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      Proud Boys Regroup Locally to Add to Ranks Before 2022 Midterms

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      The far-right nationalist group has become increasingly active at school board meetings and town council gatherings across the country.They showed up last month outside the school board building in Beloit, Wis., to protest school masking requirements.They turned up days later at a school board meeting in New Hanover County, N.C., before a vote on a mask mandate.They also attended a gathering in Downers Grove, Ill., where parents were trying to remove a nonbinary author’s graphic novel from public school libraries.Members of the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, have increasingly appeared in recent months at town council gatherings, school board presentations and health department question-and-answer sessions across the country. Their presence at the events is part of a strategy shift by the militia organization toward a larger goal: to bring their brand of menacing politics to the local level.For years, the group was known for its national profile. The Proud Boys were prominent at the rallies of Donald J. Trump, at one point offering to serve as the former president’s private militia. On Jan. 6, some Proud Boys members filmed themselves storming the U.S. Capitol to protest what they falsely said was an election that had been stolen from Mr. Trump.But since federal authorities have cracked down on the group for the Jan. 6 attack, including arresting more than a dozen of its members, the organization has been more muted. Or at least that was how it appeared.Away from the national spotlight, the Proud Boys instead quietly shifted attention to local chapters, some members and researchers said. In small communities — usually suburbs or small towns with populations of tens of thousands — its followers have tried to expand membership by taking on local causes. That way, they said, the group can amass more supporters in time to influence next year’s midterm elections.“The plan of attack if you want to make change is to get involved at the local level,” said Jeremy Bertino, a prominent member of the Proud Boys from North Carolina.The group had dissolved its national leadership after Jan. 6 and was being run exclusively by its local chapters, Mr. Bertino said. It was deliberately involving its members in local issues, he added.That focus is reflected in the Proud Boys’ online activity. On the encrypted messaging app Telegram, the Proud Boys’ main group in the United States has barely budged in number — with about 31,000 followers — over the last year. But over a dozen new Telegram channels have emerged for local Proud Boys chapters in cities such as Seattle and Philadelphia over that same period, according to data collected by The New York Times. Those local Telegram groups have rapidly grown from dozens to hundreds of members.Other far-right groups that were active during Mr. Trump’s presidency, such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, have followed the same pattern, researchers said. They have also expanded their local groups in states such as Pennsylvania, Texas and Michigan and are less visible nationally.“We’ve seen these groups adopt new tactics in the wake of Jan. 6, which have enabled them to regroup and reorganize themselves,” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who researches domestic extremist groups. “One of the most successful tactics they’ve used is decentralizing.”Members of the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters did not respond to requests for comment.The Proud Boys were founded in 2016 by Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice. Enrique Tarrio, an activist and Florida director of Latinos for Trump, later took over as leader. The group, which is exclusively male, has espoused misogynistic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated it as a hate group.By the 2020 election, the Proud Boys — who often wear distinctive black-and-yellow uniforms — had become the largest and most public of the militias. Last year, Mr. Trump referred to them in a presidential debate when he was asked about white nationalist groups, replying, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”Enrique Tarrio during a Proud Boys rally last September. He was arrested in January.Mason Trinca for The New York TimesAfter the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the group grew disillusioned with Mr. Trump. The president distanced himself from the riot and declined to offer immunity to those who were involved. The Proud Boys have also experienced a leadership vacuum, after Mr. Tarrio was arrested two days before the Capitol attack on charges of property destruction and illegally holding weapons.That was when the Proud Boys began concentrating on local issues, Mr. Holt said. But as local chapters flourished, he said, the group “increased their radical tendencies” because members felt more comfortable taking extreme positions in smaller circles.Many Proud Boys’ local chapters have now taken on causes tied to the coronavirus pandemic, with members showing up at protests over mask mandates and mandatory vaccination policies, according to researchers who study extremism.This year, members of the Proud Boys were recorded at 145 protests and demonstrations, up from 137 events in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nonprofit that monitors violence. But the data most likely understates the Proud Boys’ activities because it doesn’t include school board meetings and local health board meetings, said Shannon Hiller, the executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan research group that tracks political violence.Ms. Hiller said the Proud Boys have shown consistently high levels of activity this year, unlike last year when there was a spike only around the election. She called the change “concerning,” adding that she expected to see the group’s appearances intensify before the midterms.On the Proud Boys’ local Telegram channels, members often share news articles and video reports about students who were barred from schools for refusing to wear a mask or employees who were fired over a vaccine requirement. Some make plans to appear at protests to act as “muscle,” with the goal of intimidating the other side and attracting new members with a show of force, according to the Telegram conversations viewed by The Times.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4U.S. nears 800,000 Covid deaths. More

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      Republicans in Texas County, in Unusual Move, Upend Primary System

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      The G.O.P. in Potter County is planning to break away from a nonpartisan election board and hold its own primary next year, in a move criticized by election experts.The Republican Party in the second-largest county in the Texas Panhandle is planning to conduct its own election during the state primary in March, breaking away from a nonpartisan county election board in a highly unusual move.The G.O.P. in Potter County, which includes Amarillo, plans to use ballots that will be marked and counted by hand, rather than employ the electronic systems that the county has relied on for decades. Election experts said the changes would confuse voters and create more potential for fraud.Under Texas law, county parties are allowed to run their own primary elections, but the vast majority have contracted with local boards of election for decades. The decision, which was reported by Votebeat, an election news website, comes as Republicans nationally have continued to push baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and sow doubts about the reliability of election machinery.Daniel L. Rogers, the chairman of the Potter County Republicans, said that he made the decision this week because “a lot of voters have concerns” with the electronic counters and “don’t feel comfortable with them.” He did not cite evidence of any problems arising under the current system, and studies have shown that hand counting leads to more inaccuracies. He argued that paper ballots would be more secure.“The parties have become lazy and complacent, but the primaries are actually the party’s responsibility,” said Mr. Rogers, a real estate broker whose office was decorated with red Make America Great Again hats when a New York Times reporter interviewed him last year. “The counties are spending millions of dollars on electronic systems, but this way it’s a true secret ballot.”He said that “the voters are smarter than our elected officials, than administrators — they don’t trust the voters. I do.”Mark P. Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University in Houston, said the move “removes the Republican Party one more step away from the standard electoral procedure.”He added: “The integrity of our electoral system depends on institutionalizing and professionalizing election boards. There will be more doubts about the overall outcome, or it will lead to more slip-ups and more potential flaws and problems than if the professionals ran it.”Potter County has about 57,000 registered voters, and they are overwhelmingly Republican: Roughly 70 percent cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump in 2020.Mr. Rogers, when asked if the election results nationally were valid, responded, “I don’t have any idea and that’s the problem — I don’t know if it was accurate or not.”Under state law, the county elections board will still be responsible for absentee and early voting, which a majority of voters in Texas use to cast their ballots. But the two systems, experts said, could complicate the process and make it easier for voters to cast ballots twice.“It opens the door wide to fraud,” Dr. Jones said. “It doesn’t close the door to fraud.”The legal office of the Texas secretary of state, who oversees elections in the state and who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, raised several concerns about the move.“Any time that a party conducts their own election rather than contracting with a county, it is more confusing to voters,” said Sam Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for communications. Still, he added that “ultimately it’s their decision to go at it alone.”One risk, Mr. Taylor said, is that candidates in contested races could file election challenges to prompt a court to order a new primary election. “It’s not unprecedented,” he said. “But county parties usually do not invite that opportunity upon themselves.”“They have every legal right to do so,” he added. “We can’t really intervene.”Melynn Huntley, the Potter County elections administrator, said that she had been taken aback by Mr. Rogers’s decision and that she was most worried about the potential to make it easier to vote twice.“The biggest worry I have is that those two systems will not talk with each other,” Ms. Huntley said. “His desire is to eliminate fraud, but there is a vulnerability in the plan. I am concerned whether this can function with high integrity.”Ms. Huntley, who has served as elections administrator for eight years, said that when she took on the job, she pledged not to vote in either party’s primary so that she could maintain her role as a nonpartisan overseer.“I am truly trying to figure out how this is going to work,” she said. More

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      Echoing Trump, David Perdue Sues Over Baseless Election Claims

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      The legal action by Mr. Perdue, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, was the latest sign that 2020 election falsehoods will be a main focus of his bid.Former Senator David Perdue of Georgia, a Republican who is running for governor with the backing of former President Donald J. Trump, filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking the inspection of absentee ballots in the 2020 election, reviving long-debunked claims in the latest sign that Mr. Trump’s election grievances will be central to his candidacy.The lawsuit draws on Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud in Georgia and across the country, which culminated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. In the months since, many Republican elected officials have pivoted from rebuking election conspiracy theories to embracing them vocally in an effort to win the affections of Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Perdue, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump soon after announcing his candidacy on Monday, is running against Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who is a staunch conservative but has come under withering attacks from the former president and his allies over Mr. Kemp’s unwillingness to help them overturn President Biden’s victory in Georgia. Mr. Perdue told news outlets this week that he would not have certified the results if he had been governor instead of Mr. Kemp.Republicans in states across the country have continued to cast doubt on the 2020 election’s legitimacy by trying to carry out partisan reviews of the results, which they often misleadingly label “audits” to lend them a greater sense of authority. G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states are pursuing reviews, and Republicans in states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida have introduced bills to begin new ones next year.Mr. Perdue’s suit, which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier reported and which was filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County, argues that through unlawful “acts and omissions,” election officials in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and a major source of Democratic votes, “circumvented the majority vote of the people of the State of Georgia and thereby affected the outcome of the statewide General Election on Nov. 3, 2020 in several races.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In the complaint, Mr. Perdue names a county election official and workers underneath him, claiming that they “negligently, grossly negligently or intentionally engaged in and/or permitted multiple unlawful election acts.”“David Perdue wants to use his position and legal standing to shine light on what he knows were serious violations of Georgia law in the Fulton absentee ballot tabulation,” Bob Cheeley, a lawyer for the candidate, told The Journal-Constitution.Georgia election officials have reviewed the 2020 results three times and have come to the same conclusion: Mr. Biden won the state, narrowly but decisively.Mr. Perdue lost his re-election bid in January to Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat.The legal effort by Mr. Perdue follows a similar lawsuit this year by a group of voters led by a known conspiracy theorist. That case, which sought to inspect all 147,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County, was thrown out after Judge Brian Amero of Henry County Superior Court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing and could not show any specific injury or harm.Mr. Perdue’s lawsuit could work around at least part of Judge Amero’s ruling, because he was a candidate in the 2020 elections.Several Republicans in Georgia criticized the suit.“David Perdue is so concerned about election fraud that he waited a year to file a lawsuit that conveniently coincided with his disastrous campaign launch,” Cody Hall, a spokesman for Governor Kemp’s campaign, said. “Keep in mind that lawsuit after lawsuit regarding the 2020 election was dismissed in part because Perdue declined to be listed as a plaintiff.”Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state — who, like Mr. Kemp, has come under attack from fellow Republicans for resisting Mr. Trump’s election pressure — said in a statement: “Fake Trumpers like Perdue are trying to curry favor with the Trump base by pushing election conspiracy theories that everyone — including the voters they are hoping to attract — knows they don’t really believe.”Georgia continues to be a hub of litigation and national attention over elections and voting rights. Two election workers in the state filed a defamation lawsuit last week against Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news outlet that falsely claimed they had manipulated ballots. On Friday, Reuters reported that one of the workers said she had been pressured by a publicist for Kanye West, the rapper who ran for president and previously supported Mr. Trump, to acknowledge manipulating votes.The Georgia Democratic Party, whose likely nominee for governor, Stacey Abrams, announced her campaign last week, reveled in the high-profile clash of Republicans and sought to lump them together.“It is reprehensible that David Perdue is peddling those same dangerous lies in a sad ploy for attention,” the party said in a statement. “From David Perdue’s frivolous lawsuit to Brian Kemp’s voter suppression laws — both based on the same fabricated lies — nobody who sows distrust in our free and fair elections deserves to lead our state.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills

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      Republicans plan to carry their push to reshape the nation’s electoral system into next year, with Democrats vowing to oppose them but holding few options in G.O.P.-led states.A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.Both parties are preparing to use the issue of voting to energize their bases. Democratic leaders, especially Stacey Abrams, the newly announced candidate for governor of Georgia and a voting rights champion for her party, promise to put the issue front and center.But the left remains short of options, leaving many candidates, voters and activists worried about the potential effects in 2022 and beyond, and increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ inability to pass federal voting protections in Washington.“What we are facing now is a very real and acute case of democratic subversion,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview, adding that the country needed a Senate willing to “protect our democracy regardless of the partisanship of those who would oppose it.”Democrats and voting rights groups say some of the Republican measures will suppress voting, especially by people of color. They warn that other bills will increase the influence of politicians and other partisans in what had been relatively routine election administration. Some measures, they argue, raise the prospect of elections being thrown into chaos or even overturned.Republicans say the bills are needed to preserve what they call election integrity, though electoral fraud remains exceedingly rare in American elections.“This is going to be one of the big political issues for at least the next year,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative group that has helped craft voting legislation. He said the group wanted lawmakers to “stop thinking of election-related policies as something that only comes up once in a blue moon,” adding that “it should instead be something that comes up in every legislative session — that you take what you just learned from the last election.”G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states have put forward legislation to review the 2020 election and institute new procedures for investigating the results of future elections.Many of the other bills are similar to those passed this year, which aim to limit access to mail-in voting; reduce the use of drop boxes; enact harsher penalties for election officials who are found to have broken rules; expand the authority of partisan poll watchers; and shift oversight of elections from independent officials and commissions to state legislatures.It remains unclear how new voting bills might affect turnout, and some election experts say that any measures designed to suppress voting carry the potential to backfire by energizing voters of the opposing party.Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing for Florida to create an election law enforcement unit that would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election.”Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesIn Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is pushing for changes to election laws that build on the major bill his party passed this year, including a special force to investigate voting crimes. In New Hampshire, Republicans are proposing to require that all ballots be counted by hand and may try to tighten residency requirements. In Georgia, G.O.P. lawmakers are trying to restructure the Democratic-led government of the state’s most diverse county.The biggest potential changes to voting could come in Florida, which had just one prosecuted case of voter fraud in the 2020 election.Mr. DeSantis, who had been facing pressure from conservatives to greenlight a review of the 2020 election results in the state, has urged state lawmakers to send new election measures to his desk. One proposal would increase the penalty for the collection of more than two ballots by a third party from a misdemeanor to a third-degree felony. Another calls for more routine maintenance of voter rolls, which voting rights advocates say would lead to more “purges” of eligible voters.The governor said last month that the prospective election law enforcement unit would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election” and would include sworn law enforcement officers, investigators and a statewide prosecutor. Critics argued that such a unit could intimidate voters and be prone to abuse by politicians.In New Hampshire, where Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, faces a potentially challenging re-election bid, Republicans have proposed to scrap the ballot-scanning machines that the state has used for decades in favor of hand-counting.That bill — introduced by Mark Alliegro, a Republican state representative who declined to comment about it — has drawn opposition from Democrats, who say that a lengthy delay between Election Day and the results would create an opening for those who want to challenge the election’s legitimacy.“Republicans are trying to sow distrust and discord in the process,” said Matt Wilhelm, a Democratic state representative. “If they’ve got an additional window of time of hours, days, weeks when Granite Staters don’t know the results of the election that they just participated in, that’s going to cast doubt on our democratic institutions.”A separate G.O.P. bill in New Hampshire introduced in the legislature’s prefiling portal contained a brief description: “Provide that only residents of the state may vote in elections.”Republicans have long tried to tighten residency requirements in New Hampshire, whose small population means that the elimination of even relatively small numbers of college students from the voter rolls could help give the G.O.P. an edge in close elections. This year, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected a 2017 state law requiring proof of residence to vote.A spokeswoman for Regina Birdsell, the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, said that it was “currently in draft form” and that Ms. Birdsell would not comment until the language had been finalized.Ballot-counting machines used in New Hampshire’s 2020 election were transported in May for a review of the results. A Republican proposal would scrap the machines in favor of hand-counting.Josh Reynolds/Associated PressIn Georgia, a plan by Republicans in the state legislature to restructure the government of Gwinnett County would effectively undercut the voting power of people of color in an increasingly Democratic area.Gwinnett, which includes northeastern suburbs of Atlanta, has swung from full Republican control to full Democratic control over four years, culminating last year with the selection of the first Black woman to oversee the county commission. President Biden carried the county by 18 percentage points last year.But last month, Clint Dixon, a Republican state senator, filed two bills that would allow the G.O.P.-led legislature to roughly double the size of the county’s Democratic-led board of commissioners and redraw new districts for the school board — moves that Democrats and civil rights leaders said would essentially go over the heads of voters who elected those officials.The changes would keep the county in Democratic control, but would most likely guarantee multiple safe Republican districts, including some that would be predominantly white despite the county’s diversity.After an outcry on the left, Republicans pushed the bills to the January session.Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county’s board of commissioners, said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”Mr. Dixon defended the bills, asserting that with more commissioners, voters would have more representation and elected leaders would be more accountable.“I don’t see any kind of swing back to a Republican majority; it has nothing to do with a power grab,” he said in an interview. “I think at that local level, local governance is intended at lower populations.”Investigating the 2020 election also remains a focus of many Republican state lawmakers.At least five states are pursuing partisan reviews of the 2020 election, and Republicans in states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida have introduced bills to begin new ones next year.“There was suspiciously high voter turnout that broke all projections,” said Nathan Dahm, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who sponsored a bill to review the results. “That alone is not enough to say that there absolutely was fraud, but it was suspicious enough to say that maybe there are some questions there.”Lawmakers will be aided in writing new voting bills by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, which helped craft some of the 2020 legislation. A spokeswoman for the group said it would continue to push for measures including more maintenance of voting rolls; increased authority for poll watchers; reductions in the use of absentee ballots; more power for state legislatures in the election process; and additional voter identification regulations.Republicans around the country have highlighted polling that shows broad bipartisan support for some voter identification requirements.Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, has called for the state’s legislature to pass a bill that would require a state or federal photo ID to vote.“The idea that the voters of my state are too stupid to follow a simple photo ID requirement like this is ridiculous and ludicrous,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ashcroft noted that the Missouri bill would not ban people without IDs from voting; they would be allowed to vote provisionally and their ballots would be validated through signature matching.Voting rights leaders like Ms. Abrams, meanwhile, have sought to frame the issue as one that should transcend politics.“This isn’t simply about who wins or loses an election,” she said. “It is about what type of nation we intend to be. And are there consequences for undermining and breaking our system of government?” More

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      Wisconsin Republicans Push to Take Over the State’s Elections

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      Led by Senator Ron Johnson, G.O.P. officials want to eliminate a bipartisan elections agency — and maybe send its members to jail.Republicans in Wisconsin are engaged in an all-out assault on the state’s election system, building off their attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential race by pressing to give themselves full control over voting in the state.The Republican effort — broader and more forceful than that in any other state where allies of former President Donald J. Trump are trying to overhaul elections — takes direct aim at the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, an agency Republicans created half a decade ago that has been under attack since the chaotic aftermath of last year’s election.The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.Then the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state” should determine whether to bring charges.And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His suggestion was nonetheless echoed by Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who is conducting the Legislature’s election inquiry.Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.“Do I expect Democrats to follow the rules?” said the senator, who over the past year has promoted fringe theories on topics like the Capitol riot and Covid vaccines. “Unfortunately, I probably don’t expect them to follow the rules. And other people don’t either, and that’s the problem.”Senator Ron Johnson said that Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin should unilaterally assert control of federal elections.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe uproar over election administration in Wisconsin — where the last two presidential contests have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes each — is heightened by the state’s deep divisions and its pivotal place in American politics.Some top Republican officials in Wisconsin privately acknowledge that their colleagues are playing to the party’s base by calling for state election officials to be charged with felonies or for their authority to be usurped by lawmakers.Adding to the uncertainty, Mr. Johnson’s proposal has not yet been written into legislation in Madison. Mr. Evers has vowed to stop it.“The outrageous statements and ideas Wisconsin Republicans have embraced aren’t about making our elections stronger, they’re about making it more difficult for people to participate in the democratic process,” Mr. Evers said Thursday. The G.O.P.’s election proposals, he added, “are nothing more than a partisan power grab.”Yet there is no guarantee that the Republican push will fall short legally or politically. The party’s lawmakers in other states have made similar moves to gain more control over election apparatus. And since the G.O.P. won control of the Wisconsin Legislature in 2010, the state has served as an incubator for conservative ideas exported to other places.“In Wisconsin we’re heading toward a showdown over the meaning of the clause that says state legislatures should set the time, manner and place of elections,” said Kevin J. Kennedy, who spent 34 years as Wisconsin’s chief election officer before Republicans eliminated his agency and replaced it with the elections commission in 2016. “If not in Wisconsin, in some other state they’re going to push this and try to get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this.”Next year, Wisconsin will host critical elections for Mr. Johnson’s Senate seat and for statewide offices, including the governor. Rebecca Kleefisch, the leading Republican in the race to challenge Mr. Evers, is running on a platform of eliminating the state election commission. (On Monday, she filed a lawsuit against the agency asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare that the commission’s guidance violates state law.)The Republican anger at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a body of three Democrats and three Republicans that G.O.P. lawmakers created in part to eliminate the investigatory powers of its predecessor agency, comes nearly 20 months after commissioners issued guidance to local election clerks on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.Republicans have seized in particular on a March 2020 commission vote lifting a rule that required special voting deputies — trained and dispatched by municipal clerks’ offices — to visit nursing homes twice before issuing absentee ballots to residents. The special voting deputies, like most other visitors, were barred from entering nursing homes early in the pandemic, and the commission reasoned that there was not enough time before the April primary election to require them to be turned away before mailing absentee ballots.The vote was relatively uncontroversial at the time: No lawsuits from Republicans or anyone else challenged the guidance. The procedure remained in place for the general election in November.But after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast, Republicans began making evidence-free claims of fraudulent votes cast from nursing homes across the state. Sheriff Christopher Schmaling of Racine County said the five state election commissioners who had voted to allow clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing homes without the visit by special voting deputies — as is prescribed by state law — should face felony charges for election fraud and misconduct in office.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who represents Racine County, quickly concurred, saying that the five commissioners — including his own appointee to the panel — should “probably” face felony charges.The commissioners have insisted they broke no laws.Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who is the commission’s chairwoman, said she had no regrets about making voting easier during the pandemic and added that “even my Republican colleagues” were afraid about the future of fair elections in the state.“We did everything we could during the pandemic to help people vote,” she said. Mr. Johnson — a two-term senator who said he would announce a decision on whether to seek re-election “in the next few weeks” — is lobbying Republican state legislators, with whom he met last week at the State Capitol, to take over federal elections.“The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Mr. Johnson said. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”Mr. Johnson acknowledged that his proposal could leave the state with dueling sets of election regulations, one from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and another from the Legislature.“I suppose some counties will handle it one way and other counties will handle it another,” he said.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      The Steele Dossier Indicted the Media

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      On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed News published a photo rendition of a 35-page memo titled “U.S. Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship With the Kremlin.”Those who were online that evening remember the jolt. Yes, these were just allegations, but perhaps this was the Rosetta Stone of Trump corruption, touching everything from dodgy real estate negotiations to a sordid hotel-room tryst, all tied together by the president-elect’s obeisance to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.Sure, the memo provided little hard evidence or specific detail, but, BuzzFeed said, it had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government” and had “acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials.” This, along with tantalizing tidbits like “Source A confided” or “confirmed by Source E,” gave it a patina of authenticity, especially to those unaware that spycraft often involves chasing unverified information down dead ends. Any caveats — even BuzzFeed’s own opening description of the allegations as “explosive but unverified” — could be dismissed as a kind of obligatory cautiousness.That memo, soon to become known as the “Steele dossier” when a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele was publicly identified as its author, would inspire a slew of juicy, and often thinly sourced, articles and commentaries about Mr. Trump and Russia.Now it has been largely discredited by two federal investigations and the indictment of a key source, leaving journalists to reckon how, in the heat of competition, so many were taken in so easily because the dossier seemed to confirm what they already suspected.Many of the dossier’s allegations have turned out to be fictitious or, at best, unprovable. That wasn’t for want of trying by reporters from mainstream and progressive media outlets. Many journalists did show restraint. The New York Times’s Adam Goldman was asked by the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple about two years ago how reporters should have approached an unverified rumor from the dossier. He responded, “By not publishing.”Others couldn’t wait to dive in.Two reporters in McClatchy’s Washington bureau, for example, wrote that the special counsel Robert Mueller had found evidence for one of the most tantalizing bits of the dossier, that Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen secretly visited Prague during the 2016 campaign. That would have been a key link in the claim that he was there to coordinate campaign strategy with the Russians. It wasn’t true.Over time, the standards for proof diminished to the point that if something couldn’t be proved to be false, the assumption was that it was probably true. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow once put it: A number of the elements “remain neither verified nor proven false, but none so far have been publicly disproven.”Or journalists would take Mr. Trump’s other serious misdeeds and tie them to the dossier. So his alleged sexual relationship with Stormy Daniels, who appeared in pornographic films, became the backup for the dossier’s claim of a lurid round with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. “The count is growing higher and higher of porn actresses,” Slate’s editor at the time, Jacob Weisberg, said on MSNBC, adding, “The whole picture starts to be more plausible, the picture that’s painted in the dossier.” Natasha Bertrand, who was then a staff writer at The Atlantic, chimed in, “It makes it much more plausible that Trump did go to Russia and he did have these kinds of sexual escapades with prostitutes.”The dossier’s credibility suffered a grievous blow in December 2019, when an investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general found that F.B.I. investigations “raised doubts about the reliability of some of Steele’s reports.” The F.B.I. “also assessed the possibility that Russia was funneling disinformation to Steele,” the report said, adding that “certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered” by investigators.Then, this month, a primary source of Mr. Steele’s was arrested and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about how he obtained information that appeared in the dossier. Prosecutors say that the source, Igor Danchenko, did not, as The Wall Street Journal first reported, get his information from a self-proclaimed real estate partner of Mr. Trump’s. That prompted a statement promising further examination from The Journal and something far more significant from The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee. She took a step that is almost unheard-of: removing large chunks of erroneous articles from 2017 and 2019, as well as an offending video.So where did much of the press go wrong?The first problem was this: There is no doubt that Mr. Trump had long curried Mr. Putin’s favor and that he and his family were eager to do business in Russia. Moreover, Mr. Mueller showed, and filed indictments that explained, how the Russians interfered in the 2016 campaign by targeting voter-registration systems, hacking into Democrats’ emails and taking advantage of Facebook and other social media companies to foment dissent and unrest.Mr. Trump’s choice of Paul Manafort to serve as his campaign chairman reinforced the idea that he was in the thrall of Russia. Those fears were borne out when a bipartisan Senate committee found Mr. Manafort to be a “grave counterintelligence threat” because of his ties to a Kremlin agent. So, given all those connections, it was easy to assume that the dossier’s allegations must also be true. The distinction between what journalists assume and what we verify is often the difference between fiction and reality.Journalists also had to deal with the fact that many of the denials came from confirmed liars. The night that BuzzFeed went live with the dossier, Mr. Cohen told the website Mic that the material was “so ridiculous on so many levels” and that “this fake-news nonsense needs to stop.” (Mr. Cohen later pleaded guilty to federal charges including lying to banks and Congress, but even after he provided evidence against Mr. Trump, he said the Prague allegation was false.)The day after the dossier came out, Mr. Trump told reporters: “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen.” (Washington Post fact-checkers would eventually catalog more than 30,000 Trump falsehoods during his term in the White House.) When a well-known liar tells you that something is false, the instinct is to believe that it might well be true.The situation also became complicated because some reporters simply didn’t like or trust Mr. Trump or didn’t want to appear to be on his side. He had been berating journalists as charlatans while seeking their acclaim; calling on legislators to “open up our libel laws” to make it easier to sue news organizations; and launching personal attacks, especially on female reporters of color. In a perfect world, journalists would treat people they don’t like the same way they treat those they do like, but this is not a perfect world.As the former Times reporter Barry Meier writes in his book “Spooked,” “Plenty of reporters were skeptical of the dossier, but they hesitated to dismiss it, because they didn’t want to look like they were carrying water for Trump or his cronies.”None of this should minimize the endemic and willful deceptions of the right-wing press. From Fox News’s downplaying of the Covid-19 threat to OAN’s absurd defense of Mr. Trump’s lies about the election, conservative media outlets have built their own echo chamber, to the detriment of the country.But news organizations that uncritically amplified the Steele dossier ought to come to terms with their records, sooner or later. This is hard, but it’s not unprecedented. When The Miami Herald broke the news in 1987 that the Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart was seeing a woman other than his wife, the paper followed that scoop with a 7,000-plus-word examination of its investigation, which showed significant flaws in how the paper surveilled its target.More than two decades ago, after New York Times articles identified a scientist at Los Alamos as being investigated for having a role in a spying scheme, which federal investigators were unable to substantiate, the paper ran both an extensive editors’ note and an article that included details about how its reporting had gone astray.Newsrooms that can muster an independent, thorough examination of how they handled the Steele dossier story will do their audience, and themselves, a big favor. They can also scrutinize whether, by focusing so heavily on the dossier, they helped distract public attention from Mr. Trump’s actual misconduct. Addressing the shortcomings over the dossier doesn’t mean ignoring the corruption and democracy-shattering conduct that the Trump administration pushed for four years. But it would mean coming to terms with our conduct and whatever collateral damage these errors have caused to our reputation.In the meantime, journalists could follow the advice I once got from Paul Steiger, who was the managing editor of The Journal when I was editing articles for the front page. Several of us went to his office one day, eager to publish a big scoop that he believed wasn’t rock solid. Mr. Steiger told us to do more reporting — and when we told him that we’d heard competitors’ footsteps, he responded, “Well, there are worse things in this world than getting beaten on a story.”Bill Grueskin, a professor of professional practice and former academic dean at Columbia Journalism School, has held senior editing positions at The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Bloomberg News.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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      Chris Christie Wants the Post-Trump G.O.P. to Move Past 2020

      by

      In a new book and in an interview, Mr. Christie says that if the former president wants to be a positive force, “he’s got to let this other stuff go.”Chris Christie wants to be very clear about something: The election of 2020 was not stolen.“An election for president was held on November 3, 2020. Joe Biden won. Donald Trump did not,” Mr. Christie writes in his new book, “Republican Rescue: Saving the Party From Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.”“That is the truth. Any claim to the contrary is untrue,” Mr. Christie says.It is not a popular view in the Republican Party right now, as Mr. Trump has promoted his baseless claims of widespread election fraud for more than a year, and as many Republicans have either echoed those claims or averted their gaze.But it’s a view that Mr. Christie has been repeating since Election Day, as he urges the G.O.P. — and Mr. Trump — to move on from looking backward.“It’s not a book about him,” Mr. Christie said in a recent interview about the book, which will be released on Wednesday. “It’s a book about where we go from here and why it is important for us to let go of the past.”Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie was blunt: “If he wants to be a positive force in the future, he’s got to let this other stuff go. If he doesn’t, I don’t think he can be.”Mr. Christie pointed to the Virginia governor’s race and Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the state party convention without Mr. Trump’s endorsement and then kept him at bay during the general election. Mr. Youngkin ultimately defeated his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe.Mr. Christie said the Youngkin victory knocks down “this idea that if you don’t agree with Donald Trump on everything, and pledge unfettered fealty to him, then you can’t win because his voters quote unquote won’t come out to vote,” Mr. Christie said. “No candidate owns voters. They don’t.”He described Mr. Trump’s conduct in the year since he left office — and the anxiety felt by lawmakers who worry about crossing him — in stark terms. “Donald Trump’s own conduct is meant to instill fear,” he said.Mr. Christie is a former governor of New Jersey, a former presidential candidate and a possible future one. He was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016 after he ended his own national candidacy, was a potential vice-presidential candidate, led Mr. Trump’s transition effort until he was fired from that role and helped lead Mr. Trump’s opioids commission.He was with Mr. Trump throughout a tumultuous presidency, a fact that Mr. Christie’s critics say makes his critiques too late to be meaningful. Mr. Christie argues that his support for Mr. Trump, and their 15-year friendship before that, makes him a credible critic.“I think it was really important for people to understand why I did support the president for so long,” Mr. Christie said. “And the reason was, because I generally agreed with the policies that he was pursuing.” When they would argue over the years, he added, “it was rarely over policy.”Mr. Christie was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThe arguments were generally over how things were handled, Mr. Christie added, citing Mr. Trump’s throwing of “bouquets” at President Xi Jinping of China as an example. Being generous with Mr. Xi when the Chinese government was withholding information about the coronavirus was “unacceptable,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Christie does not blame Mr. Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 for the violence that followed at the Capitol by his supporters. He said instead that it was the months of Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him that instilled anger in those who believed him.The responsibility for what happened “was months long in coming,” he said. “As a leader, you need to know that there are consequences to the words you use. And that those consequences at times can be stuff that you may not even be able to anticipate. I don’t believe he anticipated that people would cause violence up on Capitol Hill. But I don’t think he thought about it, either.”Mr. Christie began road-testing his themes in a speech at the Reagan presidential library in September, during which he didn’t name Mr. Trump. When he spoke again at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Nevada last weekend, Mr. Trump took notice, and delivered a broadside that his aides intended as a warning shot.Mr. Christie “was just absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 Election Fraud,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that also attacked Mr. Christie for a low approval rating, which Mr. Trump mischaracterized by half.Mr. Christie said that Mr. Trump should focus less on “personal vendetta,” and added, “I just think if he wants to have that kind of conversation about me then I’m going to point out that I got 60 percent of the vote in a blue state with 51 percent of the Hispanic vote.”Mr. Christie said he would not make a decision about running for president in 2024 until after the midterm elections in 2022. He said that Mr. Trump would not factor into his thinking and that he would not rule out supporting the former president if he saw no path for himself.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      Chris Christie Wants the Post-Trump G.O.P. to Move Past Trump

      by

      In a new book and in an interview, Mr. Christie says that if the former president wants to be a positive force, “he’s got to let this other stuff go.”Chris Christie wants to be very clear about something: The election of 2020 was not stolen.“An election for president was held on November 3, 2020. Joe Biden won. Donald Trump did not,” Mr. Christie writes in his new book, “Republican Rescue: Saving the Party From Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.”“That is the truth. Any claim to the contrary is untrue,” Mr. Christie says.It is not a popular view in the Republican Party right now, as Mr. Trump has promoted his baseless claims of widespread election fraud for more than a year, and as many Republicans have either echoed those claims or averted their gaze.But it’s a view that Mr. Christie has been repeating since Election Day, as he urges the G.O.P. — and Mr. Trump — to move on from looking backward.“It’s not a book about him,” Mr. Christie said in a recent interview about the book, which will be released on Wednesday. “It’s a book about where we go from here and why it is important for us to let go of the past.”Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie was blunt: “If he wants to be a positive force in the future, he’s got to let this other stuff go. If he doesn’t, I don’t think he can be.”Mr. Christie pointed to the Virginia governor’s race and Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the state party convention without Mr. Trump’s endorsement and then kept him at bay during the general election. Mr. Youngkin ultimately defeated his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe.Mr. Christie said the Youngkin victory knocks down “this idea that if you don’t agree with Donald Trump on everything, and pledge unfettered fealty to him, then you can’t win because his voters quote unquote won’t come out to vote,” Mr. Christie said. “No candidate owns voters. They don’t.”He described Mr. Trump’s conduct in the year since he left office — and the anxiety felt by lawmakers who worry about crossing him — in stark terms. “Donald Trump’s own conduct is meant to instill fear,” he said.Mr. Christie is a former governor of New Jersey, a former presidential candidate and a possible future one. He was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016 after he ended his own national candidacy, was a potential vice-presidential candidate, led Mr. Trump’s transition effort until he was fired from that role and helped lead Mr. Trump’s opioids commission.He was with Mr. Trump throughout a tumultuous presidency, a fact that Mr. Christie’s critics say makes his critiques too late to be meaningful. Mr. Christie argues that his support for Mr. Trump, and their 15-year friendship before that, makes him a credible critic.“I think it was really important for people to understand why I did support the president for so long,” Mr. Christie said. “And the reason was, because I generally agreed with the policies that he was pursuing.” When they would argue over the years, he added, “it was rarely over policy.”Mr. Christie was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThe arguments were generally over how things were handled, Mr. Christie added, citing Mr. Trump’s throwing of “bouquets” at President Xi Jinping of China as an example. Being generous with Mr. Xi when the Chinese government was withholding information about the coronavirus was “unacceptable,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Christie does not blame Mr. Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 for the violence that followed at the Capitol by his supporters. He said instead that it was the months of Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him that instilled anger in those who believed him.The responsibility for what happened “was months long in coming,” he said. “As a leader, you need to know that there are consequences to the words you use. And that those consequences at times can be stuff that you may not even be able to anticipate. I don’t believe he anticipated that people would cause violence up on Capitol Hill. But I don’t think he thought about it, either.”Mr. Christie began road-testing his themes in a speech at the Reagan presidential library in September, during which he didn’t name Mr. Trump. When he spoke again at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Nevada last weekend, Mr. Trump took notice, and delivered a broadside that his aides intended as a warning shot.Mr. Christie “was just absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 Election Fraud,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that also attacked Mr. Christie for a low approval rating, which Mr. Trump mischaracterized by half.Mr. Christie said that Mr. Trump should focus less on “personal vendetta,” and added, “I just think if he wants to have that kind of conversation about me then I’m going to point out that I got 60 percent of the vote in a blue state with 51 percent of the Hispanic vote.”Mr. Christie said he would not make a decision about running for president in 2024 until after the midterm elections in 2022. He said that Mr. Trump would not factor into his thinking and that he would not rule out supporting the former president if he saw no path for himself.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More