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      Elect Democrats in 2022, Write Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman

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      After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the G.O.P. would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take back the party. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national G.O.P., the state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democratic Party.Earlier this year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps by forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, G.O.P. leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.Breaking away from the G.O.P. and starting a new center-right party may prove in time to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the G.O.P. is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate the leaders of the G.O.P. — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.Pool photo by Chip SomodevillaIn addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022.These “renewers” must be protected and elected if we want to restore a common-sense coalition in Washington. But merely holding the line will be insufficient. To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong G.O.P. members to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.One of those races is in Pennsylvania, where a bevy of pro-Trump candidates are vying to replace the outgoing Republican senator, Pat Toomey. The only prominent moderate in the G.O.P. primary, Craig Snyder, recently bowed out, and if no one takes his place, it will increase the urgency for Republican voters to stand behind a Democrat, such as centrist Representative Conor Lamb, who is running for the seat.For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.Utah is a prime example, where the best hope of defeating Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, is not a Democrat but an independent and former Republican, Evan McMullin, a member of our group, who announced last week that he was entering the race.We need more candidates like him prepared to challenge politicians who have sought to subvert our Constitution from the comfort of their “safe seats” in Congress, and we are encouraged to note that additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure.More broadly, this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock.To work, it will require trust-building between both camps, especially while fighting side-by-side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.A great deal depends on our willingness to consider new paths of political reform. From the halls of Congress to our own communities, the fate of our Republic might well rest on forming alliances with those we least expected.Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Christine Todd Whitman (@GovCTW) was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and served as E.P.A. administrator under President George W. Bush.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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      The Sunday Read: ‘The “Perfect Villain” for Voting Conspiracists’

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      Hans Buetow and Listen and follow ‘The Daily’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOver the past decade, Eric Coomer has helped make Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest providers of voting machines and software in the United States.He was accustomed to working long days during the postelection certification process, but November 2020 was different.President Trump was demanding recounts. His allies had spent months stoking fears of election fraud. And then, on Nov. 8, Sidney Powell, a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, appeared on Fox News and claimed, without evidence, that Dominion had an algorithm that switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden.This is the story of how the 2020 election upended Mr. Coomer’s life.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on Twitter: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with “The Daily,” write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Emma Kehlbeck, Parin Behrooz, Carson Leigh Brown, Anna Diamond, Elena Hecht, Desiree Ibekwe, Tanya Perez, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Margaret Willison and Kate Winslett. Special thanks to Mike Benoist, Sam Dolnick, Laura Kim, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Blake Wilson and Ryan Wegner. More

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      Trump Hotel Lost Money, Despite Lobbyist Spending, Documents Show

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      House investigators released data revealing that the hotel in Washington lost $74 million from 2016 to 2020, a figure disputed by the Trump Organization.WASHINGTON — Despite all the Republican-paid political events and big bar tabs from lobbyists, foreign dignitaries and other supporters of President Donald J. Trump, the Trump International Hotel in Washington lost an estimated $74 million between 2016 and 2020, according to data released on Friday by House investigators.The tally came from Mr. Trump’s own auditors, showing losses that generally increased through his tenure in the White House, even as Mr. Trump’s annual financial disclosure reports showed revenues of more than $40 million a year, at least until the pandemic hit.The new account of revenues and annual losses at the hotel — which is in a federally owned landmark known as the Old Post Office building — was released as House Democrats push the Biden administration to turn over additional documents to determine if Mr. Trump broke federal rules by continuing to operate the hotel through his family while serving as president.“The documents provided by G.S.A. raise new and troubling questions about former President Trump’s lease,” said a letter sent Friday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to the General Services Administration, asking for more information.The materials released by House investigators estimated that the hotel also generated nearly $3.8 million in revenue from foreign government officials during the first three years Mr. Trump was in office, be it hotel stays or meals or other business. The president drew in foreign dignitaries who often liked to be seen at his hotel, at times even meeting with Mr. Trump’s aides at the complex.Millions more were spent by the Republican National Committee and various election campaigns and other political groups backing Republican candidates, or supporting Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts, Federal Election Commission reports show. During his presidency, the Trump hotel became a showcase of special-interest lobbying and maneuvering by allies of Mr. Trump to draw his attention or support.Still, the overall message was that the Trump International Hotel, despite all the headlines, is a money-losing operation, said David J. Sangree, an accountant who runs a firm, Hotel & Leisure Advisors, that evaluates hotel industry performance and who looked at the audited reports at the request of The New York Times.“You would expect a hotel in Washington, D.C., to earn a profit,” he said.The Trump family often has various ways of counting revenues and losses, for example presenting one set of figures suggesting losses to property tax authorities in an effort to reduce tax bills and giving another to the public that suggests higher returns reflecting well on Mr. Trump’s business acumen.Prosecutors in New York are already investigating whether Mr. Trump essentially keeps two separate sets of books: one with glowing numbers that banks and insurers received and another bleaker set of data for tax collectors.Eric Trump, who has helped run the family business since his father started his campaign for president, called the $74 million tally of losses at the hotel between 2016 and 2020 “total nonsense,” since it includes a common accounting exercise that cuts actual business profits by considering the annual depreciation of the value of the property.The revenues collected from foreign government sources, Eric Trump added, would have been much higher if the Trump family had actively worked to solicit this business. Instead, the company attempted during most of the time Mr. Trump was in office to discourage it, he said.The Trump family made annual payments to the Treasury for the Trump hotel in Washington — totaling $355,687 between 2017 and 2019 — to attempt to return profits from these sales to foreign government officials. The payments from foreign governments led to accusations in court cases that Mr. Trump was in violation of the so-called emoluments clause of the Constitution, which seeks to bar federal officials from receiving payments from foreign governments.Eric Trump also disputed a suggestion by the House Oversight Committee that the Trump family had received preferential treatment from Deutsche Bank, which financed the renovation of the Old Post Office building before it reopened as a hotel. The committee questioned why the terms of loan were changed to interest-only payments in 2018, but Eric Trump said the relatively high assessed value of the hotel allowed the company to defer principal payments on the $170 million loan for several years.“They have written a narrative that is purposely false,” Eric Trump said in an interview Friday. “And they know it is false.”Former President Trump had filed annual public reports, as required under the law, providing only gross revenues from the hotel, not profits. The information released on Friday includes profitability figures calculated in a number of ways.Detailed financial reports prepared by Mr. Trump’s auditors, which were also released by the House on Friday, show a total loss of $74 million by including depreciation in the value of the hotel of about $8 million a year.But even taking out the losses from depreciation, the documents still show that year after year, once taxes, lease payments and rent paid to the federal government are factored in, the hotel still lost money. It just lost less by that standard than by the one highlighted by House Democrats on Friday.For example, the statement of operations as of August 2018 showed that the losses for the prior year were about $5.3 million, once depreciation was removed, compared with the $13.5 million loss for that year that the House committee said occurred.Losses in 2019, by this adjusted calculation, would have been $9.6 million, compared with the $17.8 million that the House Democrats cited.Mr. Sangree said the net income at the Trump hotel in Washington, even after depreciation and interest on the loan is removed from the calculation, is relatively poor compared with other luxury hotels in major cities.The financial reports released by House investigators provide once-confidential details on the operation of the hotel, showing that it earned an unusually high share of its revenues from its restaurant and bar, compared to its hotel rooms. Each category brought in about $25 million in 2018.Typically, room revenues are considerably larger than meals and bar service, Mr. Sangree said. But large crowds of lobbyists and friends of Mr. Trump’s gathered almost every night in the Trump hotel lobby while he was president, and were sometimes even greeted by Mr. Trump himself as he arrived at the hotel to have dinner at its steakhouse.Some allies of Mr. Trump were such frequent patrons of the hotel bar, like Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, that they had tables they considered their own.Still, the hotel would most likely post much higher profits under a different owner, Mr. Sangree said, because it would no longer be hard to sell to major corporations that have stayed away because of controversies related to Mr. Trump. Management costs at the hotel have also been abnormally high, he said, as a share of revenues.“This hotel should be doing better,” Mr. Sangree said, noting that the documents released Friday showed an average daily room rate of about $500, which should be high enough to produce considerable profit.The Trump family has moved twice in recent years to sell the lease it has with the federal government to operate a hotel at the site. Offers are still being considered, after about a dozen bids came in for the property, including from several major national hotel brands, one executive involved in the negotiations said.With Mr. Trump out of office, the hotel is now much less of a draw among prominent Republican players in Washington. Its lobby now often sits largely empty, as the search for a potential buyer of the lease continues. More

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      Jennifer Medina Asks Latino Trump Voters Open-Ended Questions

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      Jennifer Medina interviews her subjects multiple times — sometimes spending as many as 50 hours with them — to understand their complex political attitudes.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.From the 2016 to the 2020 elections, Donald Trump improved his performance among certain segments of Latino voters, prompting surprised reactions from many journalists and people who work in politics. But this phenomenon was clear to those carefully tracking Latino sentiment — and few were doing that more diligently than the Times political reporter Jennifer Medina, whose parents are Panamanian.Ms. Medina, who is based in Los Angeles, started working on campaign coverage in 2019, and that September she reported on Latinos attending a Trump rally, some of whom said they felt like political loners among their Democratic friends and family. In 2020, she followed up that work with accounts of Mr. Trump’s macho appeal and why evangelical Latinos considered him a defender of their religious values. She also recently looked at the role that Latino voters played in helping Gov. Gavin Newsom keep his job in the face of a recall election in California.Here, Ms. Medina talks about developing her beat, speaking to hundreds of voters and achieving depth in her conversations. This interview has been edited and condensed.How did you find yourself covering Latinos in the 2020 presidential campaign?The campaign was the first time in my career that I had covered national politics full time. Nobody ever explicitly assigned me the beat of covering Latino politics. I just followed where the story was, and that’s what the story was in 2020.The first Trump rally I went to was in New Mexico. The second was in Miami. In the audience of both rallies, there were tons of Hispanics. Just talking to them about why they supported him, what they thought about his statements against Mexicans and immigration, and how they grappled with that captivated me.On the flip side, when the Democratic primary was happening I was hearing people based on the East Coast saying, “Latinos are never going to support Bernie Sanders because they are scared of communism.” That’s true in Miami, but in Los Angeles and Las Vegas it couldn’t have been further from the truth.There was a lot of room for me to do good, nuanced coverage. That’s partly because Latinos have been largely overlooked by both parties and by the press. It’s only just dawned on people that this is a part of the electorate that can really decide elections.How were you able to characterize popular attitudes among a sprawling, diverse group like Latinos?During the election, I interviewed hundreds of voters. For every one person I quote, I talk to five other people.I’ll use a story on Latino Republican men as an example. I had phone numbers of men who had participated in a poll or men I had met reporting throughout the campaign. After I had spoken to 40 people, I started to see trends. I want to hear something over and over again before I describe it in The Times as a generalization.I’m also relying on conversations with political strategists and pollsters — not taking what they say at face value, but also not making generalizations without having other information to back them up.What does it take to achieve depth in these conversations?My approach with Trump supporters was the same as with any other voters: open-ended questions. “When did you first start to think this way?” “Would you talk about politics as a kid?” When you ask people questions like that, most are really eager to respond. People like to talk about themselves.There’s a pastor I interviewed who has a dear place in my heart. I became convinced that Latino evangelical churches were among the only places where Trump supporters and Democrats were interacting with each other on a regular basis. I set off to try to find a church I could profile, and I came across the Church of God of Prophecy in Phoenix and its pastor, Jose Rivera. I envisioned spending weeks there in person, but the church was the very last place I went last March before the shutdown.I knew I couldn’t spend time there the way I wanted to, but I called the pastor once every week. I realized he illustrated the support for Trump among Latino evangelicals, though he himself was not voting for him. He felt upset with his flock.I must have spent 50 hours on the phone with him.50 hours?Is that crazy?What do you learn in 50 hours that you couldn’t learn in 30?I was better able to articulate where Pastor Rivera was coming from, what he represented and what he didn’t represent, the more often that I spoke to him. He said different things at different times. There was one moment where he thought he might vote for Trump. He had these tortured conversations with his wife about why she was going to vote for Trump. I heard his thinking evolve and develop.This is like asking, “What do you learn in 50 years of life that you can’t learn in 30?” More

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      Trump May Run in 2024. So Might They. It’s Getting Awkward.

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight has cast doubt on the political futures of several Republican politicians.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.With all the subtlety of a bullhorn, former President Donald J. Trump has been hinting that he plans to run for office again in 2024.And Republicans are so far treating him with the deference they displayed while he was in the White House as they wait to see if he makes his move.On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Trump heads to Iowa for a rally at the state fairgrounds, a perennial stop on the presidential campaign circuit. Joining him will be several of the state’s top Republicans, including Gov. Kim Reynolds, Senator Charles E. Grassley and the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, Jeff Kaufmann — a testament to the former president’s enduring dominance.Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight has cast doubt on the political futures of an entire group of Republican politicians who have suggested that they might someday want to run for president. And while they — like the rest of the country — can’t be sure what the notoriously fickle former president might do, some of them are trying to stake their claims as leaders in the party.That requires a good deal of delicacy on their part. And it got a little awkward this week for two of them.First there was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose refusal to interfere with the counting of the electoral votes on Jan. 6 deeply angered Mr. Trump and helped precipitate the deadly assault on the Capitol that day. Mr. Pence gave an interview this week to Sean Hannity of Fox News and sounded at times an awful lot like someone who wants to be president.He attacked President Biden for withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan. He also criticized the president’s approach to domestic affairs — for “lecturing the American people about vaccine mandates” and promoting what Mr. Pence called a “massive, big-government, socialist bill” before Congress that would widen the social safety net and address problems like climate change.But when Mr. Hannity broached the subject of Mr. Pence’s reportedly frayed relationship with Mr. Trump, the former vice president tried to deflect by accusing the news media of blowing the events of Jan. 6 out of proportion, referring to it obliquely at one point as “one day in January.”“They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believe we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration,” Mr. Pence said.He did not address the fact that numerous rioters at the Capitol called for his execution during the attack, demanding that he be hanged for not carrying out Mr. Trump’s wishes. And Mr. Hannity didn’t bring it up.Then there was a speech by Nikki Haley, another former Trump administration official whose relationship with Mr. Trump was damaged because she had declared herself “disgusted” with him after Jan. 6 and predicted that he’d “lost any sort of political viability.”But Ms. Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, praised Mr. Trump in an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. She criticized Mr. Trump’s political opponents for accusing him of being compromised by the Russians, and said that Mr. Biden’s posture toward Russia was weaker by comparison.Separately, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, she lauded Mr. Trump’s ability to “get strong people elected” and insisted, “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”At the moment, that doesn’t seem like an option for Ms. Haley or anyone else who wants to have a bright future in the Republican Party. Mr. Trump continues to attack Republicans who broke with him after Jan. 6 and supported his impeachment, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.His first rally since the day of the Capitol riot was in June outside Cleveland. He endorsed a local Republican who was challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez in next year’s primary election. Mr. Gonzalez, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in inciting the riot, announced last month that he was leaving Congress rather than staying to face his Trump-approved challenger.Polls taken over the course of the year have shown that Mr. Trump remains the overwhelming favorite for Republican voters, suggesting that he would be difficult to beat in a primary if he did indeed run. Though his popularity suffered somewhat in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, most Republicans seem to have moved on. A Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that two-thirds of Republicans say Mr. Trump should continue to be a major national figure, an increase of 10 percentage points from January. Forty-four percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning voters want him to run again. The Pew poll also found little tolerance for dissent. Asked whether their party should accept politicians who openly criticize Mr. Trump, 63 percent said no.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Read the document

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      39 tabulation of ballots within a State. Bush II, 531 U.S. at 107. 163. The actions set out in Paragraphs __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ created differential voting standards in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. COUNT III: EQUAL PROTECTION (ONE MAN, ONE VOTE) 164. Plaintiff State repeats and re-alleges the allegations of paragraphs 1-163, above, as if fully set forth herein. 165. The one-man, one-vote principle of this Court’s Equal Protection cases requires counting valid votes and not counting invalid votes. Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 554-55; Bush II, 531 U.S. at 103 (“the votes eligible for inclusion in the certification are the votes meeting the properly established legal requirements”). 166. The actions set out in Paragraphs __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ violated the one- man, one-vote principle by systemically excluding valid votes and those set out in Paragraphs __-__, __- __, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ violate that principle by systemically including invalid votes in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. COUNT IV: DUE PROCESS (INTENTIONAL NONCOMPLIANCE) 167. Plaintiff State repeats and re-alleges the allegations of paragraphs 1-__, above, as if fully set forth herein. More

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      Behind the Scenes of the Events of Jan. 6

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      More from our inbox:‘I Won’t Mount a Coup.’ Now Is That Too Much to Ask?Missing Yazidis, Captives of ISIS: ‘The World Must Act’Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic ChurchTaxing the UltrarichAn appearance in 2019 on Mark Levin’s Fox News show brought John Eastman, right, to President Donald J. Trump’s attention.via Fox News ChannelTo the Editor:Re “He Drafted Plan to Keep Trump in White House” (front page, Oct. 3) and “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked” (editorial, Oct. 3):Regarding my advice to Vice President Mike Pence in the days before the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6: Although I take issue with some statements in the front-page news article, its most important point, one backed up by very thorough reporting, is that I did not recommend “that Mr. Pence could simply disregard the law and summarily reject electors of certain key battleground states,” as your editorial contends.Rather, as your own reporters noted, I told Mr. Pence that even if he did have such power, “it would be foolish for him to exercise it until state legislatures certified a new set of electors for Mr. Trump.”That honest bit of reporting contradicts not only your editorial but also myriad other news accounts to the same effect.John C. EastmanUpland, Calif.The writer is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.To the Editor:Reading the excellent but frightening editorial “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked,” I was not surprised that the former president wanted to stay in power despite losing a fair election. What was staggering was the number of people who wanted to help him.Jana GoldmanHonor, Mich.To the Editor:Your editorial hit on a serious issue that worries us all, including your many friends in Australia. An independent electoral commission manages, scrutinizes, counts the votes and announces the results of all state and federal elections in Australia.No one ever doubts its word, and challenges are resolved by it quickly and based on evidence that is made publicly available, and only very rarely end up in the courts. The commission also draws electoral boundaries, according to statutory formulas, so there’s no possibility of gerrymandering.We find the heavy politicization of your system puzzling.Nuncio D’AngeloSydney, AustraliaTo the Editor:In “He Drafted Plan to Keep Trump in White House,” John Eastman’s influence is attributed to giving President Trump “what he wanted to hear.”The former F.B.I. director William Webster gave me the most important advice on leadership when I was a White House fellow serving as one of his special assistants. As the only nonlawyer on his executive staff, I was unsure about my job description until he explained, “Your job is to make sure I hear things people think I don’t want to hear or that they don’t want me to hear.” Within a day, it was clear what that entailed.I have shared that advice, and it has proved valuable for countless leaders. Mr. Eastman demonstrates the risks of disregarding it.Merrie SpaethPlano, Texas‘I Won’t Mount a Coup.’ Now Is That Too Much to Ask?  Jason Andrew for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Is there a chance that in the 2024 election all the presidential candidates would sign a pledge that if they lose the election they will not try to overthrow the government?William Dodd BrownChicagoMissing Yazidis, Captives of ISIS: ‘The World Must Act’The Sharya camp near Duhok in August.Hawre Khalid for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Yazidis Know Some of Their Missing Are Alive, as Captives” (news article, Oct. 4):As a Yazidi, I read this piece with a heavy heart, and I ache to do more for these women, children and families. I have been to the camps in Duhok, in northern Iraq, and met with many families hoping for their loved ones to return, but they can barely afford daily necessities, let alone ransoms.I believe that what we need is a task force, comprising Iraqi authorities, U.N. agencies and civil society organizations, formed with the sole goal of searching for and rescuing Yazidi captives of the Islamic State.Opportunities for asylum must be expanded and support given for their recovery. Every necessary resource should be committed to ensuring that survivors can live in freedom and safety for the first time in years.Seven years is an unthinkable amount of time to be held in sexual slavery. We must act. The world must act to rescue women and children from captivity.Abid ShamdeenWashingtonThe writer is executive director of Nadia’s Initiative, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence.Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic Church Benoit Tessier/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “Report Describes Abuse of Minors Permeating Catholic Church in France” (news article, Oct. 6):Clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church wasn’t imposed until the 12th century. How many more of these stories do we have to read until the church acknowledges that it made a dire, if well-intentioned, mistake by instituting that policy?Kate RoseHoustonTaxing the Ultrarich  Erik CarterTo the Editor:Re “This Is How America’s Richest Families Stay That Way,” by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Sept. 24):Mr. Kaiser-Schatzlein states that the ultrarich could pass on stock bought for $1 but worth $100 at death, and that the inheritors would pay tax only on gains above the $100. While that is accurate, it neglects to mention that instead of paying the federal capital gains rate of 20 percent on the $99 gain, the estate would pay the estate tax of 40 percent on the full $100 value (since we are discussing the ultrarich, the $11.7 million exclusion for the estate tax would be a rounding error).This omission gives the misleading impression that the inheritance would be untaxed, when in fact it would be taxed at a higher rate.Peter KnellPasadena, Calif.The writer is managing director of an investment management company. More

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      New Details of Trump Pressure on Justice Dept. Over Election

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      A Senate panel fleshed out how Donald Trump pursued his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to pursue unfounded reports of fraud.WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.The interim report, released publicly on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”The report by Mr. Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple Congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Mr. Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the District of Columbia Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys, to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More