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      Durham Distances Himself From Furor in Right-Wing Media Over Filing

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      The special counsel implicitly acknowledged that White House internet data he discussed, which conservative outlets have portrayed as proof of spying on the Trump White House, came from the Obama era.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, distanced himself on Thursday from false reports by right-wing news outlets that a motion he recently filed said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid to spy on Trump White House servers.Citing a barrage of such reports on Fox News and elsewhere based on the prosecutor’s Feb. 11 filing, defense lawyers for a Democratic-linked cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, have accused the special counsel of including unnecessary and misleading information in filings “plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool.”In a filing on Thursday, Mr. Durham defended himself, saying those accusations about his intentions were “simply not true.” He said he had “valid and straightforward reasons” for including the information in the Feb. 11 filing that set off the firestorm, while disavowing responsibility for how certain news outlets had interpreted and portrayed it.“If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information,” he wrote.But even as he did not acknowledge any problem with how he couched his filing last week, Mr. Durham said he would make future filings under seal if they contained “information that legitimately gives rise to privacy issues or other concerns that might overcome the presumption of public access to judicial documents.”Former President Donald J. Trump has seized on the inaccurate reporting to declare that there is now “indisputable evidence” of a Clinton campaign conspiracy against him — and to suggest that there ought to be executions. Mr. Trump, Fox News hosts and others have also criticized mainstream journalists for not covering the purported revelation.The dispute traces back to a pretrial motion in the case Mr. Durham has brought against Mr. Sussmann accusing him of making a false statement during a September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. where he relayed concerns about possible cyberlinks between Mr. Trump and Russia. The bureau later dismissed those as unfounded.Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the F.B.I. official he had no clients, but was really there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Mr. Sussmann denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.Several sentences of the filing recounted a second meeting, in February 2017, where Mr. Sussmann had presented different concerns about odd internet data and Russia to the C.I.A., which came from the same cybersecurity researchers who developed the suspicions he had presented to the F.B.I.At the C.I.A. meeting, Mr. Sussmann shared concerns about data that suggested that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from Mr. Joffe. The court filing also stated that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and accused Mr. Joffe — whom Mr. Durham has not charged with any crime — and his associates of having “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.In the fall, The New York Times had reported on Mr. Sussmann’s C.I.A. meeting and the concerns he had relayed about the data suggesting the presence of Russian-made YotaPhones — smartphones that are rarely seen in the United States — in proximity to Mr. Trump and in the White House.But over the weekend, the conservative news media treated those sentences in Mr. Durham’s filing as a new revelation while significantly embellishing what it had said. Mr. Durham, some outlets inaccurately reported, had said he had discovered that the Clinton campaign had paid Mr. Joffe’s company to spy on Mr. Trump. But the campaign had not paid his company, and the filing did not say so. Some outlets also quoted Mr. Durham’s filing as using the word “infiltrate,” a word it did not contain.Most important, the coverage about purported spying on the Trump White House was premised on the idea that the White House network data involved came from when Mr. Trump was president. But Mr. Durham’s filing did not say when it was from.Lawyers for a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped analyze the Yota data said on Monday that the data came from the Obama presidency. Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers said the same in a filing on Monday night complaining about Mr. Durham’s conduct.Mr. Durham did not directly address that basic factual dispute. But his explanation for why he included the information about the matter in the earlier filing implicitly confirmed that Mr. Sussmann had conveyed concerns about White House data that came from before Mr. Trump was president.The purpose of the earlier filing was to ask a judge to look at potential conflicts of interest on Mr. Sussmann’s legal team. Mr. Durham included those paragraphs, he wrote, in part because one of the potential conflicts was that a member of the defense had worked for the White House “during the relevant events that involved” the White House.The defense lawyer in question is Michael Bosworth, who was a deputy White House counsel in the Obama administration.Separately on Thursday, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann filed a pretrial motion asking a judge to dismiss the case.They argued that even if Mr. Sussmann did falsely say at the F.B.I. meeting that he had no client — which they deny — that would not rise to a “material” false statement, meaning one affecting a government decision. The decision facing the F.B.I. was whether to open an investigation about the concerns he relayed at that meeting, and it would have done so regardless, they said.Mr. Durham has said Mr. Sussmann’s supposed lie was material because had the F.B.I. known that he was acting “as a paid advocate for clients with a political or business agenda,” agents might have asked more questions or taken additional steps before opening an investigation. More

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      Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track

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      The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.Instead, Mr. Durham has developed two cases against people associated with outside efforts to understand Russia’s election interference that put forward unproven, and sometimes thin or subsequently disproved, suspicions about purported links to Mr. Trump or his campaign.Both cases are narrow — accusations of making false statements. One of those cases is against Mr. Sussmann, whom Mr. Durham has accused of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.(Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely said he had no clients, but was there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Mr. Joffe. Mr. Sussman denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.)Both Mr. Sussmann’s September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. and the February 2017 meeting with the C.I.A. centered upon suspicions developed by cybersecurity researchers who specialize in sifting DNS data in search of hacking, botnets and other threats.A military research organization had asked Georgia Tech researchers to help scrutinize a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network. After it emerged that Russia had hacked Democrats, they began hunting for signs of other Russian activity targeting people or organizations related to the election, using data provided by Neustar.Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the F.B.I. involved odd data the researchers said might indicate communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked institution. The F.B.I. dismissed suspicions of a secret communications channel as unfounded. In the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Durham insinuated that the researchers did not believe what they were saying. But lawyers for the researchers said that was false and that their clients believed their analysis.The meeting with the C.I.A. involved odd data the researchers said indicated there had been communications with Yota servers in Russia coming from networks serving the White House; Trump Tower; Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company that also played a role in the Alfa Bank matter. The researchers also collaborated on that issue, according to Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch, and Mr. Dagon had prepared a “white paper” explaining the analysis, which Mr. Sussmann later took to the C.I.A.Mr. Durham’s filing also cast doubt on the researchers’ suggestion that interactions between devices in the United States and Yota servers were inherently suspicious, saying that there were more than three million such DNS logs from 2014 to 2017 — and that such logs from the White House dated back at least that long.But Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch reiterated that YotaPhones are extremely rare in the United States and portrayed three million DNS logs over three years as “paltry and small relative to the billions and billions” of logs associated with common devices like iPhones.“Yota lookups are extremely concerning if they emanate from sensitive networks that require protection, such as government networks or people running for federal office,” they said. More

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      Where Fox News and Donald Trump Took Us

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      Roger Ailes understood the appeal Mr. Trump had for Fox viewers. He didn’t foresee how together they would redefine the limits of political discourse.When Roger Ailes ran CNBC in the mid-1990s, he gave himself a talk show called “Straight Forward.” It long ago vanished into the void of canceled cable programs and never received much attention after the network boss moved on to produce more provocative and polarizing content as chairman of Fox News. But “Straight Forward” was a fascinating window into what kind of people Mr. Ailes considered stars.Donald Trump was one of them. In late 1995, Mr. Ailes invited Mr. Trump, then a 49-year-old developer of condos and casinos, on the show and sounded a bit star-struck as he asked his guest to explain how a Manhattan multimillionaire could be so popular with blue-collar Americans.“The guy on the street, the cabdrivers, the guys working on the road crews go, ‘Hey, Donald! How’s it going?’” Mr. Ailes observed while the two men sat in front of a wood-paneled set piece that gave the studio the appearance of an elegant den in an Upper East Side apartment. “It’s almost like they feel very comfortable with you, like you’re one of them. And I’ve never quite figured out how you bridge that.”Mr. Trump answered by flipping his host’s assertion around. It was because of who hated him: other people with money. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people. It’s a funny thing. They can’t stand me,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I sort of love it.”What Mr. Ailes sensed about Mr. Trump’s popularity with middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s would stay with him, because he identified with it. “A lot of what we do at Fox is blue collar stuff,” he said in 2011.His understanding of those dynamics helped shape the coverage he directed for decades and led to an embrace of grievance-oriented political rhetoric that the Republican Party, and a further fragmented right-wing media landscape, is grappling with as it looks toward elections this fall and the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to politics.Roger Ailes interviewing Mr. Trump in 1995. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people,” Mr. Trump said.CNBCMr. Ailes was eventually ousted from Fox after several women at the network came forward to say he had sexually harassed them. But before that, his intuition about what audiences wanted — and what advertisers would pay for — helped Fox News smash ratings records for cable news. He could rouse the viewer’s patriotic impulses, mine their darkest fears and confirm their wildest delusions. Its coverage of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, often laced with baseless speculation about his past, helped propel the network in 2008 to the highest ratings it had ever recorded in its 12 years of existence. Mr. Ailes earned $19 million that year.As he looked to assemble a dynamic cast of right-wing media stars to channel the rage and resentment of the budding Tea Party insurgency, Mr. Ailes’s instincts pushed Fox News ratings even higher.Three personalities he put on the air at Fox during that period stood out for the way they gave voice to a particular kind of American grievance. There was Glenn Beck, whose show debuted the day before the Obama inauguration in 2009. There was also Sarah Palin, who joined as a paid contributor earning $1 million a year in 2010.And of course there was Donald Trump. He was “relatable rich,” Mr. Ailes told his staff, betting that viewers would see something aspirational in him, when he decided to give Mr. Trump a weekly morning slot in early 2011.But it was what Mr. Ailes did not see about Mr. Trump — how his popularity was a double-edged sword — that led him to the same flawed assumption that the leaders of the Republican Party would eventually make. What neither they nor Mr. Ailes considered fully as they opened their arms to these insurgent forces was what would happen if encouraging and empowering them meant redefining the limits of acceptable political discourse, dropping the bar ever lower, and then discovering that they were helpless to reel it back in.That’s how Fox News landed in a once-unthinkable position behind CNN and MSNBC in the ratings in the weeks after Election Day in 2020, losing viewers to outlets like Newsmax and One America News eager to revel in — and profit from — the kind of misinformation that Fox rejected when it told its audience the truth about Mr. Trump’s defeat in Arizona.In reporting this book on the Republican Party, I spoke with the former president several times, and we discussed media coverage that debunked his unfounded claims about the 2020 election.“A lot of people don’t want that,” Mr. Trump told me in an interview about a month after President Biden’s inauguration, referring to critical — if accurate — news reports about his behavior. “They don’t want to hear negativity toward me.”Trump as a manageable riskAt his core, Mr. Ailes was two things that made him think someone like Mr. Trump was a manageable risk: deeply motivated by growing the size of the Fox audience and the attendant profits that would fatten his annual bonus; and an establishment Republican who, as G.O.P. strategist, had helped elect Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush.He was no different from the transactionally minded Republican leaders in Congress who looked at the energized group of voters in the Tea Party and thought: This is going to be good for business. Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, recalled speaking with Mr. Ailes about the budding new political movement on the right — which would be good for both men’s bottom lines — and said that while Mr. Ailes liked the movement’s use of patriotic language and its rebellious spirit, he ultimately “saw them as a convenient grass-roots group.”Mr. Trump, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin — three new Fox stars — initially delivered what Mr. Ailes was looking for: compelling television, good ratings and content viewers could find nowhere else. All three also ended up growing into big enough political celebrities in their own right — one more popular and entitled than the next — that Mr. Ailes eventually lost his ability to control them. (Through representatives, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin declined to be interviewed.)One outburst from Mr. Beck in the summer of 2009 in particular demonstrated the extent to which norms were being stretched. That July, the raw, racialized anti-Obama anger of Tea Party sympathizers collided head-on with the country’s fraught history of systemic racial discrimination in Cambridge, Mass., when the noted Black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor assumed he was a burglar and called the police. The president defended Mr. Gates and criticized the police who had “acted stupidly,” in his view.Glenn Beck, here rehearsing his Fox News Channel show in 2009, was a Fox star but eventually fell out of Mr. Ailes’s favor.Nicholas Roberts for The New York TimesMr. Beck responded during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” saying that Mr. Obama had revealed his “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Then he added, matter of factly, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” When a public outcry ensued, the response from the network was to defend their host. Bill Shine, head of programming, released a statement that called Mr. Beck’s comment a “personal opinion” and not reflective of the network’s views over all. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions,” Mr. Shine added.The significance was hard to overstate. One of the biggest stars on the most-watched cable news network in the country said the country’s first Black president hated white people. And the response from Fox News was to say it was all perfectly defensible.But Mr. Beck would be out at Fox soon enough, as Mr. Ailes became convinced antics like these were too much of a distraction. According to a former senior on-air personality, Mr. Ailes told other people at the network that Mr. Beck was “insane” and had complained to him about various physical ailments that seemed fake, including fretting once that he might be going blind. The network announced Mr. Beck’s departure in the spring of 2011.A Fox News snubThe network’s relationship with another one of its stars was also changing: Mr. Ailes expressed concern about some of Ms. Palin’s public statements, including engagement with critics.Ms. Palin appeared to have reservations of her own. And the tension with Mr. Ailes, which was more nuanced than known publicly, would help open the door at the network for Mr. Trump.She told people close to her at the time that Mr. Ailes made her uncomfortable, especially the way he commented on her looks. “He’s always telling me to eat more cheeseburgers,” she told one member of her staff.Once, after a private meeting in Mr. Ailes’s office at the network’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan in 2010, she came out looking white as a ghost.Sarah Palin on “The Sean Hannity Show” during the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes’s assistant had asked that the aides and family members traveling with her wait outside so the two of them could meet alone. And when she emerged, according to the former staff member who was there, she said, “I’m never meeting with him alone again.”She was the biggest star in Republican politics at the time. The former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee had come as close as anyone ever had to leading the leaderless Tea Party movement. And even without Fox, the media was tracking her every move.Over Memorial Day weekend in 2011, a caravan of journalists chased her up the East Coast during a six-day trip from Washington to New Hampshire, believing she might use the occasion to announce that she would run against Mr. Obama. The trip also included a dinnertime stop at Trump Tower, where she and its most famous resident stepped out in front of the paparazzi on their way to get pizza.She wouldn’t reveal her intentions until later that year, in October. And when she did, she broke the news on Mark Levin’s radio show — not on Fox News. It was a slight that infuriated Mr. Ailes, who had been paying her $1 million a year with the expectation that it would pay off with the buzz and big ratings that kind of announcement could generate.The Void Trump FilledThere were signs at the time that Mr. Trump was starting to fill the void in Fox’s coverage — and in conservative politics — that would exist without Ms. Palin center stage. He had been getting a considerable amount of coverage from the network lately for his fixation on wild rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.One interview in March 2011 on “Fox & Friends” — the show known inside the network to be such a close reflection of Mr. Ailes’s favorite story lines that staff called it “Roger’s daybook” — was typical of how Mr. Trump used his media platform to endear himself to the hard right. He spent an entire segment that morning talking about ways that the president could be lying about being born in the United States. “It’s turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me from all over saying, ‘Please don’t give up on this issue,’” Mr. Trump boasted.Three days after that interview, the network announced a new segment on “Fox & Friends”: “Mondays With Trump.” A promo teased that it would be “Bold, brash and never bashful.” And it was on “Fox & Friends” where Mr. Trump appeared after his pizza outing with Ms. Palin in the spring, talking up his prospects as a contender for the White House over hers. Mr. Trump and Mr. Ailes were, at first, seemingly well matched.Though he had financial motivations for promoting sensational but misleading stories, Mr. Ailes also seemed to be a true believer in some of the darkest and most bizarre political conspiracy theories.In 2013, Mr. Obama himself raised the issue with Michael Clemente, the Fox News executive vice president for news, asking him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner whether Mr. Ailes was fully bought-in on the conspiracies over the president’s birthplace. “Does Roger really believe this stuff?” Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Clemente answered, “He does.”The network boss and the celebrity developer also shared a dim view of the man who would win the 2012 Republican nomination, Mitt Romney. On election night, Mr. Ailes had already left the office by the time his network’s decision desk called the race for the president. Shortly after the election, he visited Mr. Romney at the Essex House, a posh hotel on Central Park South, to pay his respects. He also offered the candidate his unvarnished paranoia about the outcome.The Democrats had pulled a fast one, Mr. Ailes said, just as they always do. “They make promises they can’t keep. And they’re dirty. They cheat,” he said.Mr. Ailes, with his wife, Elizabeth, leaving the News Corp building in 2016.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes did not live to see Mr. Trump’s second, unsuccessful presidential campaign. A hemophiliac, he died after a bad fall in 2017. As confident as he was in his instincts that Mr. Trump would deliver good ratings, he wasn’t oblivious to the downside of emboldening him. At one point in 2016, he complained to a colleague, the former Fox News chief legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, that he dreaded hearing from Mr. Trump.“I hate it when he calls me. He talks to me like I talk to you. He cuts me off. He doesn’t let me finish my sentences. He constantly interrupts me,” the network chief grumbled to his subordinate, Mr. Napolitano recalled.But there is no doubt that in his chase for ratings and revenue, Mr. Ailes ultimately made his network the subordinate in its relationship with Mr. Trump. And for all his paranoia, Mr. Ailes failed to see how that might happen.Mr. Trump is still embittered by Fox’s decision on the night of the election to project that he had lost Arizona, and therefore most likely the White House. In an interview late last summer, he boasted about their ratings slide. “They’re doing poorly now, which is nice to watch,” he said.Fox News lost its crown as the most-watched cable news outlet in the weeks after the 2020 election, but it quickly regained it. It remains dominant today. Questions about its future in a Republican political environment still dominated by the former president abound. Will Mr. Trump grow irritated enough with the network to lash out and urge his followers to change the channel, tanking ratings again? Will its decision desk still feel empowered to make bold calls like the Arizona one after facing such an intense backlash?“Roger wasn’t the easiest guy to deal with,” Mr. Trump said in our interview, nodding to the rupture in their relationship toward the end. “But he was great at what he did. And he built a behemoth.”Then he offered a warning: “And that behemoth can evaporate very quickly if they’re not careful.”Jeremy W. Peters, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” from which this article is adapted. He is also an MSNBC contributor. More

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      I Worked at Facebook. It’s Not Ready for This Year’s Election Wave.

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      The world is not ready for the coming electoral tsunami. Neither is Facebook. With so many elections on the horizon — France, Kenya, Australia, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States will hold elections this year — the conversation now should focus on how Facebook is preparing.I know what it’s like to prepare for an election at Facebook. I worked there for 10 years, and from 2014 through the end of 2019, I led the company’s work across elections globally. It has poured more than $13 billion into building up its safety and security efforts in the United States since the 2016 elections, when the platform was too slow to recognize how its products could be weaponized to spread misinformation.Responsible election plans cannot be spun up in days or weeks. It takes time not only to organize internally but also to make meaningful and necessary connections with the communities around the world working to secure elections. Facebook must begin serious, concerted, well-funded efforts today.For some of the elections happening in the first half of this year, Facebook is cutting it close. But there’s still time for Facebook to commit to a publicly available road map that outlines how it plans to build up its resources to fight misinformation and hate speech around the world. Algorithms that find hate speech and election-related content; labels that give people more context, like those in the United States applied to content that questioned the election results; and efforts to get people accurate information about where, when and how to vote should all be a part of the baseline protections Facebook deploys across the globe. On top of these technical protections, it needs people with country-specific language and culture expertise to make tough decisions about speech or behavior that might violate the platform’s rules.I’m proud of the progress the company made in bringing more transparency to political and issue ads, developing civil society partnerships and taking down influence operations. None of that progress happened spontaneously. To combat the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that exposed 126 million Americans to its content before and after the 2016 elections, for example, Facebook needed new policies, new expertise and a revamped team at the platform dedicated to these issues. Because of those innovations, the company was able to take down 52 influence networks in 2021.Facebook couldn’t do this work alone. Partnerships with organizations such as the Atlantic Council, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and many others were crucial.But even then, providing the technical infrastructure to combat misinformation is only half the battle. Facebook faced scrutiny again in 2020 and 2021 for how it handled everything from President Donald Trump’s Facebook account to false election fraud claims and Jan. 6. Many of the conversations I had at the time revolved around balancing the right to free speech with the harm that speech could cause someone.This is one of the central dilemmas companies like Facebook grapple with. What is the right call for company administrators when a sitting president of the United States violates their platform’s community standards, even as they believe that people should be able to hear what he has to say? When are people exercising their right to organize and protest against their government, as opposed to preparing for a violent insurrection?Similar issues come up in other countries. Last year the Russian government pressured Apple and Google to remove an app created by allies of Aleksei Navalny, an opponent of President Vladimir Putin’s. Refusing the government would have put their employees in Russia at risk. Complying would go against free-expression standards. The companies chose to protect their employees.These are the kinds of difficult questions that crop up in every country, but Facebook also needs country-specific monitoring. Human expertise is the only way to truly understand how heated discussions are shifting in real time and to be sensitive to linguistic and cultural nuances. The word “dill” in Russian translates to “ukrop,” for example, which has been used as a slur against Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians, however, reclaimed the word and even named a political party after it. A global framework that fails to account for these kinds of situations or that is overly reliant on technology to address them is not prepared to confront the reality of our complex world.Facebook has invested billions in this kind of work. But a majority of its investment for classifying misinformation, for example, has focused on the United States, even though daily active users in other countries make up the vast majority of the user base. And it’s not clear which efforts Facebook will extend from U.S. elections to those in other countries. It’s unlikely that within the next two years, much less the next few months, Facebook can build up protections in every country. But it must start planning now for how it will exponentially scale up people, products and partnerships to handle so many elections at once in 2022 and 2024.It should be transparent about how it will determine what to build in each country. In 2019, Facebook had more than 500 full-time employees and 30,000 people working on safety and security overall. Even with that amount of human talent, it could cover the national elections in only three major countries at once. At least that many people were needed for the United States in 2020. In two years, people in the United States, India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Mexico and Britain are to go to the polls in national elections. Facebook will need to consider hiring at least 1,000 more full-time employees to be ready for the next big election cycle. If the company is cutting it close for 2022, it has just enough time to be really ready for 2024.These problems are not ones that Facebook can fix on its own. Its parent, Meta, is a private company but one with tremendous influence on society and democratic discourse. Facebook needs to continue to recognize the responsibility it has to protect elections around the world and invest accordingly. Governments, civil society and the public should hold it accountable for doing so.Katie Harbath is the chief executive of Anchor Change, a company focused on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. She formerly worked at Facebook, where she helped lead its work on elections.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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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Fake Trump Electors

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      The panel demanded information from 14 people who were part of bogus slates of electors for President Donald J. Trump, digging deeper into an aspect of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack issued 14 subpoenas on Friday to people who falsely claimed to be electors for President Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., digging deeper into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.The subpoenas target individuals who met and submitted false Electoral College certificates in seven states won by President Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“The select committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”The so-called alternate electors met on Dec. 14, 2020, in seven states that Mr. Trump lost and submitted bogus slates of Electoral-College votes for him, the committee said. They then sent the false Electoral College certificates to Congress, an action Mr. Trump’s allies used to try to justify delaying or blocking the final step in confirming the 2020 election results — a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, to formally count the electoral votes.The 14 individuals subpoenaed on Friday were: Nancy Cottle and Loraine B. Pellegrino of Arizona; David Shafer and Shawn Still of Georgia; Kathy Berden and Mayra Rodriguez of Michigan; Jewll Powdrell and Deborah W. Maestas of New Mexico; Michael J. McDonald and James DeGraffenreid of Nevada; Bill Bachenberg and Lisa Patton of Pennsylvania; and Andrew Hitt and Kelly Ruh of Wisconsin.The subpoenas order the witnesses, all of whom claimed to be either a chair or secretary of the fake elector slates, to turn over documents and sit for depositions in February.Those who signed onto the fake slates of electors were mostly state-level officials in the Republican Party, G.O.P. political candidates or party activists involved with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. None of those who were subpoenaed responded on Friday to requests for comment.On Friday, the committee also issued a subpoena to Judd Deere, a former White House spokesman who interacted with Mr. Trump the day before the Capitol riot in a meeting in which Mr. Trump asked how to get Republicans in Congress he described as “weak” to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with the panel’s activities. That subpoena was reported earlier by CNN.The committee’s latest subpoenas came as the Justice Department said this week it was investigating the fake electors.The scheme to employ the so-called alternate electors was one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive efforts to overturn the election, beginning even before some states had finished counting ballots and culminating in the pressure placed on Vice President Mike Pence to throw out legitimate votes for Mr. Biden when he presided over the joint congressional session. At various times, the gambit involved lawyers, state lawmakers and top White House aides.As early as Nov. 4, Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, received a message from an unidentified Republican lawmaker proposing an “aggressive strategy” to maintain his grip on power. According to the strategy, Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania would “just send their own electors” to the Electoral College instead of those chosen by voters to represent Mr. Biden.Within a month, two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, spoke to Republican lawmakers in swing states like Michigan and Arizona, urging them to convene special sessions to choose their own electors.Around the same time, John Eastman, another lawyer who would ultimately work for Mr. Trump, spoke by video to lawmakers in Georgia, advising them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      Justice Dept. Is Reviewing Role of Fake Trump Electors, Top Official Says

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      Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, told CNN that she could not “say anything more on ongoing investigations.”WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020.In some cases, top Republican Party officials in those seven states signed the false documents, according to copies posted online last March by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”In Michigan, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, gave federal prosecutors information from her yearlong investigation into the matter. She has said that she believes there is enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state with submitting the fake certificates and falsely claiming that they were official electors for the state.And Hector Balderas Jr., the attorney general of New Mexico, and a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also asked the Justice Department to review the matter.If investigators determine that Mr. Trump’s allies created the fake slates to improperly influence the election, they could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.It is unclear whether the Republican Party officials and others who submitted the false documents did so on their own or at the behest of the Trump campaign.“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”Luke Broadwater More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit

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      The panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is demanding information from Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism. The committee said it had been investigating how the companies “contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.”“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” said the panel’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work. A committee aide said investigators were in various stages of negotiations with the other companies.In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times. Many of those employees criticized Facebook leadership’s inaction when it came to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy group, which they said also contributed to the attack.Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.Critics say that other platforms also played an instrumental role in the spread of misinformation while contributing to the events of Jan. 6.In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.Representatives for the tech companies have been in discussions with the investigating committee, though how much in the way of evidence or user records the firms have handed over remains unclear.The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.“To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spread misinformation about the election,” Mr. Thompson wrote.The panel said Facebook and other Metaplatforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”Public accounts about Facebook’s civic integrity team indicate that Facebook has documents that are critical to the select committee’s investigation, the panel said.“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More