do ask me, every time I’m in the neighborhood, is this 2021 or is this 1961?” Mr. Miles said on the Senate floor. “And why are we allowing people to roll back the hands of time?”The House, which did not move to suspend the 24-hour rule, is set to convene at 1 p.m. local time, and will debate the bill before voting on it. No further changes to the legislation can be made. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is widely expected to sign the bill. Texas is one of several Republican-led states — including Iowa, Georgia and Florida — that have moved since the 2020 presidential contest to pass new laws governing elections and restricting voting. The impetus is both Republicans’ desire to appease their base, much of which continues to believe former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, and the party’s worries about a changing electorate that could threaten the G.O.P.’s longtime grip on power in places like Texas, the second-biggest state in the country.In a statement on Saturday, President Biden called the proposed law, along with similar measures in Georgia and Florida, “an assault on democracy” that disproportionately targeted “Black and Brown Americans.” He called on lawmakers to address the issue by passing Democratic voting bills that are pending in Congress. “It’s wrong and un-American,” Mr. Biden said. “In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.”Republican state lawmakers have often cited voters’ worries about election fraud — fears stoked by Mr. Trump, other Republicans and the conservative media — to justify new voting restrictions, despite the fact that there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in recent American elections.And in their election push, Republicans have powered past the objections of Democrats, voting rights groups and major corporations. Companies like American Airlines, Dell Technologies and Microsoft spoke out against the Texas legislation soon after the bill was introduced, but the pressure has been largely ineffective so far.The final 67-page bill, known as S.B. 7, proved to be an amalgamation of two omnibus voting bills that had worked their way through the state’s Legislature. It included many of the provisions originally introduced by Republicans, but lawmakers dropped some of the most stringent ones, like a regulation on the allocation of voting machines that would have led to the closure of polling places in communities of color and a measure that would have permitted partisan poll watchers to record the voting process on video. Still, the bill includes a provision that could make overturning an election easier. Texas election law had stated that reversing the results of an election because of fraud accusations required proving that illicit votes had actually resulted in a wrongful victory. If the bill passes, the number of fraudulent votes required to do so would simply need to be equal to the winning vote differential; it would not matter for whom the fraudulent votes had been cast. Democrats and voting rights groups were quick to condemn the bill.“S.B. 7 is a ruthless piece of legislation,” said Sarah Labowitz, the policy and advocacy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “It targets voters of color and voters with disabilities, in a state that’s already the most difficult place to vote in the country.”But Republicans celebrated the proposed law and bristled at the criticism from Mr. Biden and others. “As the White House and national Democrats work together to minimize election integrity, the Texas Legislature continues to fight for accessible and secure elections,” State Senator Bryan Hughes, one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement. “In Texas, we do not bend to headlines, corporate virtue signaling, or suppression of election integrity, even if it comes from the president of the United States.”The bill took its final form after a contentious, monthslong debate; back-room negotiations; procedural errors by legislators; and extended, passionate debate by Democrats, who have tried to stall the bill’s passage through political and legislative maneuvers.Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who has said that an election overhaul is a priority, is widely expected to sign the bill.Eric Gay/Associated PressVoting rights groups have long pointed to Texas as one of the hardest states in the country for voters to cast ballots. One recent study by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas last in an index measuring the difficulty of voting. The report cited a host of factors, including Texas’ in-person voter registration deadline 30 days before Election Day, a drastic reduction of polling stations in some parts of the state, strict voter identification laws, a limited and onerous absentee voting process, and a lack of early voting options.In the preamble to the new bill, the authors appear to pre-emptively defend the legislation from criticism, stating that “reforms to the election laws of this state made by this Act are not intended to impair the right of free suffrage guaranteed to the people of Texas by the United States and Texas Constitutions, but are enacted solely to prevent fraud in the electoral process and ensure that all legally cast ballots are counted.”In March, Keith Ingram, the director of elections in the Texas secretary of state’s office, testified that last year’s election in the state had been “smooth and secure.” He added, “Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county elections officials.”A day before the Texas bill emerged, a new report pointed to the vast sweep of Republicans’ nationwide effort to restrict voting.As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute..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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new 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ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In last year’s election, while Republicans won Texas easily — Mr. Trump carried the state by more than 630,000 votes and the party maintained control of both chambers of the Legislature — turnout soared in cities and densely populated suburbs, which are growing increasingly Democratic. In Harris County, one of the biggest counties in the country, turnout jumped by nearly 10 percent.Republicans’ initial version of the bill put those densely populated counties squarely in the cross hairs, seeking to ban measures put in place during the 2020 election that helped turnout hit record numbers. The initial bill banned drive-through voting, a new method used by 127,000 voters in Harris County, as well as 24-hour voting, which was held for a single day in the county and was used by roughly 10,000 voters.While those provisions were left out of an earlier version of the bill as it made its way through the Legislature, they were reinstated in the final version of the bill, though the bill does allow for early voting to begin as early as 6 a.m. and continue until as late as 9 p.m. on weekdays. It also maintains at least two weekend days of early voting. More than any other state, Texas has also gone to great lengths to grant more autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers. The observers have been a cornerstone of American voting for years, viewed as a watchdog for election officials, but their role has grown increasingly contentious, especially in Texas. Republican poll watchers have been egged on in particular by Mr. Trump, who implored them to go to major cities across the country and hunt for nonexistent voter fraud.Across Texas during the 2020 election, there was an increase in anecdotal complaints of aggressive poll watchers, often on the Republican side, harassing both voters of color and election officials.The new bill would make it a crime to refuse to admit the observers to voting sites or to block their ability to fully watch the process. It says poll watchers must be able to “sit or stand [conveniently] near enough to see and hear the election officers.”It would also make it easier for partisan poll watchers to successfully pursue legal action if they argue that they were wrongfully refused or obstructed.In addition, the bill would limit who can vote absentee by mail in Texas, which does not have universal, no-excuse absentee voting. The bill states that those with a disability may vote absentee, but a voter with “an illness, injury or disability that does not prevent the voter from appearing at the polling place on election day” may not do so.Amid the new restrictions are multiple provisions that provide greater transparency into election administration. Counties must now provide video surveillance of ballot-counting facilities, and they must eventually make those videos available to the public. Discussions with voting equipment vendors must also be available to the public.During the debate before Sunday’s vote in the State Senate, Senator Royce West, a Democrat from Dallas, raised concerns that a provision barring voting before 1 p.m. on Sundays would limit “souls to the polls” organizing efforts that are popular with Black churches. Mr. Hughes said that clause was intended to allow poll workers to go to church.Mr. West noted that a separate bill passed by the Legislature will allow the sale of beer and wine starting at 10 a.m., two hours earlier than current law permits.“We’re going to be able to buy beer at 10 o’clock in the morning, but we can’t vote until one o’clock,” Mr. West said.Austin Ramzy and Anna Schaverien contributed reporting. More

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      The D.N.C. Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why.

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      A devastating email breach of the D.N.C. roiled Democrats in the final months of 2016. An unassuming security official made it his mission to prevent a recurrence.As the country learns more about a broad Russian hijacking of American federal agencies and private companies and now another Russian hack, which was revealed on Thursday, it can look to the Democratic National Committee for a more positive development in the effort to prevent cyberattacks: Unlike four years ago, the committee did not get hacked in 2020.It’s worth remembering the D.N.C.’s outsized role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, when a spearphishing email roiled the Democratic Party in the final months of the campaign.That March, Russian hackers broke into the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, unlocking a decade’s worth of emails, before dribbling them out to the public with glee. The D.N.C. chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, resigned after emails appeared to show her favoring Mrs. Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.A simultaneous Russian hack of the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tainted congressional candidates with accusations of scandal in a dozen other races.By the time Donald J. Trump was in the White House in January 2017, “The D.N.C.’s house was ablaze,” Sam Cornale, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview this week.That month, Bob Lord, an unassuming, bespectacled chief security officer at Yahoo, was still mopping up the largest Russian hacks in history: a 2013 breach of more than three billion Yahoo accounts and a second breach in 2014 of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Mr. Lord, who discovered the breaches when he took over the job, helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation identify the assailants. A courtroom sketch of Karim Baratov, one of the hackers in the Yahoo case, still hangs on his wall.Mr. Lord left the team Yahoo affectionately calls “The Paranoids,” took a six-figure pay cut and headed to Washington in January 2017 to become the D.N.C.’s first chief information security officer.The way he saw it, the D.N.C.’s 2016 breach wasn’t so much a cybersecurity issue as it was a problem of workflow and corporate culture.Mr. Podesta’s aide, for instance, had asked a staff member to vet whether the infamous Russian spearphishing email was safe, and the aide responded that the email was “legitimate.” It was a typo; he later said he had meant to write “illegitimate.” By the time anyone realized what was happening, Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipes, and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, were being dissected online by the news media and conspiracy theorists.“After that, few would even pick up a flier, let alone a hose to help in 2017,” Mr. Cornale said. “Bob showed up with five fire trucks while putting on his suspenders, and ran in to the house.”.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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{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-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Lord told his staff on Friday that he was leaving, clearing the way for the D.N.C. to get a replacement to get ahead of whatever adversaries may have planned for the midterms.Over the past four years, Mr. Lord has been a persistent and pervasive presence, speaking at every all-hands meeting, reminding employees that staving off the next cyber threat would come down to individual accountability: not reusing passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, running software updates. He urged them to use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to lock down their Venmo accounts; he also advised them to avoid clicking on suspicious links.A “Bobmoji”— a digital caricature of Mr. Lord — hangs above the men’s urinal and adorns the walls of the women’s restroom, reminding staff members of the checklist.Mr. Lord has had significantly smaller security budgets than he did at Yahoo, or that of any government agency and technology companies that Russia breached over the past year. And so he became something of a digital Marie Kondo — the Japanese tidying expert — decluttering the D.N.C.’s networks, excising old software and canceling extraneous vendor contracts, then took those extra discretionary funds and put them towards cybersecurity. But he knew cybersecurity technologies can go only so far. “If adding security technologies could fix our cybersecurity problems, we would have fixed things 25 years ago,” he said in an interview.His real legacy, D.N.C. staff members said, is that he single-handedly changed a culture.“To survive in Bob’s role, you have to drive people a little crazy,” Nellwyn Thomas, chief technology officer at the D.N.C., said.When the committee sent out an innocuous email asking staff members to enter their T-shirt size and address for some free swag, not a single employee complied, employees said.Mr. Lord had proudly turned them paranoid. More