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      Manhattan D.A. Intensifies Investigation of Trump

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The President’s TaxesOur InvestigationA 2016 WindfallProfiting From FameTimeline18 Key FindingsEditor’s NoteAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyManhattan D.A. Intensifies Investigation of TrumpProsecutors have recently interviewed employees of President Trump’s lender and insurance brokerage, in the latest indication that he still faces the potential threat of criminal charges once he leaves office.When President Trump returns to private life in January, he will lose the protection from criminal prosecution that his office has afforded him. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesWilliam K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Dec. 11, 2020Updated 7:42 a.m. ETState prosecutors in Manhattan have interviewed several employees of President Trump’s bank and insurance broker in recent weeks, according to people with knowledge of the matter, significantly escalating an investigation into the president that he is powerless to stop.The interviews with people who work for the lender, Deutsche Bank, and the insurance brokerage, Aon, are the latest indication that once Mr. Trump leaves office, he still faces the potential threat of criminal charges that would be beyond the reach of federal pardons.It remains unclear whether the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., will ultimately bring charges. The prosecutors have been fighting in court for more than a year to obtain Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, which they have called central to their investigation. The issue now rests with the Supreme Court.But lately, Mr. Vance’s office has stepped up its efforts, issuing new subpoenas and questioning witnesses, including some before a grand jury, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.The grand jury appears to be serving an investigative function, allowing prosecutors to authenticate documents and pursue other leads, rather than considering any charges.When Mr. Trump returns to private life in January, he will lose the protection from criminal prosecution that his office has afforded him. While The New York Times has reported that he discussed granting pre-emptive pardons to his eldest children before leaving office — and has claimed that he has the power to pardon himself — that authority applies only to federal crimes, and not to state or local investigations like the one being conducted by Mr. Vance’s office.The investigation led by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has spanned more than two years, and its focus has shifted over time. Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Trump, who has maintained he did nothing improper, has railed against the inquiry, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”The investigation by Mr. Vance, a Democrat, has focused on Mr. Trump’s conduct as a private business owner and whether he or employees at his family business, the Trump Organization, committed financial crimes. It is the only known criminal inquiry into the president.Employees of Deutsche Bank and Aon, two corporate giants, could be important witnesses. As two of Mr. Trump’s oldest allies — and some of the only mainstream companies willing to do regular business with him — they might offer investigators a rich vein of information about the Trump Organization.There is no indication that either company is suspected of wrongdoing.Because grand jury rules require secrecy, prosecutors have disclosed little about the focus of the inquiry and nothing about what investigative steps they have taken. But earlier this year, they suggested in court papers that they were examining possible insurance, tax and bank-related fraud in the president’s corporate dealings.In recent weeks, Mr. Vance’s prosecutors questioned two Deutsche Bank employees about the bank’s procedures for making lending decisions, according to a person familiar with the interviews. The employees were experts in the bank’s underwriting process, not bankers who worked with the Trump Organization, the person said.While the focus of those interviews was not on the relationship with Mr. Trump, bank officials expect Mr. Vance’s office to summon them for additional rounds of more specific questions in the near future, the person said.Glimpses into the investigation have come in court records during the bitter and protracted legal battle over a subpoena for eight years of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns and other financial records.A month after Mr. Vance’s office demanded the documents from the president’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August 2019, Mr. Trump sued to block compliance with the subpoena. The case has twisted its way through the federal courts, with the president losing at every turn, and is now in front of the Supreme Court for the second time.Danny Frost, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, declined to comment on recent moves in the investigation. Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, declined to comment, but recently said that the company’s practices complied with the law and called the investigation a “fishing expedition.”Aon confirmed that the company had received a subpoena for documents from the district attorney’s office but declined to comment on the interviews with prosecutors. “As is our policy, we intend to cooperate with all regulatory bodies, including providing copies of all documents requested by those bodies,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement.Deutsche Bank, Mr. Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, received a subpoena last year from the district attorney and has said it is cooperating with the inquiry.In court papers, the prosecutors have cited public reports of Mr. Trump’s business dealings as legal justification for their inquiry, including a Washington Post article that concluded the president may have inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to lenders and insurers.Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer who turned on him after pleading guilty to federal charges, also told Congress in February 2019 that Mr. Trump and his employees manipulated his net worth to suit his interests.Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Feb. 27, 2019.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” he said in testimony before the House Oversight Committee.Mr. Trump’s supporters have noted that Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress and accused him of lying again to earn a reduced prison sentence.The Trump Organization’s lawyers are also likely to argue to prosecutors that Mr. Trump could not have duped Deutsche Bank because the bank did its own analysis of Mr. Trump’s net worth.Over the years, employees and executives inside the bank thought that Mr. Trump was overvaluing some of his assets by as much as 70 percent, according to current and former bank officials. Deutsche Bank still decided to lend Mr. Trump’s company hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, concluding that he was a safe lending risk in part because he had more than enough money and other assets to personally guarantee the debt.The prosecutors’ interviews with the employees was not the only recent activity in the investigation. Last month, The Times reported that Mr. Vance’s office had subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump.According to people with knowledge of the matter, the subpoena sought information about fees paid to TTT Consulting L.L.C., an apparent reference to Ms. Trump and other members of her family. Ms. Trump was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she appears to have been paid as a consultant while also working for the Trump Organization.Mr. Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, argued in a statement at the time that the subpoena was part of an “ongoing attempt to harass the company.” He added that “everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law and under the advice of counsel and tax experts.”Mr. Vance’s investigation has spanned more than two years and shifted focus over time. When the investigation began, it examined the Trump Organization’s role in hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Mr. Trump. Prosecutors were examining how the company recorded a reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for one of the payments. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance violations for his role in the scheme.A state grand jury convened by Mr. Vance’s office heard testimony from at least one witness about that issue last year, according to a person with knowledge of that testimony, but the payments have receded as a central focus of the inquiry.Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Biden Clashes With the Left

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsBiden Clashes With the LeftDec. 11, 2020, 7:01 a.m. ETDemocrats are trying to work out their differences as Biden prepares to take office. But across party lines, a lot feels unbridgeable. It’s Friday, and this is your politics tip sheet.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.Where things standThe seams in the Democratic Party have been showing this week, with progressives and moderates fixing their attention on President-elect Joe Biden’s major staff choices. All the while, eyes are locked on Georgia, where the Senate majority — and with it the Democrats’ legislative agenda, no matter how centrist or progressive — hangs in the balance.Biden this week argued that the rallying cry to “defund the police” was a political third rail, saying in a private call with leaders of civil rights groups that it could hurt the Democratic candidates in Georgia’s two Senate runoffs next month.“That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police,” Biden said on Tuesday, referring to down-ballot races last month, according to audio obtained by The Intercept. “We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable.”Over the summer, Biden resisted the calls of demonstrators and progressive organizers to defund police departments and shift funding to social services, though his website promises to “reform our criminal justice system.”A separate, intraparty battle is brewing on another issue: student loan debt. Biden has endorsed canceling up to $10,000 per person in federal student debt, but Democrats in Congress are pushing him to multiply that number by five. Both sides of the debate acknowledge that tackling the $1.7 trillion in student debt nationwide, which is spread among more than 43 million borrowers, would go far toward jump-starting the economy.“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”But economists also argue that above a certain point, most student loan debt is held by relatively affluent borrowers, given who tends to attend costly colleges and universities without being covered by financial aid. The fundamental problem, they say, is the high cost of tuition — something that debt forgiveness may not do much to combat.Progressives are expressing concern over Biden’s pick to head the Agriculture Department, Tom Vilsack, since news emerged this week that Biden plans to bring him back to run the agency he’d led throughout President Barack Obama’s two terms.His appointment was met with some disappointment from progressives, Black farmers and some farm groups that had pushed for an appointee who would bring a fresher perspective and shift the department’s focus more firmly toward confronting poverty and food scarcity.Vilsack drew some criticism during the Obama years for hiring people with ties to Monsanto, and for his relative leniency on labeling genetically engineered food. Since 2017, Vilsack has led the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which pushes the dairy industry’s interests abroad.Many progressives had aligned themselves with Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat of Ohio, who represents an urban district and has made food access and equity a major theme of her work. Biden instead named Fudge as his pick for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.Biden also announced yesterday that Denis McDonough, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, will be his nominee for the secretary of Veterans Affairs. Susan Rice, who was national security adviser when Mr. Biden was vice president, will become the director of his Domestic Policy Council, overseeing a large part of the new president’s agenda.The latest picks underscore a theme running through Biden’s appointments thus far: He tends to be choosing people he has worked with, most often in the Obama administration.The implications are varied. He has managed to assemble a diverse team, full of “firsts” and at least somewhat representative of the country’s demographic makeup. He has also signaled that in his quest to “Build Back Better,” he intends to hand the keys back to many of the officials whose work helped to define what came before.And he is also drawing upon a number of figures who, after leaving the White House, made their way in private industry, often serving in lucrative positions for companies with direct contracts with the federal government.An independent advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine yesterday, by a vote of 17 to 4.Some committee members expressed some reservations about possible allergic reactions reported in Britain, which authorized the vaccine last week but recommended this week that people with a history of severe allergic reactions should not take it.In the Senate, hopes of a bipartisan stimulus compromise faded a bit on Thursday, as reports emerged that aides to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, had told colleagues that they didn’t expect Republicans to get behind a bill.Republicans have been particularly resistant to Democrats’ demands for aid to struggling state, local and tribal governments. In exchange, Republicans have sought liability protections for businesses that have reopened during the pandemic — anathema to Democrats.Only a few days remain before the 116th Congress ends and both chambers are scheduled to adjourn for the holidays. The prospects for a one-week stopgap government funding bill intended to avert a shutdown were unclear in the Senate late yesterday.Photo of the dayCredit…Samuel Corum for The New York TimesMembers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance drove past the Capitol yesterday during a protest for more pandemic relief aid.Seven in 10 Republican voters think Biden’s win is illegitimate, poll findsBiden has made a message of national unity central to his presidential transition, but he faces a challenge in bringing together a country that simply can’t agree on basic facts anymore.The depth of the divide can be seen in a smattering of recent polls, which have found a fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the very legitimacy of Biden’s win.In a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday, 70 percent of Republican registered voters said Biden’s win was not legitimate, while just 23 percent said it was. Among white male registered voters, only 47 percent said Biden had won fair and square.Comparatively, 98 percent of Democrats said Biden had won legitimately.Asked about whether there had been significant voter fraud — as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed, but failed to find — 77 percent of Republicans said yes. Ninety-seven percent of Democrats said no.The results of this poll dovetail with those of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-November, after most major news outlets had called the election but before President Trump’s legal team had suffered some of its most humiliating losses in court.While 94 percent of Biden voters said they were at least somewhat confident the election had been “run and administered well,” just 21 percent of Trump voters said the same. And whereas 82 percent of Biden voters were very confident that their own vote had been accurately counted, that number plummeted to 35 percent among Trump voters.The Pew poll, published on Nov. 20, found that most Trump voters were uninterested in letting bygones be bygones: Eighty-five percent said the president should continue his “legal challenges to the voting process in several states.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Two Reasons the Texas Election Case Is Faulty

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationTwo reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy.Dec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ETDec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ETJeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Texas filed its election challenge directly to the Supreme Court, an unusual move.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesKen Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election.The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said.And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.”Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor.Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it.The suit’s legal argument is deeply flawed, legal experts said.Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans.The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies.“They all do what they do,” Mr. Foley said. “For Texas to try to complain about what Georgia, Pennsylvania and these other states have done would be a lot like Massachusetts complaining about how Texas elects its senators.”Typically state attorneys general are protective of their rights and wary of Supreme Court intervention, which Mr. Foley said makes this case unusual. “This is just the opposite,” he said. “It would be an unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.”The four states named in the suit denounced it on Thursday and urged the court to reject it. The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, accused Mr. Paxton and other Trump allies of running “a disinformation campaign baselessly attacking the integrity of our election system.”The remedy the lawsuit seeks — the disenfranchisement of millions of voters — would be without precedent in the nation’s history.Even if the suit were proper, it was almost surely filed too late, as the procedures Texas objects to were in place before the election.A Supreme Court brief opposing Texas’ requests by prominent Republicans, including former Senator John Danforth of Missouri and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, said Texas’ filings “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers.”“It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this court,” the brief said, “to serve as the trial court for presidential election disputes.”Mr. Trump and his supporters have often pointed to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 election, as a hopeful historical precedent for their side. But unlike Bush v. Gore, there is not an obvious constitutional question at issue.“It looks like an inherently political suit,” Mr. Foley said.The suit uses statistical arguments that statisticians called ‘comical.’Mr. Paxton’s filing repeatedly cites an analysis by an economist in California that statisticians have said is nonsensical. Mr. Biden’s chances of winning the four battleground states in question, the analysis says, were “less than one in a quadrillion.”The economist, Charles J. Cicchetti, who donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, arrived at the minuscule probability by purporting to use the results of the 2016 election as a backstop. His flawed reasoning was this: If Mr. Biden had received the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, he wrote, a victory would have been all but impossible.But Mr. Biden, of course, did not receive the same number of votes as Mrs. Clinton; he received over 15 million more. Nor would any candidate be expected to receive the same number of votes as a previous candidate.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 10, 2020, 4:09 p.m. ETWalmart is preparing to administer a coronavirus vaccine once it is available.Mastercard and Visa stop allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub.The U.S. budget deficit hit $207 billion in November.That one-in-a-quadrillion figure has echoed across social media and was promoted by the White House press secretary. But an array of experts have said that the figure and Mr. Cicchetti’s analysis are easily refutable.Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who runs its election data archive, called this analysis “comical.”The analysis omitted a number of obvious, relevant facts, he said: “the context of the elections are different, that a Covid pandemic is going on, that people reach different conclusions about the administration, that Biden and Clinton are different candidates.”By the same logic and formula, if Mr. Trump had received an equal number of votes in 2020 as he did in 2016, there is also a one in a quadrillion chance that Mr. Trump in 2020 would outperform his totals in 2016, said Stephen C. Preston, a professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College. “But that doesn’t prove Trump cheated, it just shows that the numbers are different,” he said. “It’s like finding a low probability that 2 equals 3.”Mr. Cicchetti also wrote that votes counted earlier in the process and votes counted later favored different candidates, and that there was “a one in many more quadrillions chance” that votes counted in the two time periods were coming from the same groups of voters.But that is exactly what was expected to happen: Democrats tended to prefer voting by mail, and those ballots were counted later in the four battleground states, while Republicans tended to prefer voting in person on Election Day, and those ballots were counted earlier.“The order and tempo of vote counting was unlike previous elections,” said Amel Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.What Mr. Cicchetti wrote was not especially revelatory, experts agreed.“The model is silly,” said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is not science or statistics. It’s not even a good cartoon of elections.”Texas’ attorney general is caught up in scandal.Though the legal reasoning of Mr. Paxton’s case may be novel, the impulse behind it is not. It was just the latest example of a Trump loyalist using the power of public office to come to the aid of a president whose base of support remains deeply attached to him and overwhelmingly says the election was unfair, according to polls.Mr. Paxton, 57, has been under a cloud of scandal since October, when seven of his senior staff attorneys accused their boss of bribery, misuse of his office and other wrongdoing. Their allegations, which Mr. Paxton has denied, involve a wealthy developer and political donor, Nate Paul, whose home and offices were raided by federal agents in August.The aides accused Mr. Paxton of “potential criminal offenses,” including assisting in Mr. Paul’s defense and intervening in the developer’s efforts to get a favorable judgment in a legal battle between his properties and a nonprofit.First elected in 2014, Mr. Paxton has served much of his term under a still-unresolved securities fraud indictment stemming from events that took place before he took office. The indictment accuses Mr. Paxton of selling technology shares to investors in 2011 without disclosing that he received 100,000 shares of stock as compensation, and of failing to register with securities regulators.Mr. Paxton has nevertheless maintained a high national profile — and the affection of conservatives — with his relentless efforts to dismantle policies of the Obama era and shoulder the Trump administration’s causes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Four State A.G.s Ask Supreme Court to Reject Texas Election Lawsuit

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      Student Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the Left

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStudent Loan Cancellation Sets Up Clash Between Biden and the LeftDemocratic leaders are pressing the president-elect to cancel $50,000 in debt per student borrower by fast executive action, but he wants Congress to pass more modest relief.Marquette University in Milwaukee last month. Student debt has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages.Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesErica L. Green, Luke Broadwater and Dec. 10, 2020Updated 7:09 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale, quickly and by executive action, a campaign that will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the liberal wing of his party.Mr. Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation, and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan. But Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.More than 200 organizations — including the American Federation of Teachers, the N.A.A.C.P. and others that were integral to his campaign — have joined the push.The Education Department is effectively the country’s largest consumer bank and the primary lender, since 2010, for higher education. It owns student loans totaling $1.4 trillion, so forgiveness of some of that debt would be a rapid injection of cash into the pockets of many people suffering from the economic effects of the pandemic.“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger. The working poor largely are not college graduates — more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all, according to a report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.While many Black students would benefit greatly from even modest loan forgiveness, debt relief overall would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates of all colors and ethnicities, especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.An October analysis by the Brookings Institution found that almost 60 percent of America’s educational debt is owed by households in the nation’s top 40 percent of earners, with an annual income of $74,000 or more.People who go to college “are often from more advantaged backgrounds, and they end up doing very well in the labor market,” said Adam Looney, a former Treasury official who helped write the analysis.Without a parallel effort to curb tuition growth, one-time debt relief could actually lead to more higher-education debt in the future as students take on larger loans, hoping the government would at some point wipe them clean, a “moral hazard” that often accompanies one-time interventions. And it would be expensive: Canceling even $10,000 per person in debt would eliminate more than $400 billion in government assets, although calculating the true cost to the Treasury is tricky because of student loans’ long repayment time and high default rate.Mr. Looney said that canceling $50,000, at a projected cost of $1 trillion, would be “among the largest transfer programs in American history,” on par with decades of targeted spending on programs that exclusively benefit low-income families, such as the $992 billion spent on federal Pell grants since 1972 and the $1.4 trillion spent on welfare since 1975.If debt relief overall would disproportionately flow to better-off Americans, even modest debt forgiveness would help many financially vulnerable people, especially people of color. Student debt load has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed both credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages, and much of it falls on Black graduates, who owe an average of $7,400 more than their white peers at the time they leave school. Black borrowers also default at higher rates.College dropouts, especially those who attended for-profit schools, often end up trapped by debt they cannot afford to repay.“In this moment of national reckoning on racial injustice, the president-elect must cancel all federal student debt on Day 1 of his administration,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “The president-elect must meet the moment. If he fails to, we will hold him accountable.”An economic working paper published by the Roosevelt Institute casts debt forgiveness explicitly in racial-justice terms. The total percentage of Black households that would benefit would be greater than white households, and the relative gains for those households’ net worth are far larger, the researchers found. The greatest marginal gains come from canceling the smallest debts; wiping out $20,000 would end student debt for half of all households with loans.Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a joint op-ed last week that $50,000 debt cancellations would give “Black and brown families across the country a far better shot at building financial security” and would be the “single most effective executive action available to provide massive stimulus to our economy.”To truly break the debt cycle, though, forgiveness would need to be paired with policy changes addressing the underlying cause of America’s skyrocketing student debt: affordability, an issue Democrats have tried to address.“The real problem is the cost of higher education,” said Betsy Mayotte, the president and founder of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors. “Unless you’re going to solve the problem, forgiveness is just throwing away money.”Mr. Biden’s campaign platform proposed making public universities tuition-free for families making less than $125,000 a year.“The virus epidemic has accelerated some of the trends that are strangling public higher education,” said Louise Seamster of the University of Iowa and a co-author of the Roosevelt Institute paper. She said a momentous move like debt forgiveness could spur “new ways of thinking.”“A lot of the debate has gotten stale because we’ve been limited in thinking about the fixes,” she said.Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have pushed for up to $50,000 in debt cancellation.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBut student debt forgiveness could have serious political implications. In 2009, relief extended by President Barack Obama to homeowners with houses suddenly worth less than their mortgages was the original spark for the Tea Party movement, driven by people who fastidiously paid their home loans and felt left out. The dynamic would almost certainly repeat itself as earlier and later borrowers wondered why they had to pay off their loans.“I don’t believe any president has the authority to give away hundreds of billions of dollars through the stroke of a pen,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. “And I think doing so is profoundly unfair to the millions of Americans who worked hard to pay down their student debt.”The legal argument for debt cancellation by executive action hinges on a passage in the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives the education secretary the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loan debts. Mr. Schumer and Ms. Warren maintain that Mr. Biden can broadly use that power, and several lawyers have written analyses backing that view.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 10, 2020, 8:48 p.m. ETThe federal investigation into his son is likely to hang over Biden as he takes office.The Trump administration may sharply draw back military support for the C.I.A. in its final weeks.State Department watchdog announces early departure as Pompeo criticizes his office.But former government lawyers have warned that across-the-board forgiveness would face legal challenges from Republicans. And Mr. Biden has never publicly endorsed the idea. Some close to him say he recognizes the risks and consequences of bypassing Congress.There is more consensus that the $10,000 proposal would reach the most vulnerable borrowers, the estimated 15 million who have low debt under $10,000, often because they did not complete their degrees.Some experts argue that Mr. Biden has other, more progressive options for taming student debt, such as improving existing repayment plans that link borrowers’ loan payments to their incomes.The government has struggled to get all borrowers who would benefit from income-linked plans enrolled in them, in part because the loan servicers it hired to work with borrowers and collect their payments have not guided people through the complicated process of getting and staying enrolled.A separate program to forgive the debts of those who work in public-service careers has an even grimmer track record, and a longstanding program to forgive the debts of graduates bilked by their universities — usually for-profit colleges — has been crippled by the Trump administration.The “benefit of outright cancellation is simplicity,” said Eileen Connor, the legal director at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, which represents thousands of students defrauded by their colleges and mired in legal fights with the Education Department over loan forgiveness.“We are facing an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, and we need to use every tool readily available to keep families and the economy afloat,” Ms. Connor said.Mr. Biden has continued to push for the passage of legislation that called for some loan forgiveness, named the Heroes Act, that the House passed in the spring.Student debt holders are “having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent, those kinds of decisions,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference last month.Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House whose endorsement was key to Mr. Biden winning the presidency, said the president-elect should first try legislation. If that fails, Mr. Clyburn argued, Mr. Biden should use an executive order.“I sit here in this Congress because of an executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation. Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the armed services,” Mr. Clyburn said.“Let them sue,” he added. “They’re not the only ones that can employ lawyers.”Mr. Clyburn, who speaks with Mr. Biden frequently, said in an interview that he did not think that what Mr. Biden proposed during the campaign “goes quite far enough.”Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina said President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. should use an executive order to provide student debt relief if legislation fails.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“I’ve got people with $130,000 in student debt. What’s $10,000 going to do for that person?” asked Mr. Clyburn, whose legislation to eliminate up to $50,000 would completely cancel student debt for 75 percent of borrowers.Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said he hoped the two parties could find common ground on the issue. He introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow employers to contribute up to $5,250 tax-free to their employees’ student loans, which was included as a temporary provision in the coronavirus relief law this spring.“There’s no question that student debt is a problem in this country, but simply forgiving student loans is not the answer,” Mr. Thune said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barr Plans to Finish Term Despite Wanting to Leave Early

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