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      Ron DeSantis and Republicans’ Mar-a-Lago Playbook

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      Republican politicians weighing how to react to the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago last week had several options. Boiled down, they were:1. Immediately denounce it as a “witch hunt” and threaten to investigate or even defund the bureau, while calling for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s impeachment.2. Issue a cautious, place-holder statement expressing confidence in the process while sounding a note of concern about the potential for Justice Department overreach. Say little that could become embarrassing should more facts emerge that portray the former president’s conduct in a negative light.3. Criticize Trump as having jeopardized the national security of the United States. Call on him to release the search warrant and explain what agents might have been looking for, and why he had not returned the documents they were seeking.4. Await more information before commenting at all.To defend or not to defend?The political dilemma was particularly acute for Republicans who aspire to run for president in 2024 — requiring a high-wire act worthy of the Flying Wallendas.Enter Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who is widely viewed as Trump’s most serious potential rival in a Republican primary race. The political world watches DeSantis’s every move nowadays, and many awaited his reaction to the search with bated breath.Sometimes, mischief ensues.In a clever but dishonest bit of online skulduggery, someone spliced together two separate videos to make it seem as if DeSantis had defended the F.B.I. The manipulated video, which circulated widely on social media, purports to show DeSantis tangling with Sean Hannity over the Fox News host’s use of the word “raid” to describe the F.B.I.’s actions.“It’s not a raid,” DeSantis says in the edited video, adding, “they were serving valid process in accordance with the laws and Constitution of the United States.”It would have been an explosive moment — the first real fireworks of the shadow 2024 presidential primary.But it never happened.In reality, DeSantis had been defending a 2020 search by law enforcement officers of the home of Rebekah Jones, a former data specialist for the state of Florida who had claimed that the DeSantis administration was manipulating information about the coronavirus pandemic.Hannity, for one, called the video “FAKE NEWS” and demanded that Twitter remove it.What DeSantis actually said was this tweet:“The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves,” DeSantis wrote. “Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.”Note what was missing here: any defense of Trump’s conduct. DeSantis made similar remarks at a rally on Sunday for Kari Lake and Blake Masters, the Republican nominees for governor and Senate in Arizona — criticizing the Justice Department and raising examples of what he characterized as F.B.I. misconduct, while remaining silent on the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.DeSantis and Trump hats at a Turning Point USA event in Tampa, Fla., in July.Marco Bello/ReutersThe DeSantis danceDavid Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress from Florida, said the “dance” between DeSantis and Trump was quietly consuming both camps behind the scenes.Trump has periodically noted — accurately — that he remains the most popular Republican in hypothetical 2024 primary matchups, with DeSantis a distant second. But the two have yet to spar in earnest. More

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      The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law

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      This article has been updated to include new information about a man who attempted to breach an F.B.I. field office.It took many accidents, catastrophes, misjudgments and mistakes for Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016. Two particularly important errors came from James Comey, then the head of the F.B.I., who was excessively worried about what Trump’s supporters would think of the resolution of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.First, in July 2016, Comey broke protocol to give a news conference in which he criticized Clinton even while announcing that she’d committed no crime. He reportedly did this because he wanted to protect the reputation of the F.B.I. from inevitable right-wing claims that the investigation had been shut down for political reasons.Then, on Oct. 28, just days before the election, Comey broke protocol again, telling Congress that the Clinton investigation had been reopened because of emails found on the laptop of the former congressman Anthony Weiner. The Justice Department generally discourages filing charges or taking “overt investigative steps” close to an election if they might influence the result. Comey disregarded this because, once again, he dreaded a right-wing freakout once news of the reopened investigation emerged.“The prospect of oversight hearings, led by restive Republicans investigating an F.B.I. ‘cover-up,’ made everyone uneasy,” The New Yorker reported. In Comey’s memoir, he admitted fearing that concealing the new stage of the investigation — which ended up yielding nothing — would make Clinton, who he assumed would win, seem “illegitimate.” (He didn’t, of course, feel similarly compelled to make public the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.)Comey’s attempts to pre-empt a conservative firestorm blew up in his face. He helped put Trump in the White House, where Trump did generational damage to the rule of law and led us to a place where prominent Republicans are calling for abolishing the F.B.I.This should be a lesson about the futility of shaping law enforcement decisions around the sensitivities of Trump’s base. Yet after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Trump’s beachfront estate this week, some intelligent people have questioned the wisdom of subjecting the former president to the normal operation of the law because of the effect it will have on his most febrile admirers.Andrew Yang, one of the founders of a new centrist third party, tweeted about the “millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution.” Damon Linker, usually one of the more sensible centrist thinkers, wrote, “Rather than healing the country’s civic wounds, the effort to punish Trump will only deepen them.”The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta described feeling “nauseous” watching coverage of the raid. “What we must acknowledge — even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law — is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences,” he wrote.In some sense, Alberta’s words are obviously true; Trumpists are already issuing death threats against the judge who signed off on the warrant, and a Shabbat service at his synagogue was reportedly canceled because of the security risk. On Thursday, an armed man tried to breach an F.B.I. field office in Ohio, and The New York Times reported that he appears to have attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The former president relishes his ability to stir up a mob; it’s part of what makes him so dangerous.We already know, however, that the failure to bring Trump to justice — for his company’s alleged financial chicanery and his alleged sexual assault, for obstructing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and turning the presidency into a squalid influence-peddling operation, for trying to steal an election and encouraging an insurrection — has been disastrous.What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.We do not know the scope of the investigation that led a judge to authorize the search of Mar-a-Lago, though it reportedly involves classified documents that Trump failed to turn over to the government even after being subpoenaed. More could be revealed soon: Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department had filed a motion in court to unseal the search warrant.It should go without saying that Trump and his followers, who howled “Lock her up!” about Clinton, do not believe that it is wrong for the Justice Department to pursue a probe against a presidential contender over the improper handling of classified material. What they believe is that it is wrong to pursue a case against Trump, who bonds with his acolytes through a shared sense of aggrieved victimization.The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, Trump’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?It was Trump himself who signed a law making the removal and retention of classified documents a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Those who think that it would be too socially disruptive to apply such a statute to him should specify which laws they believe the former president is and is not obliged to obey. And those in charge of enforcing our laws should remember that the caterwauling of the Trump camp is designed to intimidate them and such intimidation helped him become president in the first place.Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because of politics, but he also shouldn’t be spared because of them. The only relevant question is whether he committed a crime, not what crimes his devotees might commit if he’s held to account.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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      F.B.I. Seizure of Scott Perry’s Phone Is Sign of Escalating Election Inquiry

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      Representative Scott Perry’s lawyer said he was told he is not a target of the Justice Department’s expanding inquiry into one element of the effort to keep Donald J. Trump in power after his loss in 2020.The F.B.I.’s seizure of Representative Scott Perry’s phone this week was at least the third major action in recent months taken in connection with an escalating federal investigation into efforts by several close allies of former President Donald J. Trump to overturn the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.The inquiry, which was begun last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office, has already ensnared Jeffrey Clark, a former department official whom Mr. Trump wanted to install atop the agency to help him press his baseless claims of election fraud, and John Eastman, an outside lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on brazen proposals to overturn the vote result.In June, federal agents acting on search warrants from the inspector general’s office seized phones and other electronic devices from Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman. That same tactic was used on Tuesday to seize the phone of Mr. Perry, a Republican of Pennsylvania.While the inspector general’s office had initial jurisdiction in the probe because Mr. Clark was an employee of the department, there have been signs in recent days that the investigation is increasingly being run by prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. One of those prosecutors, Thomas P. Windom, is in charge of a broad investigation of a plan by Mr. Trump and his allies to create fake slates of electors to the Electoral College in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.It remains unclear exactly how — or even if — the inquiry into Mr. Perry, Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman is entwined with the broader investigation. In that inquiry, prosecutors are seeking to determine whether a group of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and several of his allies in state legislatures and state Republican parties broke the law by creating pro-Trump slates of electors in states he did not win and later by using them to disrupt a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, where the final results of the election were certified.Mr. Clark, Mr. Eastman and Mr. Perry all played roles in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office, according to extensive evidence gathered by the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House select committee that is looking into the events of Jan. 6. The men also each had direct dealings with Mr. Trump, meaning the inquiry could ultimately lead to the former president.At a series of public hearings, the House committee showed, for instance, how Mr. Eastman, a constitutional scholar, was one of the chief architects of the fake elector plan, advising Mr. Trump on its viability and encouraging lawmakers in some key swing states to go along with it.Mr. Eastman also took part in a campaign to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use the fake slates of electors to disrupt or delay the normal counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 in the effort to hand Mr. Trump the election.A video clip of John Eastman speaking at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, with Rudolph W. Giuliani. The House committee showed Mr. Eastman, a constitutional scholar, was one of the chief architects of the fake elector plan seeking to overturn the 2020 election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Jan. 6 panel have further documented how, in December 2020, Mr. Clark helped to draft a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia falsely claiming that the Justice Department had evidence that the vote results in the state might have been marred by fraud. The letter, which was never sent, advised Mr. Kemp, a Republican, to rectify the problem by calling a special session of his state’s General Assembly to create “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”Mr. Perry was instrumental in pushing Mr. Trump to appoint Mr. Clark as his acting attorney general over the objections of several other top officials at the Justice Department. At one of its presentations, the House committee released text messages in which Mr. Perry repeatedly pressured Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, to reach out to Mr. Clark.The House committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Perry in May, but he declined to comply with it. Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman were also subpoenaed by the committee and repeatedly invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.On Wednesday, after Mr. Perry received his phone back from investigators, prosecutors told him that he was a witness in, not a subject of, their inquiry, according to one of his lawyers, John Irving. More

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      Republicans Rally Behind Trump, Who Reprises Favored Role: Victim

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      Arguments used against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 email inquiry are long forgotten as G.O.P. officials rush to condemn the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago.WASHINGTON — Republicans sought Tuesday to turn the F.B.I.’s search of Donald J. Trump’s Florida home into a rallying point, positioning the former president in his political comfort zone as a partisan target and victim, while effectively suspending the party’s efforts to focus on other issues heading into the midterm elections.The immediacy with which Republicans closed ranks and focused on the political ramifications of the search of Mar-a-Lago — without a full understanding of the direction of the F.B.I.’s investigation or the potential criminality that could be uncovered — underscored Mr. Trump’s role as keystone of the party, the single figure upon whom its elected leaders and midterm candidates depend most heavily for support.Some party officials tried to channel conservatives’ rage about the search of the former president’s winter home into productive energy for the coming midterms. Within hours of the news that Mr. Trump’s home had been searched, the Republican National Committee texted an urgent appeal about the search to supporters asking for cash to “take back Congress.”Mr. Trump also sought to capitalize financially. His political committee, Save America, followed Tuesday morning with a fund-raising text message suggesting that the F.B.I. search was proof of a corrupt “radical left.” It added: “Return the power to the people! Will you fight with me?”J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, emailed supporters a fund-raising pitch about the F.B.I. search.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesAnd in Ohio, J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate, who has struggled to match the fund-raising strength of his Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, emailed supporters an appeal about the F.B.I. search that included two siren emojis and a request to donate and “Join the Trump Strategy Team,” though the money went to the Vance campaign.Republicans largely ignored the possibility of any wrongdoing on the former president’s part, and the fact that law enforcement agents would have had to show probable cause that a crime had been committed in order to obtain a search warrant. The search appeared to be focused on material that the former president had brought with him from the White House, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.The Republican rush to judgment amounted to a sharp reversal from their quick condemnation of Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s 2016 rival, during an F.B.I. investigation of her personal email system during her time as secretary of state. (Mrs. Clinton, for her part, was selling “But her emails” hats on Tuesday, in reference to that inquiry.)From comparisons to Nazi Germany to warnings that the nation was on the brink of becoming a “banana republic” or “third-world country,” Republicans drew from a short list of dire-sounding metaphors intended to maximize outrage among voters by contending, without knowing what investigators cited as their probable cause, that the pretext for the F.B.I. search was little more than a mere records-retention violation. Their words mostly echoed a statement from Mr. Trump on Monday evening.Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican overseeing his party’s Senate races this year, sounded nearly every one of those themes in an interview Tuesday on Fox News in which he made comparisons to the Nazi secret police, communist Russia and Latin American dictatorships.“This should scare the living daylights out of American citizens,” Mr. Scott said.Senator Rick Scott made comparisons to the Nazi secret police, communist Russia and Latin American dictatorships.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesOther top Republicans demanded answers from the F.B.I. and threatened investigations of the Justice Department should the party capture control of the House. And a group of House Republicans headed to Bedminster, N.J., for a previously scheduled dinner with Mr. Trump on Tuesday that abruptly turned into an opportunity for a symbolic show of solidarity.The search also prompted Mr. Trump’s potential rivals in 2024, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to fall in line and question the F.B.I.’s action. But even Mr. Trump’s critics in the party, such as Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, said the unprecedented search of a former president’s home required a public justification from the Biden administration.The speed with which Republicans have rallied around Mr. Trump threatened to drive the former president directly into the spotlight of the 2022 elections, something many party leaders had hoped to avoid.Republicans have sought to focus on rising inflation and President Biden’s poor approval ratings as key midterm issues, and have been divided over whether a presidential campaign from Mr. Trump would present an unhelpful distraction. In Kentucky on Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, sidestepped a question about the search, before issuing a statement Tuesday evening echoing other Republicans’ calls for “a thorough and immediate explanation.”But the F.B.I.’s decision to execute such a fraught and politically high-stakes search warrant further dimmed the hope of some Republican strategists working on key House and Senate races that the 2022 midterms could stay focused on the Democrats.Yet again, it was Mr. Trump dominating the news.Fox News aggressively reported the search, featuring overhead camera shots from above Mar-a-Lago and multiple interviews with Trump family members, including his son Eric and daughter-in-law, Lara, and former administration officials, such as Stephen Miller, his chief policy adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist. More

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      Garland Becomes Trump’s Target After F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago Search

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      The F.B.I. had scarcely decamped from Mar-a-Lago when former President Donald J. Trump’s allies, led by Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, began a bombardment of vitriol and threats against the man they see as a foe and foil: Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Mr. Garland, a bookish former judge who during his unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination in 2016 told senators that he did not have “a political bone” in his body, responded, as he so often does, by not responding.The Justice Department would not acknowledge the execution of a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s home on Monday, nor would Mr. Garland’s aides confirm his involvement in the decision or even whether he knew about the search before it was conducted. They declined to comment on every fact brought to their attention. Mr. Garland’s schedule this week is devoid of any public events where he could be questioned by reporters.Like a captain trying to keep from drifting out of the eye and into the hurricane, Mr. Garland is hoping to navigate the sprawling and multifaceted investigation into the actions of Mr. Trump and his supporters after the 2020 election without compromising the integrity of the prosecution or wrecking his legacy.Toward that end, the attorney general is operating with a maximum of stealth and a minimum of public comment, a course similar to the one charted by Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, during his two-year investigation of Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.That tight-lipped approach may avoid the pitfalls of the comparatively more public-facing investigations into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time. But it comes with its own peril — ceding control of the public narrative to Mr. Trump and his allies, who are not constrained by law, or even fact, in fighting back.“Garland has said that he wants his investigation to be apolitical, but nothing he does will stop Trump from distorting the perception of the investigation, given the asymmetrical rules,” said Andrew Weissmann, who was one of Mr. Mueller’s top aides in the special counsel’s office.“Under Justice Department policy, we were not allowed to take on those criticisms,” Mr. Weissmann added. “Playing by the Justice Department rules sadly but necessarily leaves the playing field open to this abuse.”Mr. Mueller’s refusal to engage with his critics, or even to defend himself against obvious smears and lies, allowed Mr. Trump to fill the political void with reckless accusations of a witch hunt while the special counsel confined his public statements to dense legal jargon. Mr. Trump’s broadsides helped define the Russia investigation as a partisan attack, despite the fact that Mr. Mueller was a Republican.Some of the most senior Justice Department officials making the decisions now have deep connections to Mr. Mueller and view Mr. Comey’s willingness to openly discuss his 2016 investigations related to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump as a gross violation of the Justice Manual, the department’s procedural guidebook.The Mar-a-Lago search warrant was requested by the Justice Department’s national security division, whose head, Matthew G. Olsen, served under Mr. Mueller when he was the F.B.I. director. In 2019, Mr. Olsen expressed astonishment that the publicity-shy Mr. Mueller was even willing to appear at a news conference announcing his decision to lay out Mr. Trump’s conduct but not recommend that he be prosecuted or held accountable for interfering in the Russia investigation.But people close to Mr. Garland say that while his team respects Mr. Mueller, they have learned from his mistakes. Mr. Garland, despite his silence this week, has made a point of talking publicly about the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on many occasions — even if it has only been to explain why he cannot talk publicly about the investigation.“I understand that this may not be the answer some are looking for,” he said during a speech marking the first anniversary of the Capitol attack. “But we will and we must speak through our work. Anything else jeopardizes the viability of our investigations and the civil liberties of our citizens.” More

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      The Politics of Searching a Former President’s Home

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      Experts on high-wire investigations say that the Justice Department would have carefully weighed the decision to poke around Mar-a-Lago — and that it might want to tell the public why it was necessary.The F.B.I. does not take a decision like searching the private home of a former president lightly.As Garrett Graff, the author of a biography of James Comey — the F.B.I. director who oversaw the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, then went on to run the Russia inquiry before Donald Trump fired him in 2017 — put it, “This was presumably the highest burden of proof that the Justice Department has ever required for a search warrant.”As a matter of political sensitivity, he said, the Mar-a-Lago search ranked with the subpoena of Richard Nixon’s secret Oval Office tapes and the decision to sample the DNA on Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress to see if it belonged to President Bill Clinton.Graff noted that the Justice Department’s “fumbling” of several aspects of its investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign and the controversy over its handling of the Clinton email investigation would probably raise the bar for what might prompt such a high-profile step this time around.Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., Attorney General Merrick Garland and their top deputies would be well aware of the minefields involved — including the possibility, as Trump proved on Monday when he announced the search in a news release, that it would draw the department into the very sort of political maelstrom Garland has sought to avoid.All of that suggests the investigation is both serious and fairly well advanced.In May, Garland reissued the department’s traditional guidance on politically sensitive investigations — and he kept the language approved by his predecessor as attorney general, Bill Barr. That move led someone to leak the memo to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, who criticized Garland for sticking with Barr’s policy.Former Justice Department officials said the search fell into a gray area, as Trump is not officially a candidate for anything at the moment. The policy, moreover, applies only to the coming midterm elections, not to the 2024 presidential election.But that’s just the technical, legal side of this move. Politics is another story.There are a few hints that Trump thinks — with some justification — that the search will help him secure the Republican nomination in 2024. First, he announced it himself. Second, Republicans have already rallied to his side. Third, there’s no sign that any of his putative rivals in the shadow G.O.P. primary are ready to throw him overboard just yet, which suggests that they fear crossing him.Consider Ted Cruz, who ran against Trump in 2016 and might do so again in 2024. On Tuesday afternoon, Cruz sent a text message to his supporters calling the search “a raw abuse of power.” He also accused the F.B.I. of becoming “the Democrat Party Police Force.” For good measure, he threw in a fund-raising link.News of the search is probably not helpful to Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, either. She has a tough primary next Tuesday, which she is widely expected to lose. Given Cheney’s role as vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, it’s likely many G.O.P. base voters will associate her with the F.B.I. search.As far as we know, however, that would be a mistaken impression; there’s no reason to think the bureau’s investigation has anything to do with Jan. 6, let alone with Cheney herself.Cheney’s opponent, Harriet Hageman, isn’t worried about the nuances. She tweeted this morning, in a tone that could have been written by the 45th president himself:If the FBI can treat a former President this way, imagine what they can do to the rest of us. It’s a 2-tiered justice system – one for elites & another for their political enemies. Like sending 87k IRS agents to harass citizens. Or the J6 committee. Political persecution!Attorney General Merrick Garland would be well aware of the minefields involved in the search of the private home of a former president.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMerrick Garland’s Trump dilemmaIn February 2021, when Garland testified before the Judiciary Committee ahead of his confirmation vote, he began his remarks by observing that “the president nominates the attorney general to be the lawyer — not for any individual, but for the people of the United States.”He added, in case anyone didn’t get the message, that he wanted to “reaffirm that the role of the attorney general is to serve the rule of law.” More

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      2020 Election Denier Will Run for Top Elections Position in Colorado

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      Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, has been stripped of her county election oversight but is seeking to oversee her state’s elections as secretary of state.A Republican county clerk in Colorado who was stripped of her responsibility of overseeing county elections is joining a growing movement of people throughout the country who spread false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election and want to oversee the next one.Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, who is facing accusations that she breached the security of voting machines, announced on Monday that she would run to be the top elections official in Colorado.At least three Republican challengers are already running to unseat the current Colorado secretary of state, Jena Griswold, a Democrat.Colorado is a purple state that President Biden won with 55 percent of the vote in 2020. The state’s primary is on June 28, and Colorado is one of 27 states whose top elections official will be on the ballot this year.In 2020, when former President Donald J. Trump and his allies sought to undo the results of the election, they focused their pressure campaign on these relatively little-known officeholders.“I am the wall between your vote and nationalized elections,” Ms. Peters said during an appearance Monday on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled former top aide to Mr. Trump. “They are coming after me because I am standing in their way — of truth, transparency and elections held closest to the people.”Ms. Griswold, who is also the head of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement on Monday that Ms. Peters was “unfit to be secretary of state and a danger to Colorado elections,” citing Ms. Peters’s attempts to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election.Ms. Peters did not immediately respond to telephone and email messages on Monday seeking comment.Elected in 2018, Ms. Peters took office as clerk and recorder of Mesa County, in far western Colorado, in 2019. By late 2021 a Mesa County Court judge had upheld Ms. Griswold’s removing Ms. Peters from overseeing elections in the county and replacing her with an appointee.In May of last year, Ms. Peters and two other people entered a secure area of a warehouse in Mesa County where crucial election information was stored. They copied hard drives and election-management software from voting machines, the authorities said.In early August, the conservative website Gateway Pundit posted passwords for the county’s election machines. In October Ms. Peters spoke at a gathering in South Dakota of people determined to show that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.The gathering also featured a large screen that, at one point, showed the software from the election machines in Mesa County.Ms. Griswold said her office had concluded that the passwords leaked out when Ms. Peters enlisted a staff member to accompany her to surreptitiously record a routine voting-machine maintenance procedure. State and county officials announced last month that a grand jury was looking into allegations of tampering with Mesa County election equipment and “official misconduct.”More recently, Ms. Peters was briefly detained by the police when she obstructed efforts by officials with the local district attorney to serve a search warrant for her iPad. Ms. Peters may have used the iPad to record a court proceeding related to one of her deputies, according to Stephanie Reecy, a spokeswoman for the county.In video of the Feb. 8 encounter, taken by a bystander and posted on Twitter, Ms. Peters can be heard repeatedly saying, “Let go of me,” as officers seek to detain her. “It hurts. Let go of me,” she says, before bending her leg and raising her foot toward the officer standing behind her.An officer responds, “Do not kick,” according to body camera video posted by KJCT News 8, a local station. “Do you understand?”Ms. Peters was charged with obstructing a peace officer and obstructing government operations, according to the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. She turned herself in to the authorities on Thursday, posted $500 bond and was released, according to county officials.“I still have the bruises on my arm where they manhandled me,” Ms. Peters told Mr. Bannon on Monday. Later she said: “I just want to say I love the people. That’s why I’m doing this.”Mr. Bannon said Ms. Peters had been targeted because of her fight against “this globalist apparatus.”“Thank you,” Ms. Peters told the host. “I’ll work hard for you guys.” More

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      'Special Master' to Decide if FBI Can Use Giuliani's Data

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      A federal judge in Manhattan on Friday ordered the appointment of a so-called special master to review whether materials seized from Rudolph W. Giuliani’s apartment and office during an F.B.I. search in April are protected by attorney-client privilege.The searches were part of a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine before the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Giuliani was President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time.Mr. Giuliani was seeking to uncover damaging information on President Biden, then a leading presidential candidate. The authorities are examining whether Mr. Giuliani was also lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were assisting him in his dirt-digging mission, The New York Times has reported.Mr. Giuliani has not been accused of any wrongdoing. He has said he never lobbied on behalf of the Ukrainians.The judge, J. Paul Oetken of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said the appointment of the special master — usually a retired judge or magistrate — was “warranted here to ensure the perception of fairness.”The special master would conduct a review to determine whether any of the material seized from Mr. Giuliani’s cellphones and computers was potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and should be made off-limits to prosecutors.In response to the ruling, one of Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers, Robert J. Costello, said, “We knew that a special master was inevitable, which is why we did not oppose it, so this ruling comes as no surprise to us.”The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had sought the appointment of the special master, declined to comment.Judge Oetken also denied Mr. Giuliani’s request for copies of the confidential government documents detailing the basis for the warrants issued in support of the searches in April, and an earlier search of Mr. Giuliani’s iCloud account. Typically, such records are only made available to defendants after they are indicted and before a trial.Mr. Giuliani was “not entitled to a preview of the government’s evidence in an ongoing investigation before he has been charged with a crime,” the judge said.Judge Oetken asked that the parties submit to the court proposed candidates for special master by next Friday.Ben Protess More