Presidential Election of 2020

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      YouTube Restores Donald Trump’s Account Privileges

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      The Google-owned video platform became the latest of the big social networks to reverse the former president’s account restrictions.YouTube suspended former President Donald J. Trump’s account on the platform six days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The video platform said it was concerned that Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election could lead to more real-world violence.YouTube, which is owned by Google, reversed that decision on Friday, permitting Mr. Trump to once again upload videos to the popular site. The move came after similar decisions by Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.“We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, while balancing the chance for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election,” YouTube said on Twitter on Friday. Mr. Trump’s account will have to comply with the site’s content rules like any other account, YouTube added.After false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen circulated online and helped stoke the Jan. 6 attack, social media giants suspended Mr. Trump’s account privileges. Two years later, the platforms have started to soften their content rules. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter has unwound many of its content moderation efforts. YouTube recently laid off members of its trust and safety team, leaving one person in charge of setting political misinformation policies.Mr. Trump announced in November that he was seeking a second term as president, setting off deliberations at social media companies over whether to allow him back on their platforms. Days later, Mr. Musk polled Twitter users on whether he should reinstate Mr. Trump, and 52 percent of respondents said yes. Like YouTube, Meta said in January that it was important that people hear what political candidates are saying ahead of an election.The former president’s reinstatement is one of the first significant content decisions that YouTube has taken under its new chief executive, Neal Mohan, who got the top job last month. YouTube also recently loosened its profanity rules so that creators who used swear words at the start of a video could still make money from the content.YouTube’s announcement on Friday echoes a pattern of the company and its parent Google making polarizing content decisions after a competitor has already taken the same action. YouTube followed Meta and Twitter in suspending Mr. Trump after the Capitol attack, and in reversing the bans.Since losing his bid for re-election in 2020, Mr. Trump has sought to make a success of his own social media service, Truth Social, which is known for its loose content moderation rules.Mr. Trump on Friday posted on his Facebook page for the first time since his reinstatement. “I’M BACK!” Mr. Trump wrote, alongside a video in which he said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated.”Despite his Twitter reinstatement, Mr. Trump has not returned to posting from that account.In his last tweet, dated Jan. 8, 2021, he said he would not attend the coming inauguration, held at the Capitol. More

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      Princeton Student Charged With Attacking Officers During Jan. 6 Riot

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      Larry Giberson was part of a mob that fought with the police and he cheered on others who used weapons and pepper spray against officers, prosecutors said.A Princeton University student was charged on Tuesday with being part of a violent mob that assaulted law enforcement officers during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, federal prosecutors said.The student, Larry F. Giberson Jr., was among a group of rioters who pushed against a phalanx of officers defending the Capitol at a tunnel entrance, according to an affidavit filed by a federal agent. With Mr. Giberson at the front of the crowd as the confrontation unfolded, one officer was briefly crushed between the rioters and the tunnel doors, the affidavit says.Mr. Giberson, 21, waved other rioters into the tunnel and joined a second round of shoving against the officers, the affidavit says. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to start a chant of “Drag them out!” and cheered on others as they used weapons and pepper spray to attack the police guarding the tunnel, the affidavit says.Mr. Giberson was charged in a criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., with civil disorder, a felony, and several misdemeanors, including engaging in physical violence in a restricted building. He was arrested in Washington and released with conditions after an initial appearance before a federal magistrate judge.A Princeton University spokesman confirmed that Mr. Giberson, of Manahawkin, N.J., was enrolled as a member of this year’s graduating class.A university website lists Mr. Giberson as a James Madison Program undergraduate fellow for the 2022-23 academic year. The program, the website says, provides “a unique opportunity” for students to “pursue, outside of the classroom, academic interests related to politics, history, law and political thought.” Mr. Giberson could not be reached for comment. A lawyer representing him did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Giberson is among about 1,000 people to be charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, and one of more than 320 to be accused of assaulting or impeding law enforcement officers as supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol in a bid to disrupt the certification of President Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.Mr. Giberson can be seen in publicly available video footage wearing a blue “Make America Great Again” cap on his head and a Trump flag around his neck and climbing toward the tunnel entrance on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace shortly after 3 p.m. the day of the riot, the affidavit says.Once inside the tunnel, prosecutors said, Mr. Giberson and others tried to force their way in with a coordinated “heave-ho” pushing effort that left one officer crushed between a door and a rioter’s shield.Officers eventually gained temporary control of the tunnel and pushed out rioters, including Mr. Giberson, prosecutors said. As the mob continued its attack, Mr. Giberson stood by and watched as one officer was dragged into the crowd, assaulted and injured, they said.Federal investigators matched a photo of Mr. Giberson from the day of the riot with images posted on Instagram and the Princeton website, as well as with photos from his high school, the affidavit says.He was subsequently interviewed at the Princeton Police Department, where he acknowledged being the person seen in videos and photos from the scene of the riot, the affidavit says.The Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper, reported on Tuesday that Mr. Giberson publicly opposed the university’s decision in June 2020 to remove President Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school and one of its residential colleges because of what Princeton leaders said were Mr. Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies.”“If our university can be intimidated by the transient impulses of the mob mentality to disregard their own esteemed standards,” Mr. Giberson wrote in an essay in The Princeton Tory, “what guarantee is there that the university will stand firm against those who would seek to undermine the nation, or indeed, humanity itself?”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      The Trump Aide Who Helps the Former President Navigate Legal Peril

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      Boris Epshteyn is the latest aide to take on the role of slashing defender of the former president, even as the Justice Department seeks information about him in the Jan. 6 and documents inquiries.Boris Epshteyn has had his phone seized by federal agents investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after his election loss. Lacking any track record as a political strategist, he has made more than $1.1 million in the past two years for providing advice to the campaigns of Republican candidates, many of whom believed he could be a conduit to Mr. Trump.A cryptocurrency with which he is involved has drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors. And he has twice been arrested over personal altercations, leading in one case to an agreement to attend anger management classes and in another to a guilty plea for disorderly conduct.As the former president faces escalating legal peril in the midst of another run for the White House, Mr. Epshteyn, people who deal with him say, mirrors in many ways Mr. Trump’s defining traits: combative, obsessed with loyalty, transactional, entangled in investigations and eager to make money from his position.Mr. Epshteyn is the latest aide to try to live up to Mr. Trump’s desire for a slashing defender in the mold of his first lawyer protector, Roy M. Cohn. He serves as a top adviser and self-described in-house counsel for Mr. Trump, at a time when the former president has a growing cast of outside lawyers representing him in a slew of investigations and court cases.A Trump spokesman, Steven Cheung, called Mr. Epshteyn “a deeply valued member of the team” and said he has “done a terrific job shepherding the legal efforts fighting” the Justice Department and congressional investigations.Mr. Epshteyn declined to comment for this article.Mr. Epshteyn speaks with Mr. Trump several times a day and makes it known that he does so, according to interviews with Trump associates and other Republicans. He has recommended, helped hire and negotiated pay for several lawyers working for Mr. Trump on civil litigation and the federal and local criminal investigations swirling around him.As Mr. Epshteyn has worked to establish his place as a key legal adviser to Mr. Trump, he has profited from his ties to the former president — and come under scrutiny himself.Desiree Rios/The New York Times“Boris is a pair of heavy hands — he’s not Louis Brandeis,” said Stephen K. Bannon, a close ally of Mr. Epshteyn and former adviser to Mr. Trump, referring to the renowned Supreme Court justice. But Mr. Trump, he said, “doesn’t need Louis Brandeis.”“You need to be a killer, and he’s a killer,” Mr. Bannon added.But Mr. Epshteyn’s attacking style grates on other people in Mr. Trump’s circle, and he has encouraged ideas and civil lawsuits that have frustrated some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, like suits against the journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize committee. His detractors see him as more of a political operative with a law license than as a provider of valuable legal advice.“As soon as anybody starts making anything happen for Trump overall, the knives come out,” Mr. Bannon said. He described Mr. Epshteyn as “a wartime consigliere.”Federal records show that Mr. Epshteyn was paid nearly $200,000 by Mr. Trump’s political action committee over seven months in 2022, and $30,000 by his 2024 campaign. The past payments were almost all listed in Federal Election Commission records as for “strategy consulting,” not legal work.After the search last summer of Mar-a-Lago by F.B.I. agents looking for classified documents still in Mr. Trump’s possession, Mr. Epshteyn retroactively changed his agreement with the political action committee. The agreement, which had been primarily for communications strategy, was updated to include legal work, and to say it covered legal work since the spring of last year, a campaign official said. His monthly retainer doubled to $30,000.But he dropped a separate effort to have Mr. Trump sign a letter retroactively designating him as a lawyer for Mr. Trump personally, dating to March of last year, soon after Mr. Trump’s post-presidency handling of classified documents became an issue. The letter specifically stated that their communications would be covered by attorney-client privilege, multiple people familiar with the request said.The Justice Department has recently sought to pierce assertions of attorney-client privilege by another of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, and compel him to answer more questions before a grand jury in the special counsel’s investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents.But even as Mr. Epshteyn has worked to establish his place as a key legal adviser to Mr. Trump, he has also profited from his ties to the former president and his supporters as a strategist and political adviser.Prosecutors have sought information related to Mr. Epshteyn in investigations into Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the transfer of power. They have also asked about Mr. Epshteyn’s role connecting two attorneys to respond to the Justice Department inquiry into classified material. Hailey Sadler for The New York TimesFederal records show the only candidates who paid Mr. Epshteyn for work before 2020 were the Republican senator John McCain, for his 2008 presidential race, and Mr. Trump. But in the 2022 midterm election cycle, he had contracts with at least 13 candidates, some of them interested in having Mr. Trump’s support, or in preventing attacks from him or other MAGA figures with whom Mr. Epshteyn has close connections.Bernard B. Kerik, a close Epshteyn ally who worked with him on a few races, said Mr. Epshteyn has an expansive list of contacts and offered advice on polling and social media. Some Republicans said he provided help with opinion essays and fund-raising targets. But some campaigns that paid his monthly retainers said they were skeptical of his value..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It’s a mystery; we’re still trying to figure it out,” said Carl Paladino, a Republican who failed in his primary race in a congressional district in Western New York last year, when asked what Mr. Epshteyn did for $20,000 on what was a three-month House primary campaign.“He was highly recommended as having good relations with some people that work for Trump,” said Mr. Paladino, who did not receive Mr. Trump’s endorsement. He added: “I was told that it would be in my interest if I sent money to this Boris. I did, and we heard nothing from the man. He was totally useless.”Some former aides to Mr. Paladino said that the candidate was livid over his loss and that Mr. Epshteyn had in fact provided advice and assistance to senior aides.An adviser to another candidate seeking a Trump endorsement, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the candidate’s team had hoped Mr. Epshteyn would praise the candidate to Mr. Trump or at least help avoid public criticism from him. Advisers to Mr. Trump have long said Mr. Epshteyn often tries to influence the former president’s views.Several people involved with campaigns that hired Mr. Epshteyn said he had made it clear that he could not promise an endorsement from Mr. Trump. But some said Mr. Epshteyn described himself as someone who understood Mr. Trump’s hard-core base. Some campaigns, one Republican operative said, saw him as an effective way to get information about what was happening within Mr. Trump’s orbit.Mr. Epshteyn was paid $95,000 over four months by Senator Katie Britt’s campaign in Alabama. Another $82,500 came from Eric Greitens’s losing Senate campaign in Missouri. Over three months, he was paid $60,000 by the losing Don Bolduc Senate campaign in New Hampshire.Representative Eli Crane’s campaign in Arizona paid him $125,000. The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Brock Pierce in Vermont paid him $100,000, but ultimately did not run for a Senate seat.Mr. Epshteyn’s legal role with Mr. Trump, while less often focused on gritty legal details, has been to try to serve as a gatekeeper between the lawyers on the front lines and the former president, who is said to sometimes roll his eyes at the frequency of Mr. Epshteyn’s calls but picks up the phone.“Boris has access to information and a network that is useful to us,” said one of the team’s lawyers, Timothy Parlatore, whom Mr. Epshteyn hired. “It’s good to have someone who’s a lawyer who is also inside the palace gates.”Mr. Parlatore suggested that he was not worried that Mr. Epshteyn, like a substantial number of other Trump lawyers, had become at least tangentially embroiled in some of the same investigations on which he was helping to defend Mr. Trump.“Absent any solid indication that Boris is a target here, I don’t think it affects us,” Mr. Parlatore said.“Going after the lawyers is a tactic D.O.J. uses to wear you down and remove your defenses,” he added, referring to the Justice Department. “And it’s dirty.”Prosecutors have sought information related to Mr. Epshteyn in investigations into Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the transfer of power. Of particular interest are his work with Rudolph W. Giuliani and his alleged involvement in securing so-called alternate electors in an attempt to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Epshteyn also testified before a fact-finding grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., looking into efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss in that state.Prosecutors investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material have looked at whether Mr. Epshteyn improperly sought a common-interest agreement among witnesses as a shield against the investigation, the people familiar with the matter said.Prosecutors have also asked about his role connecting two attorneys to respond to the Justice Department inquiry into classified material. The two lawyers then produced a statement in June saying that to the best of their knowledge all of the classified documents being kept at Mar-a-Lago had been returned to the government in compliance with a subpoena — which turned out to be untrue.More recently, a pro-Trump cryptocurrency that Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Bannon are involved with managing is facing an inquiry from federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to a person familiar with the matter. ABC News reported that the management of the cryptocurrency has been criticized, including for not fulfilling charitable pledges.Mr. Epshteyn, whose family emigrated from the Soviet Union when he was young and who grew up in New Jersey, attended Georgetown University with Mr. Trump’s son, Eric, and then Georgetown’s law school. He worked at the firm Milbank Tweed for nearly three years.He became a television surrogate on the 2016 Trump campaign, hired late in the race.“He desperately wanted to be part of the inner circle,” said Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who is now a key witness against Mr. Trump.Mr. Epshteyn, left, speaking at Trump Tower in 2016. He became a television surrogate on the 2016 Trump campaign and also joined Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Epshteyn worked on the presidential inaugural committee after Mr. Trump’s victory, and then briefly in the White House, leaving after an issue arose with his security clearance. (A person briefed on the matter said the issue has been resolved.)He was the chief political analyst for Sinclair Broadcast Group until December 2019. After losing his on-air role, Mr. Epshteyn remained a consultant with Sinclair. He was hired months later by the 2020 Trump campaign as a strategic adviser.He has faced other legal entanglements over the years.Mr. Epshteyn was arrested in Arizona in 2014 for an alleged assault in a bar; the charges were dropped when he agreed to anger management classes.In October 2021, he was arrested in Arizona again after a woman claimed he had inappropriately touched her and a friend, telling the police he appeared as a less attractive “version of Tony Soprano,” according to a copy of the police report. Mr. Epshteyn denied the claims to the police. Prosecutors dropped charges related to sexual misconduct; Mr. Epshteyn pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. He was ordered to attend an alcohol abuse prevention program and put on probation, which ended last year. The conviction was set aside last year.Several people who have worked closely with Mr. Epshteyn compared his impulse to please Mr. Trump to that of Mr. Cohen, a comparison disputed by supporters of Mr. Epshteyn but backed by Mr. Cohen.“He’s a great mimic,” Mr. Cohen said. “He watched me with hungry eyes in terms of how to maneuver around Trump.”Ben Protess More

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      Why Fox’s Call on Arizona, Which Was Right, Was Still Wrong

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      It was more a risky guess than a sound decision, and easily could have led to a missed call.The Fox News election-night call that Joe Biden would win Arizona in 2020 proved correct but wasn’t based on sound principles.Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, my guess is you’d be interested in my colleague Peter Baker’s article about the drama at Fox News in the aftermath of its decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.Here’s the short version: Fox News executives, news anchors and pundits were enraged over the call, with messages and a recording showing they thought it hurt ratings and threatened to “impact the brand” by alienating Donald J. Trump’s supporters.Most people would agree that political and branding concerns shouldn’t dictate an election call by a news organization. But the article has nonetheless rekindled an old debate about whether Fox News was really “right” to call Arizona for Mr. Biden on election night in 2020.This debate can be a little confusing, since Fox was right in the most important sense: It said Mr. Biden would win Arizona, and he ultimately did.But a race call is not an ordinary prediction. It’s not like calling heads or tails in a coin toss. A race call means that a candidate has something like a 99.9 percent chance of winning. As a result, a call can be wrong, even if the expected outcome ends up happening. If you assert that there’s a 99.9 percent chance that a coin flip will come up heads, you’re wrong — regardless of what happens next.Of course, everyone knows heads or tails is a 50-50 proposition. It’s much harder to know whether Mr. Biden had a 50.1 percent or 99.9 percent chance of winning Arizona based on the data available at 11:20 p.m. Eastern on election night, when Fox called the state for Mr. Biden. Most other news organizations didn’t think so; only The Associated Press, a few hours later, joined Fox in making the call so quickly. And in the end, Mr. Biden won Arizona by just three-tenths of a percentage point — a margin evoking a coin flip.Was the Fox call the result of the most sophisticated and accurate modeling, or more like being “right” when calling heads in a coin flip? It appears to be the latter — a lucky and dangerous guess — based on a review of televised statements by the Fox News decision team and publicly available data about the network’s modeling.The Fox team believed Mr. Biden would win Arizona by a comfortable margin at the time the call was made, based on erroneous assumptions and flawed polling. While it worked out for Fox in the end, similarly risky decisions could have easily led to a missed call, with potentially dire consequences for trust in American elections.I should disclose that I’m not an entirely disinterested party. Here at The Times, we rejected the A.P. call on Arizona (The Times usually accepts A.P. calls, but we independently evaluate A.P. projections in very important races) because we couldn’t rule out a Trump victory based on the available data. I believe we were right about that decision. But much as the Fox team has an incentive to argue its case, readers may believe that I have an incentive to argue against the Arizona call. I should also disclose that I know and like the Fox News decision desk director Arnon Mishkin.In a recording of a Fox Zoom meeting two weeks after the election obtained by The Times, Mr. Mishkin acknowledged that the Arizona call appeared “premature” but that “it did land correctly.”A Fox spokesperson on Sunday said that “Fox News continues to stand by its decision desk’s accurate call of Arizona.”Still, there is a compelling body of publicly available evidence suggesting that Fox, when it called the state, fundamentally misunderstood the remaining votes. It did not imagine that Mr. Trump could come so close to winning.Why Fox made the callAt the time Fox called Arizona, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by 8.5 percentage points, with an estimated 73 percent of the expected vote counted. The tabulated votes were mainly mail ballots received well ahead of the election. To win, Mr. Trump needed to take about 61 percent of the remaining votes.In addition to the tabulated vote, the Fox decision desk also had the Fox News Voter Analysis, otherwise known as the A.P. VoteCast data — a pre-election survey fielded by The Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago. The AP/NORC data showed Mr. Biden ahead by six percentage points in Arizona.A person with knowledge of how the call was made, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Fox team believed that the early returns confirmed the Fox News Voter Analysis. Indeed, Mr. Biden’s early lead seemed to match the survey’s findings among early voters, who broke for Mr. Biden by 10 points in the survey, 54 percent to 44 percent. The implication was that Mr. Biden was on track for a clear victory.When asked on election night on Fox to explain the Arizona call, Mr. Mishkin rejected the notion that Mr. Trump would do well in the outstanding ballots. Instead, he said he expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote:“We’ve heard from the White House that they need to get just 61 percent of the expected vote and they’ll be getting that.” He added: “But the reality is that’s just not true. They’re likely to only get 44 percent of the outstanding vote.” These figures were repeated by Daron Shaw, a Republican pollster on the Fox decision desk, and Mr. Mishkin in subsequent appearances. At the various times these statements were made, Mr. Biden would have been on track to win the state by between four and nine percentage points if the outstanding vote had gone so heavily in his favor.Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said he “misspoke on election night” when he said Fox expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote. If Mr. Mishkin did misspeak, there was still no indication that the Fox team expected Mr. Trump to win the remaining votes by a meaningful margin — let alone an overwhelming margin.On air on election night, Mr. Mishkin offered two main reasons to expect Mr. Biden to fare well in the remaining vote:“Yes, there are some outstanding votes in Arizona. Most of them are coming from Maricopa, where Biden is currently in a very strong position. And many of them are mail-in votes, where we know from our Fox News Voter Analysis that Biden has an advantage.”On their face, these arguments weren’t outlandish. Mr. Biden won Maricopa County, which is the home of Phoenix and a majority of Arizona voters. He won the mail vote in Arizona as well.In the end, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the remaining vote, all but erasing Mr. Biden’s advantage.What Fox missedHow could a group of mostly mail-in and mostly Maricopa ballots break for Mr. Trump by such a wide margin? The reason was foreseeable before election night.While “mail” votes sound monolithic, there can be important differences between mail ballots counted before and after the election. That’s because Arizona counts mail ballots in roughly the order in which they are received, and different kinds of voters return their ballots at different times.Ahead of the election, it was clear that Democrats were turning in their ballots earlier than Republicans. As a result, the mail ballots counted on election night — those received at least a few days before the election — were likely to break for Mr. Biden by a wide margin.The flip side: The voters who received mail ballots but had not yet returned them were very Republican. If they ultimately returned their ballots, these so-called “late” mail ballots counted after the election would break heavily for Mr. Trump.It wasn’t inevitable, of course, that Mr. Trump would win these ballots by as wide a margin as he ultimately did. It was possible that many of these Republicans would simply vote on Election Day. In the midterms last November, for instance, Republicans failed to decisively win the “late” mail vote under fairly similar circumstances.But in 2020, whether the late ballots would be overwhelmingly Republican was nonetheless “the big question,” as I wrote before the election. As a result, we never contemplated the possibility of a call in Arizona on election night; it was an easy decision for us to reject the A.P. call without knowing exactly how the “late” mail ballots would break.When asked on television the day after the election if the so-called late mail voters could back Mr. Trump with more than 60 percent support, Mr. Mishkin dismissed the possibility, saying it could happen “if a frog had wings.”Mr. Mishkin said he did not “ascribe any significance” to whether mail voters turned in their ballots on Election Day. Instead, he expected the “late” ballots would “confirm” their call. He was confident the late data “would look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” which to that point had shown Mr. Biden with a clear lead.Similarly, Mr. Shaw said in a radio interview the day after the election that “we don’t have any evidence” that “late” early voters would break for Mr. Trump.In fairness to Fox News and The A.P., it was hard to anticipate the difference between early and late mail ballots ahead of the election. It required marrying a detailed understanding of absentee ballot returns with an equally deep understanding of the mechanics of how Arizona counts mail ballots.The Fox News Voter Analysis was a factor here again as well. The survey offered no indication that mail voters surveyed near the election were likelier to back Mr. Trump, according to the person with knowledge of the call. And previously, late-arriving mail ballots in Arizona had benefited Democrats.But the ballot return data showed that this time could be very different. In the end, it was.Models and polls that missed the markAnalytical and research failures are inevitable. No one can perfectly anticipate what will happen on election night, especially in the midst of a pandemic. What matters is whether these failures yield a bad projection, and here the quality of statistical modeling — and especially whether the model properly quantifies uncertainty — becomes an important factor.Fox’s statistical modeling was highly confident about its Arizona call. On election night, Mr. Mishkin said, “We’re four standard deviations from being wrong” in Arizona. This implied that the Fox model gave Mr. Trump a 1-in-10,000 chance of victory.It’s hard to evaluate why the model was so confident. What’s clear is that it provided a basis for Fox to call the race, even as there were mounting nonstatistical reasons to begin to doubt the estimates.By the time of the Arizona call, it was already clear that the AP/NORC survey data — along with virtually all pre-election polling — had overestimated Mr. Biden. In North Carolina, for example, Mr. Trump had already taken the lead after AP/NORC data initially showed Mr. Biden ahead by five points. The same data initially showed Mr. Biden ahead by seven points in Florida, where Mr. Trump was by then the projected winner.As a result, there was already reason to be cautious about estimates showing great strength for Mr. Biden. But rather than become a source of uncertainty, Mr. Biden’s positive numbers in the AP/NORC data appeared to become a source of confidence — as Mr. Biden’s strength in the early vote appeared to confirm expectations.One indication that Fox’s modeling was prone to overestimate Mr. Biden was its publicly available probability dials, which displayed the likelihood that Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump would win the key battleground states.At various points, these estimates gave Mr. Biden at least an 87 percent chance of winning Ohio and at least a 76 percent chance of winning Iowa; Mr. Trump ultimately won both by nearly 10 points.Maybe most tellingly, Fox gave Mr. Biden a 95 percent chance to win North Carolina — even at a point when it was quite obvious that Mr. Trump would win the state once the Election Day vote had been counted.Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said, “The program that translated the decision desk’s numbers into the probability dials was not working properly at times.” Fox stopped using the probability dials on air, though they remained available online.But even if the dials were erroneously overconfident or otherwise not exactly to Fox’s liking, they nonetheless erred in almost exactly the same way as the Arizona call. In all four states, including Arizona, the AP/NORC data greatly overestimated Mr. Biden; the early vote count leaned heavily toward Mr. Biden; and the Fox estimates confidently swung toward Mr. Biden.Whether it was inaccurate AP/NORC data, misunderstanding the “late” mail vote, technical issues or overconfident modeling, there’s not much reason to believe that there was a factual basis for a projection in Arizona. It came very close to being wrong. If it had been, it could have been disastrous.The public’s confidence in elections would have taken another big hit if Mr. Trump had ultimately taken the lead after a call in Mr. Biden’s favor. It would have fueled the Trump campaign’s argument that he could and would eventually overturn the overall result. After all, he would have already done so in Arizona. More

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      Tucker Carlson Is No Less Dangerous

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      Gail Collins: Bret, we have all kinds of deeply important issues to tackle. But let’s start with Tucker Carlson. We’ve learned he didn’t really believe all the stuff he said on TV about a “stolen” election. Shocking!Bret Stephens: They say that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, but in this case it’s the tribute that cynicism pays to cowardice.Gail: Since you’re in charge of that side of our world, I really want to hear your opinion.Bret: I sometimes think of Carlson in the same mold as Father Coughlin, but worse: At least Coughlin was an honest-to-God fascist, a sincere bigot, whereas Carlson only plays one on TV for the sake of ratings.Gail: Wow, been a while since I heard a Father Coughlin comparison.Bret: As for Fox, the way in which they are trying to “respect” their viewers is to lie to them. I can only wish Dominion Voting Systems well in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network for claiming that their voting machines played a role in Trump’s loss. I believe in strong protections against frivolous lawsuits, but knowingly and recklessly spreading falsehoods about the subject of one’s reporting is the very definition of — dare I say it — fake news.Gail: Glad we can come together on the importance of not making up the news.Bret: But Gail, let’s move on to weightier things. Like President Biden’s dead-on-arrival $6.8 trillion budget. Your thoughts?Gail: Yippee! Whenever I wonder if we’re ever going to have a serious fight again, government spending rears its head.So let’s have at it. Obviously, Biden knows his plans aren’t going anywhere with a Republican-sort-of-controlled House. But he’s laying his cards down, and I think the cards look great.Bret: Explain.Gail: He’s ready to raise taxes on the rich. Good for him! Right now the Republicans seem to be claiming we can keep taxes as they are, or lower, plus protect Social Security and Medicare, plus protect or increase military spending. Which would, I believe, cut the rest of the budget by 70 percent.Bret: To steal a line from “Pride and Prejudice,” “My feelings are so different. In fact, they are quite the opposite.”Gail: Love that you’re bringing up Jane. Even if it’s to disagree with me.Bret: Ten years ago, federal spending was $3.45 trillion. Biden’s budget request is double that, and he has the chutzpah to suggest he wants to reduce the deficit — achieved almost entirely by huge tax increases instead of spending discipline.Gail: I will refrain from referring at length to a super-deficit-exploder named Donald Trump. Who was very much with his party’s program in one sense — pretending to be anti-deficit without proposing anything difficult to reduce it. Of course, the gang is OK with cutting back on, say, child care. Which makes it tougher for single parents to go to work and create a better future for the whole family.Bret: I too will refrain from noting that, godawful as Trump was, his final pre-Covid 2019 budget request was around $4.75 trillion, which is still $2 trillion less than Biden’s current request. I’m also not too thrilled by Biden’s proposal for higher taxes, including a nakedly unconstitutional tax on the appreciated assets of very rich people. It won’t pass, which I guess is the point, since the budget is less of a serious proposal and more of a campaign platform.Speaking of platforms: Your thoughts on the administration’s reported decision to approve an $8 billion oil-drilling project in the Alaskan wilderness?Gail: I’m horrified, actually. We’re supposed to be worrying about global warming and Biden is approving a plan that, as our story pointed out, will have an effect equivalent to adding almost two million more cars a year on the roads.Bret: OK, so now it’s my turn to cheer Biden while you jeer. We’re going to need oil for decades to come no matter how many electric vehicles we build, and the oil has to come from somewhere. Europe has discovered the price of relying on Russia for its energy, and I’d much rather have our gas come from a remote corner of Alaska, extracted by American workers, under American regulations, than from, say, Venezuela or Iran.But I’m really curious to see how this will play out within the Democratic Party. To me it looks like a crucial test of whether the party will again reach out to its old blue-collar manufacturing base or move further into the orbit of knowledge-industry workers with, well, coastal values. What do you think?Gail: The Biden administration is obviously going along with labor, lower-cost energy and all the other stuff you think of when you’re running for re-election. Democrats who worry about the environment may be rightfully horrified, but I doubt it’ll cost Biden votes. When the elections roll around, they’ll realize the other side is worse.Bret: Smart political advice.Gail: Still, the least the oil-drilling forces could do would be to apologize in advance to the kids who are currently in kindergarten and will have to live with the results.Bret: Also known as jobs and energy security.Gail: Hey, talking about youth reminds me of … oldth. I was so sorry to hear Mitch McConnell had fallen and been hospitalized with a concussion. He’s 81 and you can’t help wondering if he’s coming to the end of his career as the Senate Republican leader. Any predictions?Bret: First of all, we’ve got to petition the O.E.D. to make “oldth” a word as the appropriate antonym of youth. Second, I wish the senator a speedy recovery.His bigger problems, though, aren’t his physical stumbles but his political ones. He let Biden score his unexpected political wins last year. He’s fallen between two stools when it came to Trump: not Trumpy enough for Trump and his crowd, but not brave enough to stand up to them and move the party past them — like when he lambasted Trump after Jan. 6 but refused to vote to convict him during his second impeachment trial. And he’s been the Republican Senate leader forever, or at least it feels that way.Gail: So who’s next?Bret: He’d probably be wise to step aside for his whip, South Dakota’s John Thune, except that the Trumpians hate Thune for his anti-denialist position when it came to the 2020 election.Gail: Well, if you want to see the kind of leader that can crawl between the regular Republicans and the Trumpians, there’s … Kevin McCarthy. Senators would be better off with a hospitalized McConnell.Bret: A very good point. Since we’re speaking of Trump, your thoughts on his potential indictment?Gail: So many to choose from! Are we talking about the secret government documents he piled up at Mar-a-Lago, or his attempt to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 ballot counting, or the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the ex-lover Trump wanted to keep quiet? Although possibly as much about his sexual ineptitude as his marital sins? Pick one, Bret.Bret: My general view with most of these legal efforts is that, merited though they may be, they are more likely to help Trump than to hurt him. The weakest case seems to be the one that may be closest to an actual indictment — the alleged hush money payments to the alleged paramour Stormy Daniels. Problem there is that the star witness, the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, is an ex-felon with a big-time ax to grind against his former boss.Gail: Well, when your witnesses have to be people who spent a lot of quality time with Donald Trump, the options will almost always be depressing.Bret: The stronger case is the one in Georgia. Then again, is a jury in Georgia going to vote unanimously to convict the former president? Color me skeptical. At this point, the most realistic way for the country to be done with Trump is if Ron DeSantis or some other Republican defeats him, fair and square, in the race for the G.O.P. nomination. Which is why you’re strongly rooting for DeSantis to jump in the race, am I right?Gail: Oh, Bret, it’s so hard to admit I’d rather see Trump as the nominee than DeSantis, but it’s true. I would. Rather have a terrible Republican with no real fundamental values than one who has strong but terrible commitments and is a genuine obsessive on social issues like abortion rights.Bret: That sound you just heard was my jaw hitting the floor. But I’m giving you full points for total honesty.Gail: Plus, if we have to live through two years of presidential politics featuring Joe Biden on one side, I’d rather have the awful, wrong-thinking Republican who isn’t also incredibly boring. Is that shallow?Bret: Other than for the entertainment value, do you prefer to have Trump as the nominee because you think he has no chance of winning the election? You could very well be right. Then again, I remember how that worked out in 2016.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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      Fox’s P.R. Woes May Not Directly Translate to Legal Ones

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      Some of the unflattering private messages among the network’s hosts and executives may never become evidence when Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News goes to trial.For the past three weeks, a drip, drip, drip of disclosures have exposed widespread alarm and disbelief inside Fox News in the days after the 2020 presidential election, as the network became a platform for some of the most insidious lies about widespread voter fraud. These revelations are the most damning to rattle the Murdoch media empire since the phone hacking scandal in Britain more than a decade ago.The headlines have been attention-grabbing. Tucker Carlson, a professed champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s populist message, was caught insulting Mr. Trump — “I hate him passionately,” he wrote in a text. Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity disparaged colleagues in their network’s news division. And Rupert Murdoch said he longed for the day when Mr. Trump would be irrelevant.These examples and many more — revealed in personal emails, text messages and testimony made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — are embarrassing. But whether they pose serious legal jeopardy for Fox in that case is far less clear.The messages that led to some of the biggest headlines may never be introduced as evidence when the case goes to trial next month, according to lawyers and legal scholars, including several who are directly involved in the case. Fox is expected to ask a judge to exclude certain texts and emails on the grounds they are not relevant.Laura Ingraham disparaged Fox News colleagues in private messages released recently.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBut the most powerful legal defense Fox has is the First Amendment, which allows news organizations broad leeway to cover topics and statements made by elected officials. In court, Fox’s lawyers have argued that the network was merely reporting on what Mr. Trump and his allies were saying about fraud and Dominion machines — not endorsing those falsehoods.Media law experts said that if a jury found that to be true — not a far-fetched outcome, they said, especially if lawyers for the network can show that its hosts did not present the allegations as fact — then Fox could win.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsDocuments from a lawsuit filed by the voting machine maker Dominion against Fox News have shed light on the debate inside the network over false claims related to the 2020 election.Running Fox: Emails that lawyers for Dominion have used to build their defamation case give a peek into how Rupert Murdoch shapes coverage at his news organizations.Behind the Curtain: Texts and emails released as part of the lawsuit show how Fox employees privately mocked election fraud claims made by former President Donald J. Trump, even as the network amplified them to appease viewers.Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt: The Fox host’s private comments, revealed in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of Mr. Trump on his show.A Show of Support: In his first public remarks since the recent revelations on Fox News, Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, issued a full-throated show of support for Suzanne Scott, who is at the helm of Fox News Media.“I think the case really will come down to a jury deciding whether the company or the commentators did or didn’t endorse — that really is the key question,” said George Freeman, a former New York Times lawyer who is now executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which assists news organizations with legal issues.“It gives Fox, I think, a fighting chance,” he added.Despite the ways Fox could prevail with a jury, legal scholars say Dominion’s case is exceptionally strong.Lawyers for Dominion argue that the claims made by Fox’s hosts and guests about its machines and their supposed role in a nonexistent conspiracy to steal votes from Mr. Trump was anything but dispassionate, neutral reporting.“Truth and shared facts form the foundation of a free society — even more so here,” its lawyers said in a brief, filed with the court on Thursday. “The false idea that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election undermines the core of democracy.”It is rare for First Amendment lawyers to side against a media company. But many of them have done just that, arguing that a finding against Fox will send an important message: The law does not protect those who peddle disinformation. And it would help dispel the idea, First Amendment experts said, that libel laws should be rewritten to make it easier to win defamation suits, as Mr. Trump and other conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have suggested.In its most recent filings, Dominion argued that the law was more than adequate to find Fox liable.“If this case does not qualify as defamation, then defamation has lost all meaning,” Dominion argued in a legal filing made public on Thursday.But legal experts said that the case would rise or fall not based on how a jury considered lofty concerns about the health of American democracy. Rather, they said, Dominion’s challenge will be to persuasively argue something far more specific: that Fox News either knowingly broadcast false information or was so reckless that it overlooked obvious evidence pointing to the falsity of the conspiracy theories about Dominion.Though the coverage of the case has largely focused on the disparaging comments the network’s star hosts and top executives made in private — about Mr. Trump, his lawyers and one another — those remarks could only help Dominion’s case if they pointed to a deeper rot inside Fox, namely that it cynically elevated false stories about Dominion machines because its ratings were suffering.The one episode of Mr. Carlson’s show that Dominion cited as defamatory included an interview with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.Fox News“When I see the headlines that are primarily about Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, those are conversations that the litigation was designed to spur,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Utah.“At least some of that evidence is going to be important atmospherically,” Ms. Andersen Jones added. But what will be more important to the outcome of the case, she said, is “what drove the narrower decisions at the individual shows.”Fox’s lawyers could ask the judge, for instance, to keep the jury from seeing most of Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on the grounds that he was the chairman of the company and played no direct role in decision-making at the show level. However, during his deposition, Mr. Murdoch did concede a key point of Dominion’s. He acknowledged that some Fox hosts had endorsed false claims of malfeasance during the election. And when Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, presented Mr. Murdoch with examples of how Fox went beyond merely providing a platform for election deniers, the Fox chairman agreed. “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that,” Mr. Murdoch testified.Fox also plans to argue that the network’s coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 election needs to be considered as a whole, including the hosts and guests who insisted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.And the more Fox lawyers can show instances in the coverage where its hosts rebutted or framed the allegations as unproven, the stronger their case will be.A lawyer working on Fox’s defense, Erin Murphy, said Dominion did not “want to talk about the shows where there was a lot of commentary coming from different perspectives.”Especially when those shows were ones “that had higher viewership and were the more mainstream,” Ms. Murphy added.Dominion would be on the strongest legal footing, defamation experts said, whenever it could point to specific examples when individual Fox employees responsible for a program had admitted the fraud claims were bogus or overlooked evidence that those claims — and the people making them — were unreliable.Dominion cites only a single episode each from Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity as defamatory: Mr. Carlson’s interview of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, on Jan. 26, 2021, and Mr. Hannity’s interview of Sidney Powell, a lawyer who made some of the most outrageous fraud allegations, on Nov. 30, 2020.Dominion’s defamation claims against three far more obscure shows with much lower ratings are more substantial and extensively documented: “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” and the now-canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” both of which ran on Fox Business in 2020; and “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” which was Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday evening talk show on Fox News before the network canceled it and promoted Ms. Pirro to a regular slot on “The Five,” a weekday round-table talk show.Some of the most damning evidence to emerge involves Maria Bartiromo, legal experts say.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesEspecially damaging, legal experts said, is the evidence against Ms. Bartiromo. Dominion has accused her of recklessly disregarding evidence that a key source for Ms. Powell, who appeared several times on Ms. Bartiromo’s show, was mentally unstable — a “wackadoodle” by the source’s own admission.In an email, the full text of which was released last Tuesday along with thousands of pages of depositions and private messages of Fox employees, is from someone who claims to be a technology analyst named Marlene Bourne. Ms. Powell forwarded Ms. Bourne’s email to Ms. Bartiromo on the evening of Nov. 7, and Ms. Bartiromo forwarded it to her producer.In the email, Ms. Bourne describes numerous conspirators in a plot to discredit Mr. Trump, including some who had been dead for years like Roger Ailes, the former chief executive of Fox News. She writes that she is capable of “time-travel in a semiconscious state” and that when she is awake she can “see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear.” She also says she has been decapitated and that “it appears that I was shot in the back” once after giving the F.B.I. a tip.“If we’re really zeroing in on where the strongest evidence is,” Ms. Andersen Jones said, “it’s the wackadoodle email. Because the real question is whether you had subjective awareness of the likely falsity of the thing you were platforming on your show.” More

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      The Week in Business: Fox News Anchors’ Private Messages

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      Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Up? (March 5-11)Tucker Carlson’s Private TextsNew documents released last week revealed the disconnect between the Fox News anchors’ privately held opinions and those they espoused publicly — and shared with millions of viewers — on their television programs. In particular, Tucker Carlson’s views on Donald J. Trump and the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have been shown to contrast sharply with the messaging of his show, which supported Mr. Trump and promoted his unfounded belief that the election had been stolen. Yet at the same time, Mr. Carlson was sending texts to members of his staff about Mr. Trump like “I hate him passionately.” He is not the only Fox employee to be featured in the documents, which are part of the $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by the voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems and include the messages of other network stars like Laura Ingraham. But Mr. Carlson’s texts include some of the starkest language about the former president and drew special attention from the White House in a statement on Wednesday criticizing Mr. Carlson for his on-air portrayal of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as a largely peaceful event.Biden’s Budget ProposalPresident Biden on Thursday unveiled a $6.8 trillion budget that sought to increase spending on the military and a wide range of new social programs while also reducing budget deficits by nearly $3 trillion over a decade. The proposal was meant to address a partisan fight over the country’s national debt. Mr. Biden’s proposal provides for funding for an array of new programs, including billions on guaranteed paid leave for workers, free community college and an expanded child tax credit. The budget plan — which also calls for a new 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires — is widely considered dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Mr. Biden’s proposals were “completely unserious.”Job Growth Holds StrongThe Labor Department reported on Friday that U.S. employers added 311,000 jobs in February. Forecasters had expected to see a figure around 215,000, which would have been more in line with jobs reports from the second half of 2022. But the general downward trajectory of those jobs numbers took an unexpected turn in January, when new jobs surged to 517,000. So while job growth has eased somewhat in the last month, it remains resilient in the face of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow the economy. This latest jobs data also suggests that employer confidence is still relatively high, even as layoffs begin to rise.Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Next? (March 12-18)Next on the Economic CalendarWhen Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, spoke to Congress last week, he largely avoided committing to a strategy for taming inflation. Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday and the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, Mr. Powell said he and his colleagues were prepared to take a more aggressive tack and raise rates more quickly, if needed. But much of the Fed’s decision-making depended on the inflation and jobs reports. So Fed officials will be paying close attention (as they always do) to the Consumer Price Index data that will arrive on Tuesday. The last reading showed that while overall inflation had cooled, it was only a slight change, and core inflation — which strips out volatile food and fuel costs — remained fast.Shockwaves From a Bank RunIn an ominous sign for global banking, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week seized Silicon Valley Bank, a prominent investor in tech start-ups. The bank touched off investor panic when it announced on Wednesday that it had sold off $21 billion of its most liquid investments, borrowed $15 billion and organized an emergency sale of its stock to raise cash. These were urgent and extraordinary measures that banks go to great lengths to avoid. Investors at some venture capital firms urged their clients to move their money from the bank over concerns about its financial solvency. Less than two days later, the F.D.I.C. took control of the bank and created a new one, the National Bank of Santa Clara, to hold customers’ deposits and assets. A Ruling on Gig WorkA court is expected to hand down its ruling this week on Proposition 22, a ballot measure in California that would allow gig economy companies like Lyft and Uber to continue treating drivers as independent contractors. The battle over the status of these workers in the state — who number at least one million — ramped up in 2019, when California legislators passed a law requiring these companies to give their drivers the full protections of employment. But after the ride-hail apps threatened to suspend operations in the state, an appeals court granted them a temporary reprieve and the companies poured millions into getting Prop. 22 on voters’ ballots. A majority of voters approved the measure in November 2020, but it was swiftly challenged by a coalition of ride-hail drivers and labor groups, ruled unconstitutional by a California judge and appealed through the courts.What Else?Walgreens is facing blowback after announcing that it would not dispense abortion pills in 21 states where Republican attorneys general are threatening legal action against pharmacies that distribute the medication. Roger Ng, a former Goldman Sachs banker convicted last year for his role in a money-laundering scheme known as the 1MDB scandal, was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in prison. And JPMorgan Chase on Wednesday sued James E. Staley, a former top executive, accusing him of failing to fully inform the bank about what he knew about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. More

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      Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

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      A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.Robert Cheeley reads through Georgia law during a hearing at the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough, Ga., in 2021.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More