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      For Boris Johnson, a Chaotic Reign Ends With a Chaotic Exit

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      The risk-taking bravado of Britain’s colorful prime minister was not enough to compensate for his shortcomings, or overcome a catastrophic loss of party support.LONDON — The end, when it finally came, was just as chaotic, messy and jaw-dropping as every other chapter of Boris Johnson’s political career.Holed up in Downing Street on Wednesday night, the prime minister faced an open rebellion of his cabinet, a catastrophic loss of support in his Conservative Party and a wholesale exodus of ministers, which threatened to leave significant parts of the British government without functioning leadership.Yet far from surrendering, Mr. Johnson’s aides put out word that he would continue to fight. It looked like a last roll of the dice by one of the great gamblers in British politics. His brazen refusal to bow to reality invited comparisons to Donald J. Trump’s defiance in the chaotic days after he lost the 2020 presidential election.The British prime minister stepped down as Conservative Party leader after recent scandals prompted a wave of resignations from his top officials. He plans to stay on as prime minister until a successor is in place.Henry Nicholls/ReutersBy Thursday morning, however, political gravity had finally reasserted itself. For one of the few times in his career, Mr. Johnson was unable to bend the narrative to his advantage through the sheer force of his personality.At midday, the prime minister went to a lectern in front of 10 Downing Street to announce he was relinquishing the leadership of a party that no longer supported him, and giving up a job he had pursued for much of his adult life.“I want to tell you how sorry I am to be giving up the best job in the world,” Mr. Johnson said. Then, defusing the solemnity of the moment with a wry line from the pool halls of America, he added, “Them’s the breaks.”A crowd gathered outside Downing Street on Thursday morning to hear Mr. Johnson’s statement.Henry Nicholls/ReutersAs the political post-mortems on Mr. Johnson are written, the tumultuous events of the last week may come to encapsulate his career — one defined by a gleeful disregard for the rules, a shrewd instinct for public opinion, an elastic approach to ethics and a Falstaffian appetite for the cut-and-thrust of politics.“Most prime ministers would have gotten the message sooner,” said Andrew Gimson, one of Mr. Johnson’s biographers. “The element of exaggeration, of turning up the volume, is very characteristic of his style.”Mr. Gimson once likened Mr. Johnson to Admiral Nelson, the 18th-century naval hero who vanquished Napoleon in the Battle of Trafalgar. “Nelson said the boldest measures are the safest,” he said.In the end, however, Mr. Johnson’s risk-taking bravado was not enough to compensate for his shortcomings. He engaged in behavior that critics said revealed a sense of entitlement and a belief that the rules did not apply to him, his staff or his loyalists. Critics accused him of being disorganized, ideologically and administratively.After leading Britain out of the European Union in 2020, the prime minister did not have much of a plan for what to do next. He quickly became hostage to events, lurching from crisis to crisis as the coronavirus pandemic engulfed Britain. A pattern of scandals, which followed him throughout his career, soon overtook Downing Street.Mr. Johnson had long thrived by thumbing his nose at political convention. His disheveled crop of blonde hair seemed a metaphor for a messy personal and professional life, which some British voters savored while others merely tolerated it.Mr. Johnson preparing to appear on television in 2019. A journalist-turned-politician, he was able to fuse the forces of celebrity culture with an opportunistic, ideologically flexible approach to the issues.Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated PressBut Mr. Johnson’s lack of truthfulness finally caught up with him. His constantly shifting accounts of his conduct — whether in attending illicit parties at Downing Street during lockdowns, attempting to use a Tory Party donor to finance the costly refurbishment of his apartment, or promoting a Conservative lawmaker with a history of sexual misconduct allegations against him — finally exhausted the patience of his party and many voters.Mr. Johnson’s role in campaigning to leave the European Union, then carrying out Brexit and then seeing Britain through the pandemic, will guarantee him a place in the ranks of significant British prime ministers. Beyond that, he leaves behind a checkered policy legacy, and he never escaped suspicions that his agenda was driven not by ideological conviction but by the cynical calculation of what political advantages he could extract from it.In the end he may be most remembered for his confounding mix of strengths and weaknesses.From the start, Mr. Johnson represented something new in British politics. A journalist-turned-politician, he was able to fuse the forces of celebrity culture with an opportunistic, ideologically flexible approach to the issues. To most Britons, he was simply “Boris,” a first-name familiarity enjoyed by no other British politician.With his rumpled suits and untucked shirts, Mr. Johnson affected a louche, upper-class insouciance that somehow also connected with working-class voters. His antics as the mayor of London — he once famously dangled from a zip line above photographers, waving a pair of Union Jacks — turned him into a clown prince.But all the tomfoolery — aside from drawing attention to himself — also helped make him a serious electoral contender. With Britain caught up in an anguished debate over its future in the European Union, Mr. Johnson latched on to an issue that would propel him to the top of the Conservative Party. First, of course, he famously dithered about which side of the Brexit debate to embrace — leave or remain — drafting newspaper columns that made the case for both.With his rumpled suits and untucked shirts, Mr. Johnson affected a louche, upper-class insouciance that somehow also connected with working-class voters.Pool photo by Clemens BilanOnce he had thrown in his lot with “Vote Leave,” Mr. Johnson became an energetic campaigner. He helped win the 2016 referendum against European Union membership, used the issue to drive out the woman who became prime minister in its aftermath, Theresa May, and rode a promise to “Get Brexit Done” to a thrashing of the Labour Party in the 2019 general election.That victory, which awarded the Conservative Party its largest majority since 1987, emboldened Mr. Johnson when his standing collapsed under the weight of serial ethical scandals. He invoked his “colossal mandate” as a response to those who said he should step down, saying he owed it to his 14 million voters to go on.Unlike in the United States, however, Mr. Johnson governs in a parliamentary, not a presidential, system. Those 14 million people voted for the Conservative Party, not for Mr. Johnson, who merely served as the party’s leader, at the pleasure of its lawmakers. When they withdraw that support, the leader is replaced.At a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson pointedly declined to rule out trying to call an early general election — in effect, bypassing the Conservative Party to throw his fate back to the voters.That evening, a delegation of cabinet ministers and party officials traveled to Downing Street to appeal to Mr. Johnson to step down. He rejected their entreaties and instead fired one of his most senior ministers and allies, Michael Gove, who had been among those warning him that his time was up.The palace intrigue, combined with Mr. Johnson’s initial refusal to accept his situation, drew comparisons to Mr. Trump.“We have this habit in Britain of following American politics, a couple of years later,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. “We have ended up with a poor man’s Trump, in the form of Johnson.”The United States, Mr. Powell said, was still living with the aftereffects of Mr. Trump’s presidency. “In Britain, because our system is different, we should be in a position to heal more quickly,” he said. More

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      Blake Masters’ Political Posts in a CrossFit Chat Room Come Back to Haunt Him

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      As a Stanford student in 2007, the Arizona candidate, now 35, chose a CrossFit chat room to express his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II and downplay Al Qaeda as a threat to Americans.Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been dogged by a trail of youthful writings in which he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s.In the most recent examples, unearthed and provided to The New York Times by opponents of Mr. Masters, he took to the chat room of CrossFit, his workout of choice, as a Stanford undergraduate in 2007 to espouse views that might not sit well with the Republican electorate of 2022.As he had in other forums, Mr. Masters wrote on the CrossFit chat room that he opposed American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he conceded, “is harder to argue because of the hot button issue of the Holocaust (nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?).”He did not address Pearl Harbor or say whether he thought the United States should have ignored it.Also on the CrossFit chat room, Mr. Masters, then 20, argued that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not “constitute substantial threats to Americans.”“In my view, a true libertarian is anti all wars that are not strictly defensive, and with U.S. Military (many of our best men and women!) sadly stationed in 100+ countries and bombing several dozen since war was last declared, defense is not the name of the game,” he told his fellow CrossFit enthusiasts. “We ought to be more like the Swiss in this regard — decentralized and defensive.”Such views might well have fit with the Ron Paul brand of libertarianism that Mr. Masters subscribed to as a college student. But they would be an extreme outlier in the Senate he hopes to join next year.Not surprisingly, Mr. Masters’ youthful writings have already become fodder in the hotly contested race for the Republican nomination to take on Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a freshman Democrat who is among the most vulnerable incumbents this year. The Arizona primary is Aug. 2.Another G.O.P. contender, the businessman Jim Lamon, latched onto Mr. Masters’ 2006 writings on an early blogging site, Live Journal — reported by Jewish Insider in April and June — in which Mr. Masters had claimed that “‘unrestricted’ immigration is the only choice” for a libertarian-minded voter.As a candidate, Mr. Masters, now 35, takes a position diametrically opposed to that of his younger self and in line with Mr. Trump’s views: He favors militarizing the border and ending what he calls an “invasion” by immigrants entering the country illegally.Mr. Masters declined to comment for this article. His campaign manager, Amalia Halikias, issued a statement calling him “the clear front-runner,” noting Mr. Trump’s endorsement, and expressing disdain for journalists “spending their time sifting through CrossFit message boards from 2007 to try to discredit him.”She said voters cared more about “how we can solve the inflation crisis and border crisis that Joe Biden and Mark Kelly have given us.”Mr. Masters has also been denounced for contemporary statements, like his April 11 remark that America’s gun violence problem boiled down to “Black people, frankly,” and his apparent embrace of the “replacement theory” promulgated by white supremacists when he accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.”Mr. Masters’ early writings covered a wide range of subjects and touched a number of tripwires for someone with mainstream political aspirations.In a 2006 post on the libertarian site LewRockwell.com, he rehashed an elaborate conspiracy theory about the United States’ entry into World War I, implying a connection between the banking “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild” and the failure to alert American steamship passengers to German threats that preceded the sinking of the Lusitania. His main source was C. Edward Griffin, an ardent libertarian who once said that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — a notorious antisemitic forgery — “accurately describe much of what is happening in our world today.”Arizona voters arrive for a town hall event with Blake Masters on Tuesday in Lake Havasu City.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe post ended with what Mr. Masters called a “poignant quotation” from Hermann Goering — Hitler’s right-hand man and one of the most powerful Nazis of the Third Reich.Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, assailed Mr. Masters’ invocations of Goering and Griffin, calling them “historical figures who trafficked in some of the worst antisemitic tropes imaginable.”“Any student of history should know better than to elevate leaders who once gave voice to dangerous antisemitic tropes such as the notorious ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” Mr. Greenblatt said.He added, “Regardless of how old he was at the time, Mr. Masters needs to disavow his decision to uphold these men and their ideas and condemn antisemitism in all forms.”Mr. Lamon, for one, has taken political advantage, running an ad framing Mr. Masters as a conspiratorial antisemite.Mr. Masters released a response in which he said he knew “the left-wing media” would “try to smear me” and “call me a racist and a sexist and a terrorist.” He added: “Well, it turns out loser Republicans would do that, too.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? 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      Mayra Flores and the Rise of the Far-Right Latina

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      Representative Mayra Flores is one of three Republican Latinas vying to transform South Texas politics by shunning moderates and often embracing the extreme.WASHINGTON — For years, Texas Republicans tried to win the Hispanic vote using a Bush-era brand of compassionate conservatism. The idea was that a moderate’s touch and a softer rhetoric on immigration were key to making inroads with Hispanic voters, particularly in Democratic strongholds along the southern border.Such was the Texas of old. The Trump age has given rise to a new brand of Texas Republicans, one of whom is already walking the halls of Congress: the far-right Latina.Representative Mayra Flores became only the second Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley after she won a special election last month and flipped the congressional seat from blue to red. She also became the first Latina Republican ever sent by Texas to Congress. Her abbreviated term lasts only through the end of the year, and she is seen as a long shot to win re-election to a full one.But what is most striking is that Ms. Flores won by shunning moderates, embracing the far right and wearing her support for Donald J. Trump on her sleeve — more Marjorie Taylor Greene than Kay Bailey Hutchison.Her campaign slogan — “God, family, country” — was meant to appeal to what she calls the “traditional values” of her majority-Hispanic district in the border city of Brownsville. She called for President Biden’s impeachment. She tweeted QAnon hashtags. And she called the Democratic Party the “greatest threat America faces.”In an interview in her still-barren office the day after her swearing-in ceremony, Ms. Flores was asked whether she considered Mr. Biden the legitimately elected president.Ms. Flores, the newest member of Congress, often speaks of working alongside her parents as a teenager in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle.Shuran Huang for The New York Times“He’s the worst president of the United States,” she said.When asked three more times whether Mr. Biden had been legitimately elected, she repeated the same nonanswer.Two other Latina Republicans, Monica De La Cruz in McAllen and Cassy Garcia in Laredo, are also on the ballot in congressional races along the Mexican border. All three — G.O.P. officials have taken to calling them a “triple threat” — share right-wing views on immigration, the 2020 election and abortion, among other issues.They share the same advisers, have held campaign rallies and fund-raisers together and have knocked on doors side by side. They accuse the Democratic Party of taking Hispanic voters for granted and view themselves, as do their supporters, as the embodiment of the American dream: Ms. Flores often speaks of working alongside her parents as a teenager in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle.Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz and Ms. Garcia grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, a working-class four-county region at the southernmost tip of Texas where Hispanics make up 93 percent of the population. All three are bilingual; Ms. Flores was born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and the other two in South Texas. Only Ms. De La Cruz has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, yet they all remain outspoken advocates for him, his movement and his tough talk on restricting immigration and building the border wall.Monica De La Cruz is running in the most competitive House race in Texas.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesThe Rio Grande Valley has long been a politically liberal yet culturally conservative place. Church pews are packed on Sundays, American flags wave from their poles on front lawns and law enforcement is revered. Ms. Flores’s husband is a Border Patrol agent, a note she often emphasized on the campaign trail.In 2020, the Valley’s conservative culture started to exert a greater influence on its politics. Mr. Trump flipped rural Zapata County and narrowed the Democratic margin of victory in the four Valley counties and in other border towns.“Growing up down there, you always have closeted Republicans,” said Ms. Garcia, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. “Now, the desire to embrace Republicans is really spreading. They feel a genuine sense of belonging.”Other pro-Trump Latinas are running for House seats in Virginia, Florida and New Mexico, among other places.Republican leaders and strategists say Ms. Flores’s win and the candidacies of other right-wing Hispanic women are proof that Latino voters are increasingly shifting to the right. More than 100 Republican House candidates are Hispanic, a record number, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee.Democrats view the situation much differently. Some Democratic leaders dismiss Ms. Flores’s victory as a fluke — the product of a low-turnout special election in which 28,990 people cast ballots — and a fleeting one.Ms. Flores, who was elected to serve the last six months of a retiring Democratic congressman’s term, is running in November for a full term. She faces a popular Democratic incumbent who is switching districts, Representative Vicente Gonzalez.Democratic leaders are optimistic that Mr. Gonzalez will defeat Ms. Flores, and that Ms. Garcia will lose her race against Representative Henry Cuellar, the conservative Democrat who narrowly beat a progressive challenger in a primary runoff.Ms. De La Cruz, however, is running in the most competitive House race in Texas and will face Michelle Vallejo, a progressive Democrat.Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who heads the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, dismissed Ms. Flores’s win as a “public relations coup” for Republicans.“It does not mean she represents mainstream Hispanic voters,” Mr. Gallego said.Republicans say the campaigns of Ms. Flores and other right-wing Hispanic women are proof that Latino voters are increasingly shifting to the right.Jason Garza for The New York TimesMr. Gonzalez, the Democratic congressman, nearly lost to Ms. De La Cruz two years ago when she challenged him in Texas’ 15th Congressional District. He won by 6,588 votes. Now, he is challenging Ms. Flores in the 34th District.“This was a profound message to the party,” he said of Ms. Flores’s victory. “It’s really woken up the Democratic base. I’ve never had so many people volunteer for free in all my years.”As she moved into her congressional office across from the Capitol, Ms. Flores, an evangelical Christian, eyed the bare walls. She planned to put up a large photo of the SpaceX launch site in her district as well as images of Jesus.She had campaigned with the support of evangelical churches; her pastor carried out a “Make America Godly Again” outreach effort and traveled to Washington for her swearing-in. “I do believe that pastors should be getting involved in politics and in guiding their congressmen,” Ms. Flores said. “Our pastors know our people better than we do.”Ms. Flores wasted no time displaying a combative style with Democrats. Minutes after her swearing-in, Speaker Nancy Pelosi posed with Ms. Flores and her family for a photo. What happened next is a matter of debate. To Democrats, it looked as if Ms. Pelosi had brushed her arm against Ms. Flores’s 8-year-old daughter as the two stood side by side. To Republicans, it looked as if Ms. Pelosi had shoved her aside.“No child should be pushed to the side for a photo op. PERIOD!!” Ms. Flores later wrote on Twitter.To hear Ms. Flores tell it, her switch to the G.O.P. was inevitable.Early on, she said, she had voted Democratic, primarily because everyone she knew did the same. The first time she cast a ballot for a Republican for president, she said, was for Mitt Romney in 2012.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, walks down the Capitol steps with Ms. Flores.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesAfter attending a Republican event for the spouses of Border Patrol agents, Ms. Flores began to volunteer for the Hidalgo County Republican Party in McAllen. By 2020, she was organizing pro-Trump caravans through the Rio Grande Valley.She was also posting tweets using the hashtag #QAnon.When asked about QAnon, Ms. Flores denied ever having supported the conspiracy theory, which claims that a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring is trying to control the government and the media. Hashtags have long been considered social media shorthand for expressing support for a cause or an idea, but Ms. Flores insisted her intention was to express opposition to QAnon.“It’s just to reach more people so more people can see like, hey, this needs to stop,” she said of using the QAnon hashtag. “This is only hurting our country.”Ms. Flores deleted the tweets about QAnon, but she did not refrain from expressing other right-wing views. After the 2020 election, she insisted on Twitter that Mr. Trump had won, writing in one post, “Ganamos y lo vamos a demostrar!” or “We won, and we will prove it!” Following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, she retweeted a post falsely calling it a “setup” by antifa. She has called Mr. Biden “president in name only” and has demanded his impeachment. And as her own oath of office coincided with the hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Flores largely dismissed the proceedings.“Honestly, my district doesn’t care about that,” she said of the hearings. “My district is struggling to pay their bills. That’s what we’re supposed to be focusing on.”Like Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz describes herself as a former Democrat who “walked away” from the party. She said she cast her first vote in a Republican primary for Mr. Trump in 2016.“I believe that the president was bringing to light the terrible things that we were doing to our country,” Ms. De La Cruz said.After she narrowly lost her challenge to Mr. Gonzalez in 2020, Ms. De La Cruz suggested, without evidence, that both she and Mr. Trump had been victims of voter fraud in the district.“Now, the desire to embrace Republicans is really spreading,” said Cassy Garcia, who is running to flip a Democratic House seat in South Texas.Christian K Lee for The New York TimesMs. Garcia, by contrast, said she has been a Republican her whole life. Raised conservative, she went to church three times a week and entered politics soon after college, working as the outreach director for Mr. Cruz in McAllen.As a candidate, she has focused on religious liberty, school choice and abortion bans — issues on which she said the region’s Hispanic voters were increasingly like-minded.“The red wave is here,” Ms. Garcia said. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Secures Deal for Cipollone to Be Interviewed

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      The former White House counsel pushed back on President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and was in the West Wing to witness his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel to President Donald J. Trump who repeatedly fought Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has reached a deal to be interviewed by Friday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the inquiry.The agreement was a breakthrough for the panel, which has pressed for weeks for Mr. Cipollone to cooperate — and issued a subpoena to him last week — believing he could provide crucial testimony.Mr. Cipollone was a witness to pivotal moments in Mr. Trump’s push to invalidate the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines and sending false letters to state officials about election fraud. He was also in the West Wing on Jan. 6, 2021, as Mr. Trump reacted to the violence at the Capitol, when his supporters attacked the building in his name.People close to Mr. Cipollone have repeatedly cautioned that concerns about executive privilege and attorney-client privilege could limit his cooperation.But committee negotiators have pressed to hear from Mr. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy in the White House.Mr. Cipollone will sit for a videotaped, transcribed interview, according to a person familiar with the discussions. He is not expected to testify publicly.A committee spokesman declined to comment.The panel’s push to hear from Mr. Cipollone intensified after the testimony last week of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide to the chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Ms. Hutchinson described detailed conversations with Mr. Cipollone in which she said the counsel had expressed deep concerns about the actions of Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows.Some allies of Mr. Trump have privately tried to cast doubt on parts of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, which was the committee’s most explosive to date and was delivered under oath. Mr. Trump has tried to invoke executive privilege — a president’s power to withhold the release of certain confidential communications with his advisers — to prevent his former aides from cooperating with the investigation. In April, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin both appeared for informal interviews with the panel on a limited set of topics, according to an agreement reached by their representatives and representatives for Mr. Trump.The agreement, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times, allowed discussions of a meeting with Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump cling to power; Mr. Trump’s interactions with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who drafted a legal strategy for overturning the election; any interactions with members of Congress; and Mr. Cipollone’s recollections of the events of Jan. 6.The agreement said that the two men could not discuss conversations they or others had with Mr. Trump, other than one discussion in the Oval Office with Mr. Clark in a pivotal meeting on Jan. 3, 2021.However, both were permitted to discuss the timeline of where they were, with whom they met and conversations they had on Jan. 6. Assuming those conditions hold for Mr. Cipollone’s forthcoming testimony, they would presumably cover conversations such as ones he may have had with Ms. Hutchinson or other officials that day.Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that she recalled that on Jan. 6, Mr. Cipollone had objected to suggestions that Mr. Trump join a crowd at the Capitol that was pressing to overturn the results of the election.“We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Mr. Cipollone saying.People familiar with the White House counsel’s schedule on Jan. 6, 2021, say he arrived late to the White House, although it was unclear precisely when.According to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Cipollone urged Mr. Meadows to do more to persuade Mr. Trump to call off the rioters. Ms. Hutchinson also told investigators that she heard lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office say a plan to put forward pro-Trump electors in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won was not “legally sound.”Members of the House committee had hoped that Mr. Cipollone would testify publicly at a previous hearing, but he declined. They then took their case public. From the hearing room dais, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, singled out the former White House counsel by name, saying: “Our committee is certain that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Cipollone to testify here. But we think the American people deserve to hear from Mr. Cipollone personally.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

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      Joe Rogan Says He Turned Down Trump as Podcast Guest

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      The commentator, who is no stranger to controversy, claimed he had declined several times to have the former president on his influential podcast on Spotify.Joe Rogan, whose contrarian views on vaccines and political conspiracy theories have made him popular with many supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, revealed that he has declined to host Mr. Trump on his influential podcast several times.“I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once. I’ve said no every time,” Mr. Rogan, the host of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Lex Fridman’s podcast on Monday. “I don’t want to help him.”Mr. Rogan, a comedian and sports commentator in addition to a podcast host, is Spotify’s highest paid podcaster, with a $200 million deal for exclusive rights to host his show, which attracts millions of listeners per episode.On Monday, he described the former president as “a polarizing figure” and “an existential threat to democracy.” Mr. Rogan, who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive from Vermont, for president in 2020, recently voiced his support on his podcast for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, if he were to run for president.The podcast host has been condemned for using a racial slur on his show, mocking the first openly transgender athlete in mixed martial arts and having a “love-hate relationship with conspiracies.” He has been criticized for amplifying Covid-19 misinformation on his platform, prompting medical professionals to call on Spotify to take action at the beginning of this year.Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, refused to “cancel” Mr. Rogan in a memo in February after artists such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell left the streaming service in protest.Other major tech platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have long struggled to determine their roles in moderating the speech of users, particularly prominent ones such as Mr. Trump. More

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      Justice Dept. Sues Arizona Over Voting Restrictions

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      It is the third time the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has sued a state over its voting laws.The Justice Department sued Arizona on Tuesday over a new state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in a presidential election, saying the Republican-imposed restrictions are a “textbook violation” of federal law.It is the third time the department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has challenged a state’s voting law and comes as Democratic leaders and voting rights groups have pressed Mr. Garland to act more decisively against measures that limit access to the ballot.Arizona’s law, which Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed in March, requires voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, like showing a birth certificate or passport. It also mandates that newly registered voters provide a proof of address, which could disproportionately affect people with limited access to government-issued identification cards. Those include immigrants, students, older people, low-income voters and Native Americans.“Arizona has passed a law that turns the clock back by imposing unlawful and unnecessary requirements that would block eligible voters from the registration rolls for certain federal elections,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told reporters on Tuesday.Ms. Clarke said that by imposing what she described as “onerous” requisites, the law “constitutes a textbook violation” of the National Voter Registration Act, which makes it easier to register to vote. The department said the law also ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in asking election officials to reject voter registration forms based on errors or omissions that are not relevant to a voter’s eligibility.As of March, 31,500 “federal only” voters could be prevented from voting in the next presidential election under the new requirements if state officials are unable to track down their information in time to validate their ballots.Some voting rights groups contend that the number of affected voters could be even greater. But even a few thousand fewer votes could be decisive in Arizona, one of the most closely contested battleground states: In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated President Donald J. Trump in Arizona by about 10,000 votes.A spokesperson for Mr. Ducey did not immediately respond to requests for comment. When he signed the bill in March, Mr. Ducey said the law, expected to take effect in January, was “a balanced approach that honors Arizona’s history of making voting accessible without sacrificing security in our elections.”Arizona has been at the center of some of the most contentious battles over the 2020 election. Six months after the election, its Republican-led Senate authorized an outside review of the election in Maricopa County, an abnormal step that quickly devolved into a hotbed for conspiracy theorists. The state has also passed multiple laws that impose new restrictions to voting.Even before the Republican-controlled Legislature passed the measure, existing state law required all voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote in state elections. Federal voting registration forms still required voters to attest that they were citizens, but not to provide documentary proof.In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld that law but added that Arizona must accept the federal voter registration form for federal elections. That essentially created a bifurcated system in Arizona that would require documented proof of citizenship to vote in state elections but allow those simply registering with the federal voter registration form the ability to vote in federal elections.The new law could threaten the registrations of those voters, preventing tens of thousands of them from casting a ballot in presidential elections, voting rights groups contend.“There’s certainly going to be some people in Arizona that are not going to be able to vote under the proof-of-citizenship requirement,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer.While the new law would have sprawling consequences for many groups, local election officials have noted that delivering documentary proof of citizenship can be especially hard among Native American populations, which were key to helping flip Arizona to Mr. Biden in 2020.“You may have folks who were born on reservations who may not have birth certificates, and therefore may find it very difficult to prove citizenship on paper somehow,” said Adrian Fontes, the former election administrator for Maricopa County and a current Democratic candidate for secretary of state. “Things of this nature have always been of great concern for election administrators in Arizona.”Shortly after taking office, Mr. Garland announced an expansion of the department’s civil rights division in response to a wave of laws introducing new voting restrictions after the 2020 election.In June 2021, the department sued Georgia over its sweeping new voting law that overhauled the state’s election administration and introduced a host of restrictions to voting in the state, especially voting by mail. In November, the department sued Texas over a provision limiting the assistance available to voters at the polls.Marc Elias, a Democratic elections lawyer who represented a group that filed a suit against Arizona earlier this year, said he was relieved to see the department follow through on Mr. Biden’s pledge last year to counter a threat from Republican-sponsored state laws he called the “most significant test to democracy” since the Civil War.“Adding the voice and authority of the United States is incredibly helpful to the fight for voting rights,” Mr. Elias said in an interview. More

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      Jan. 6 Hearings to Resume Next Week With Focus on Domestic Extremists

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      Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, has said he plans to show ties between Donald J. Trump and militias that helped orchestrate the Capitol attack.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans to hold a hearing next Tuesday to reveal its findings about the connections between former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and the domestic violent extremist groups that helped to organize the siege on Congress.The panel announced that the session would take place on July 12 at 10 a.m. It is expected to be led by Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, and Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, who plan to chart the rise of the right-wing domestic violent extremist groups that attacked the Capitol and how Mr. Trump amassed and inspired the mob. The panel also plans to detail known links and conversations between political actors close to Mr. Trump and extremists.The hearing will be the first since the explosive, surprise testimony last week by Cassidy Hutchinson, a junior-level aide in Mr. Trump’s White House who came forward to provide a damning account of the president’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. She recounted how Mr. Trump, knowing his supporters were armed and threatening violence, wanted to relax security measures to allow them to move around Washington freely, urging them to march to the Capitol and seeking to join them there.She testified to having overheard a conversation in which Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff and her boss at the time, said that Mr. Trump had privately sided with the rioters as they stormed the building and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, saying that he deserved it and that his supporters were doing what they should be doing.The select committee has held seven public hearings to date, beginning with one last year in which it highlighted the testimonials of four police officers who battled the mob and helped secure the Capitol.After conducting more than 1,000 interviews, the committee began a series of public hearings last month to lay out the findings of its investigation, including one in which it focused heavily on the role the Proud Boys extremist group played in the storming of the building.The next session focused on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election even as he was told repeatedly that the vote was legitimate, ripping off his donors and deceiving his supporters in the process. Subsequent hearings focused on how Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Pence, state officials and the Justice Department in a barrage of increasingly desperate efforts to overturn the election.In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Raskin declined to provide specific details about communications between political actors close to Mr. Trump and militia groups. But he said it was clear that no mob would have come to Washington or descended on the Capitol were it not for Mr. Trump’s direction.“Donald Trump solicited the mob; he summoned the mob to Washington,” Mr. Raskin said, adding, “All of this was targeted on the joint session of Congress.” More

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      in Elections

      Giuliani and Graham Among Trump Allies Subpoenaed by Georgia Grand Jury

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      Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, John Eastman and several others in the former president’s orbit were subpoenaed in the election meddling inquiry.Seven advisers and allies of Donald J. Trump, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham, were subpoenaed on Tuesday in the ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia of election interference by Mr. Trump and his associates. The move was the latest sign that the inquiry has entangled a number of prominent members of Mr. Trump’s orbit, and may cloud the future for the former president.The subpoenas underscore the breadth of the investigation by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta. She is weighing a range of charges, according to legal filings, including racketeering and conspiracy, and her inquiry has encompassed witnesses from beyond the state. The latest round of subpoenas was reported earlier by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The Fulton County investigation is one of several inquiries into efforts by Mr. Trump and his team to overturn the election, but it is the one that appears to put them in the greatest immediate legal jeopardy. A House committee continues to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. And there is an intensifying investigation by the Justice Department into a scheme to create slates of fake presidential electors in 2020.Amid the deepening investigations, Mr. Trump is weighing an early entrance into the 2024 presidential race; people close to him have said he believes it would bolster his claims that the investigations are politically motivated.A subpoena is not an indication that someone is a subject of an inquiry, though some of the latest recipients are considered at risk in the case — in particular Mr. Giuliani, a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump who has emerged as a central figure in the grand jury proceedings in the Georgia investigation. Mr. Giuliani spent several hours speaking before state legislative panels in December 2020, where he peddled false conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines and a video that he claimed showed secret suitcases of Democratic ballots. He told members of the State House at the time, “You cannot possibly certify Georgia in good faith.”Ms. Willis’s office, in its subpoena, said Mr. Giuliani “possesses unique knowledge concerning communications between himself, former President Trump, the Trump campaign, and other known and unknown individuals involved in the multistate, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”Though the subpoenas were issued Tuesday, not all had necessarily been received. Robert J. Costello, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, said, “We have not been served with any subpoena, therefore we have no current comment.”Others sent subpoenas included Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked closely with Mr. Giuliani to overturn the 2020 election results; John Eastman, the legal architect of a plan to keep Mr. Trump in power by using fake electors, and Mr. Graham, the South Carolina Republican who called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, days after the election to inquire about the rules for discarding mail-in ballots.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked with Rudolph W. Giuliani to overturn the 2020 election results, was also subpoenaed.Rey Del Rio/Getty ImagesAnother prominent lawyer who received a subpoena, Cleta Mitchell, was on a Jan. 2, 2021, call that Mr. Trump made to Mr. Raffensperger where he asked him to find enough votes to reverse the state’s results. The subpoena to her said, “During the telephone call, the witness and others made allegations of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election in Georgia and pressured Secretary Raffensperger to take action in his official capacity to investigate unfounded claims of fraud.”Two other Trump lawyers were also subpoenaed: Jacki Pick Deason, who helped make the Trump team’s case before the Georgia legislature, and Kenneth Chesebro, whose role has come into sharper focus during the House Jan. 6 hearings in Washington. In an email exchange with Mr. Eastman in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack, he wrote that the Supreme Court would be more likely to act on a Wisconsin legal challenge “if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”Most of those subpoenaed could not be immediately reached for comment. A spokesman for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Ms. Deason is a senior fellow, declined to comment.The special grand jury was impaneled in early May and has up to one year to complete its work before issuing a report advising Ms. Willis on whether to pursue criminal charges, though Ms. Willis has said she hopes to conclude much sooner. In official letters sent to potential witnesses, her office has said that it is examining potential violations that include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”The new subpoenas offered some further clues about where her investigation is focused.Mr. Eastman was a key witness at one of the December 2020 legislative hearings that were led by Mr. Giuliani. Ms. Willis’s office said in its subpoena to Mr. Eastman that during the hearing he had “advised lawmakers that they had both the lawful authority and a ‘duty’ to replace the Democratic Party’s slate of presidential electors, who had been certified as the duly appointed electors for the State of Georgia after the November 2020 election, due to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud within the state.”John Eastman, a Trump legal adviser and the architect of the fake-elector plan, with Mr. Giuliani.Jim Bourg/ReutersThey called the appearance part of a “multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”The subpoena also noted that Mr. Eastman “drafted at least two memoranda to the Trump Campaign and others detailing a plan through which Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, could refuse to count some of President Joe Biden’s electoral votes” on Jan. 6 — a plan that was rejected by Mr. Pence.Regarding Ms. Ellis, Ms. Willis’s office said that even after Mr. Raffensperger’s office debunked claims of fraud by election workers at an Atlanta arena, Ms. Ellis persisted. “Despite this, the witness made additional statements claiming widespread voter fraud in Georgia during the November 2020 election,” the subpoena said.Mr. Trump has derided the inquiry; last year, a spokesman for the former president called it “the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.”Sean Keenan More