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      Trump Holds Rally in Florida, Across State From Building Disaster

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      Aides to Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned Trump associates about whether the event on Saturday night in Sarasota should proceed given the scope of the tragedy in Surfside.Former President Donald J. Trump held a Fourth of July-themed rally on Saturday night in Sarasota, Fla., across the state from where a tragedy has been unfolding for more than a week as firefighters, search dogs and emergency crews search for survivors in the collapse of a residential building just north of Miami Beach.The political rally in the midst of a disaster that has horrified the nation became a topic of discussion among aides to the former president and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Trump ally whose growing popularity with the former president’s supporters is becoming an increasing source of tension for both men, according to people familiar with their thinking.After officials from the governor’s office surveyed the scene of the condominium collapse in Surfside, Fla., Adrian Lukis, chief of staff to the governor, called Michael Glassner, a longtime Trump aide who is overseeing the Florida event, according to people familiar with the discussion. In a brief conversation, Mr. Lukis inquired whether the former president planned to continue with the event given the scale of the tragedy, two people said.He was told there were no plans to reschedule.A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Liz Harrington, said that the rally in Sarasota was “three-and-a-half hours away, approximately the same distance from Boston to New York, and will not impact any of the recovery efforts.”She added that the former president “has instructed his team to collect relief aid for Surfside families both online and on-site at the Sarasota rally.”After a brief moment of silence for the victims and families of the tragedy as he took the stage, Mr. Trump quickly launched into a castigation of cancel culture and of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.He dismissed charges filed this week against his business, the Trump Organization, by the Manhattan district attorney’s office as “prosecutorial misconduct.” And while he appeared to deny knowledge of any possible tax evasion on benefits, he also seemed to acknowledge that those benefits occurred.“You didn’t pay tax on the car, or the company apartment,” he said, adding, “Or education for your grandchildren. I don’t even know, do you have to put, does anyone know the answer to that stuff?”Much of what followed was a familiar list of his grievances, but he drew an enthusiastic crowd that waited for hours in pouring rain to hear him speak. Mr. DeSantis, who met on Thursday with President Biden when the president visited the site of the disaster, originally wanted to attend the rally but ultimately decided he could not go. “He spoke with President Trump, who agreed that it was the right decision, because the governor’s duty is to be in Surfside,” his press secretary, Christina Pushaw, said, adding, “Governor DeSantis would have gone to the rally in normal circumstances.’’In an interview with Newsmax ahead of the rally, Mr. Trump said he told Mr. DeSantis not to come.But during the rally, when he thanked local Republican leaders in Florida, he notably did not mention Mr. DeSantis.The governor, an early supporter of Mr. Trump, has been eager to play down any perceived tension with the former president, who endorsed his campaign for governor in 2018 and could cause him a political headache if he turned against him.“Governor DeSantis is focusing on his duties as governor and the tragedy in Surfside, and has never suggested or requested that events planned in different parts of Florida — from the Stanley Cup finals to President Trump’s rally — should be canceled,” Ms. Pushaw said after the Washington Examiner reported that Mr. DeSantis had pointedly asked Mr. Trump to delay his rally.Gov. Ron DeSantis had originally planned to attend Mr. Trump’s rally in Florida but no longer plans to do so.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe recent conversation between Mr. Lukis and Mr. Glassner was not the first time Mr. DeSantis’s staff had expressed reservations about the timing of Mr. Trump’s event. Before the condominium collapse, Mr. DeSantis’s office had suggested to the Trump team that the fall was better timing for a rally, given the perils of hurricane season in Florida, two people familiar with the conversation said.Mr. Trump ignored the suggestion. Shut out of Facebook and Twitter, Mr. Trump has been eager for an outlet to have his voice heard and has been chomping at the bit to return to the rally stage, aides said.Mr. DeSantis is seen as a top-tier Republican presidential candidate for 2024, and may end up in a political collision with the former president, who himself has hinted that he is considering a third try for the White House.People close to Mr. Trump said he had become mildly suspicious of a supposed ally. He has grilled multiple advisers and friends, asking “what’s Ron doing,” after hearing rumors at Mar-a-Lago that Mr. DeSantis had been courting donors for a potential presidential run of his own. He has asked aides their opinion of a Western Conservative Summit presidential straw poll for 2024 Republican presidential candidates, an unscientific online poll that showed Mr. DeSantis beating Mr. Trump. More

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      Democrats Face High New Bar in Opposing Voting Laws

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      Democrats and voting rights groups say they can no longer count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.The 6-to-3 decision by the Supreme Court on Thursday that upheld voting restrictions in Arizona has effectively left voting rights advocates with a higher bar for bringing federal cases under the Voting Rights Act: proving discriminatory intent.That burden is prompting civil rights and voting groups to recalibrate their approach to challenging in court the raft of new restrictions that Republican-controlled legislatures have passed this year in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s election loss in November. No longer, they say, can they count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.“We have to remember that the Supreme Court is not going to save us — it’s not going to protect our democracy in these moments when it is most necessary that it does so,” Sam Spital, the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said Friday.The high court gutted the central protection of the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 decision, and on Thursday the court further limited the act’s reach in combating discriminatory laws, establishing strict new guidelines for proving the laws’ effects on voters of color and thus requiring litigants to clear the much higher bar of proving purposeful intent to discriminate.Mr. Spital said his group would have to carefully assess its next moves and “think very carefully” before bringing new cases that, if defeated, could set damaging new precedents. The Arizona case, filed in 2016 by the Democratic National Committee, was considered a weak vehicle for challenging new voting laws; even the Biden administration acknowledged that the Arizona law was not discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. Choosing the wrong cases, in the wrong jurisdictions, could lead to further setbacks, Mr. Spital and other voting rights advocates said.At the same time, Mr. Spital said, it is imperative that voting restrictions enacted by Republicans not go unchallenged.“It will force us to work even harder in the cases that we do bring,” he said. “Once the rules of the game are set, even if they are tilted against us, we have the resources — we have extraordinary lawyers, extraordinary clients, and we have the facts on our side.”Thursday’s ruling also laid bare an uncomfortable new reality for Democrats and voting activists: that under existing law, they can expect little help from the federal courts on election laws that are passed on a partisan basis by the party that controls a state government. Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida and Iowa have moved aggressively to push through voting laws, brushing aside protests from Democrats, voting rights groups and even major corporations.Arizona Republicans were candid about the partisan nature of their efforts when the Supreme Court heard the case in March. A lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party told the justices that the restrictions were needed because without them, Republicans in the state would be “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”“It’s much harder to prove these things — it takes a lot more evidence,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in voting rights and redistricting cases. “Courts are often reluctant to label legislators racist. That’s why the effects standard was added in 1982.”The high court’s decision also raises the stakes for 2022 contests for governor in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Democratic governors are poised to block measures proposed by Republican-controlled legislatures. If a Republican won the governor’s seat in any of those states, the legislature would have a clear path to pushing through new voting laws.Republicans on Friday lauded the Supreme Court ruling, calling it a validation of the need to combat voter fraud — though no evidence of widespread fraud emerged in President Biden’s victory.Justin Riemer, the chief counsel at the Republican National Committee, argued that the new “guideposts” set by Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, were welcome and would force a recognition of the broader options for voting available in a state.“It reaffirms, for example, that states have an incredibly important interest in protecting against voter fraud and promoting voter confidence,” Mr. Riemer said. “When the court looked at Arizona’s laws, it noted how generous the voting provisions were.”Mr. Riemer noted that Democrats would also have a harder time in meeting new standards for showing that laws impose unreasonable burdens on voters.“I don’t want to say completely shuts them out of Section 2, but it’s going to make it very difficult for them to strike down laws that are really minimally, if at all, burdensome,” Mr. Riemer said, referring to the section of the Voting Rights Act that addresses racially discriminatory practices.Major Supreme Court decisions affirming a new restriction on voting have historically been followed by waves of new state-level legislation. In 2011, 34 states introduced some form of new voter identification legislation after the court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law in 2008.The first immediate test of a newly emboldened legislature will come next week in Texas, where lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene for a special session, in a second attempt by Republicans to pass an election overhaul bill. The first attempt failed after Democrats in the State Legislature staged a contentious late-night walkout, temporarily halting proposals that were among the most restrictive in the country.Those proposals included bans on new methods of voting, a reduction in Sunday voting hours and provisions that would make it easier to overturn elections and would greatly empower partisan poll watchers.The uncertain legal fights will play out in a federal judiciary remade during Mr. Trump’s administration, and Democrats in Congress have failed to enact federal voter protections.The legal defense fund that Mr. Spital represents sued Georgia in May over its new voting laws, arguing that the laws would have a discriminatory effect. Other lawsuits, including one the Department of Justice filed last week, argue that Georgia acted with intent to discriminate against voters of color.But some Democrats, while lamenting the decision by the Supreme Court, noted that they still had plenty of constitutional tools to challenge repressive voting laws.“Obviously, it is now going to be more difficult to litigate,” said Aneesa McMillan, a deputy executive director at the super PAC Priorities USA, who oversees the organization’s voting rights efforts. “But most of our cases that we challenge, we challenge based on the First, the 14th and the 15th amendments of the Constitution.”Among the guideposts Justice Alito articulated is an assessment of “the standard practice” of voting in 1982, when Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was amended.“It is relevant that in 1982 States typically required nearly all voters to cast their ballots in person on election day and allowed only narrow and tightly defined categories of voters to cast absentee ballots,” Justice Alito wrote.Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling established a series of guideposts for determining whether merely the effect of a voting law is discriminatory, rather than the intent.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe court did not address the purpose clause of Section 2. But those cases often rely on racist statements by lawmakers or irregularities in the legislative process — trickier elements of a legal case to prove than the effects.“You’re not going to get that smoking gun kind of evidence,” said Sophia Lakin, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project. “It’s pulling together a lot of circumstantial pieces to show the purpose is to take away the rights of voters of color.”People protested voting restrictions outside the Texas Capitol in Austin in May.Mikala Compton/ReutersIn Texas, some Democrats in the Legislature had been hoping that they could work toward a more moderate version of the bill in the special session that starts next week; it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court decision will induce Republicans to favor an even more restrictive bill.Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and State Representative Briscoe Cain, both Republicans, did not respond to requests for comment. Speaker Dan Phelan and State Senator Bryan Hughes, both Republicans, declined to comment.But whether the Supreme Court decision will open the floodgates for more restrictive voting legislation in other states remains an open question; more than 30 state legislatures have adjourned for the year, and others have already passed their voting laws.“It’s hard to imagine what a spike in voting restrictions would look like now, because we are already seeing such a dramatic surge, more than at any time since Reconstruction,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute. “But passing new waves of legislation has certainly been the response in recent years.”Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin is one of the Democratic governors who are holding off voting measures passed by Republican-led legislatures. On Wednesday, he vetoed the first of several pieces of Republican legislation on the electoral process.In an interview, he said Republicans’ monthslong effort to relitigate the 2020 election had had the effect of placing voting rights on the level of health care and education among the top priorities of Wisconsin voters.“It’s rising up as far as people’s recognizing that it’s an important issue,” Mr. Evers said. “They brought it on themselves, frankly, the Republicans have. I don’t think the people of Wisconsin thought the election was stolen. They understand that it was a fair election. And so the Republicans’ inability to accept Donald Trump’s loss is making it more of a bread-and-butter issue here.” More

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      Trump Is Said to Have Called Arizona Official After Election Loss

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      Donald Trump tried to reach the top Republican in metropolitan Phoenix as his allies were trying to overturn the state’s 2020 results, according to the official, who said he did not pick up the calls.President Donald J. Trump twice sought to talk on the phone with the Republican leader of Arizona’s most populous county last winter as the Trump campaign and its allies tried unsuccessfully to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the state’s presidential contest, according to the Republican official and records obtained by The Arizona Republic, a Phoenix newspaper.But the leader, Clint Hickman, then the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in an interview on Friday that he let the calls — made in late December and early January — go to voice mail and did not return them. “I told people, ‘Please don’t have the president call me,’” he said.At the time, Mr. Hickman was being pressed by the state Republican Party chairwoman and Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to investigate claims of fraud in the county’s election, which Mr. Biden had won by about 45,000 votes.Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that “it’s no surprise Maricopa County election officials had no desire to look into significant irregularities during the election,” though there is no evidence of widespread problems with Arizona’s election. She did not directly address the calls reportedly made by Mr. Trump. Two former campaign aides said they knew nothing about the outreach to the Maricopa County official.The Arizona Republic obtained the records of the phone calls from Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani after a Freedom of Information Act request.Mr. Hickman and the county’s four other supervisors certified the election results and have repeatedly called the vote free and fair. But the Republican-controlled State Senate began its own review of all 2.1 million votes cast in the county, which has been widely criticized by state officials from both parties and is still underway.The Arizona Republic reported that the calls came as the state Republican chairwoman, Kelli Ward, sought to connect Mr. Hickman and other county officials to Mr. Trump and his allies so they could discuss purported irregularities in the county’s election.Ms. Ward first told Mr. Hickman on Nov. 13, the day after the Maricopa vote count sealed Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona, that the president would probably call him. But the first call did not come until New Year’s Eve, when Mr. Hickman said the White House operator dialed him as he was dining with his wife.Mr. Hickman said the switchboard operator left a voice mail message saying Mr. Trump wished to speak with him and asking him to call back. He didn’t. Four nights later, the White House switchboard operator called Mr. Hickman again, he said. By then, Mr. Hickman recalled, he had read a transcript of Mr. Trump’s call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state whom Mr. Trump pressured to “find more votes” to reverse his defeat in the state. “I had seen what occurred in Georgia and I was like, ‘I want no part of this madness and the only way I enter into this is I call the president back,’” Mr. Hickman said.He sent the call to voice mail and did not return it because, he said, the county was in litigation over the election results at that point.In November and December, Mr. Giuliani also called Mr. Hickman and the three other Republicans on the Board of Supervisors, The Republic reported. That call to Mr. Hickman also went to his voice mail, he said, and he did not return it either.Among those he consulted with while considering whether to return Mr. Trump’s calls, Mr. Hickman said, was Thomas Liddy, the litigation chief of Maricopa County. Mr. Liddy is a son of G. Gordon Liddy, the key figure in the Watergate burglary.  “History collides,” Mr. Hickman said. “It’s a small world.”Annie Karni More

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      Can Ron DeSantis Rescue the G.O.P. From Donald Trump?

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      Former President Donald Trump may be the Republican Party’s de facto leader, but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is clearly its man of the moment. Increasingly, political watchers are wondering when this will become a problem for the ambitious Mr. DeSantis.Despite some ups and downs, the governor emerged from the coronavirus crisis with his national profile raised and his stock high among conservatives, who laud him for having kept his state largely open for business.Winning even more conservative love, he has championed a smorgasbord of policies — some of dubious constitutionality — seemingly designed to make progressives’ heads explode. In recent months, he has signed legislation curtailing voting access, cracking down on protesters and punishing social media firms for deplatforming political candidates. (On Wednesday, a federal judge put the deplatforming law on hold over First Amendment concerns — though Mr. DeSantis will still get points for trying.) He pushed to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. He issued an executive order, and later signed legislation, barring businesses and government agencies from requiring vaccine passports.Recent polls show Mr. DeSantis with solid job approval numbers heading into his 2022 re-election race — a position strengthened by his ability to rake in piles of campaign cash from his nationwide network of donors. He is a familiar face on Fox News and Fox Business.Cue the speculation about Mr. DeSantis’s presidential prospects. The high-profile leader of a crucial swing state, he has emerged as a top-tier Republican contender — a natural heir to the MAGA throne. He insists he is laser focused on winning re-election. But his de rigueur demurrals do nothing to tamp down the chatter. Will he run in 2024? What if Mr. Trump does? Could the governor best the former president?Political watchers talk about Mr. DeSantis as a less problematic version of the 45th president — “Trump without the gold toilet,” as one wag put it — and his leadership style has been characterized as “competent Trumpism.” The political media is pitching him as Mr. Trump’s “big rival” for 2024 and the “new king of the G.O.P.”The party’s ground troops are smitten as well. At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this February, Mr. DeSantis won a presidential straw poll that excluded Mr. Trump. Then last month, at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, he won a straw poll that included the former president.You see where this is headed, right? Politicians generally bask in attention like snakes in the sun. But this is the sort of notice that could land a rising Republican on Mr. Trump’s bad side. Whether or not Mr. DeSantis would actually run against him is almost beside the point. The former president cannot abide anyone outshining him — certainly not some snot-nosed state official who wouldn’t even have his job if Mr. Trump hadn’t endorsed the then-congressman early in his race for governor.Mr. DeSantis is said to be taking great care not to do anything that would trigger Mr. Trump, even as he travels the country amassing piles of campaign cash, hobnobbing with Republican bigwigs and drawing ever more media coverage.Is Mr. DeSantis afraid of Mr. Trump? Probably. Most Republican officials are. The more pertinent question is whether Mr. Trump is at all afraid of Mr. DeSantis. If not, maybe he should be.Obviously the governor isn’t a natural showman like Mr. Trump. Few are. That said, Mr. DeSantis has proved a solid practitioner of Trumpian theater. His cheeky campaign ad from 2018 in which he urges his young daughter to “build the wall” with cardboard bricks was a classic own-the-libs provocation. More recently, in praising the state law targeting social media companies, Mr. DeSantis accused Big Tech of treating Mr. Trump as a bigger villain than Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.But Florida isn’t a red enough state for its governor to completely write off nonconservatives. So when the occasion suits him, Mr. DeSantis employs a slightly lighter touch. Early in his tenure, he made some moderate appointments to his administration and supported policies that didn’t fit the MAGA mold. His first week in office, he rolled out a plan to clean up Florida’s waters and address the effects of climate change.Even when catering to the right, he doesn’t always go the Full Trump. The governor aggressively touted the state’s new anti-protester law, even as he drew a clear distinction between peaceful protesters and violent rioters. The Atlantic’s David Frum put it this way: “DeSantis practices a form of political judo that works by employing judicious but limited provocation, followed by a deft, just-in-time retreat to the center, converting the opponent’s strength and energy into a resource for DeSantis.”Mr. Trump cannot fail to have noticed all the fuss. He has on a couple of occasions been asked if he would consider Mr. De Santis as a running mate in 2024. Both times he responded positively. This allows Mr. Trump to acknowledge the governor’s popularity but also assert his own status as top banana. Ron? Great guy! But strictly No. 2 material.Mr. DeSantis is maintaining friendly relations with parts of Trumpworld. Notably, he has connected with Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff. Mr. Meadows accompanied the governor on a recent fund-raising trip out West. In April, the governor introduced Mr. Trump at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago hosted by the Conservative Partnership Institute, of which Mr. Meadows is a senior partner. The dinner kicked off a two-day summit focused on building a massive dark-money machine to aid conservative candidates — a useful project for Mr. DeSantis.It serves Mr. DeSantis well that the former president apparently still sees him as a Trump creation — more of an indentured servant than a serious rival. “I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed him he took off like a rocket ship,” the former president boasted to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in April, when she asked about Mr. DeSantis as a running mate. “I was at the beginning of Ron,” Mr. Trump told the network’s Stuart Varney last month, in response to a similar question.Then again, if Mr. Trump decides that his creation is getting too big for his britches, he could turn all the harder.Looking to stir this pot, the pro-Democratic group Remove Ron has produced an ad with this theme, taunting the former president for being overtaken by a “rookie congressman” who was a “nobody” until Mr. Trump “made him governor of America’s third largest state.” The ad mocks, “Ron must think you’re past your prime or that you’re a loser, Donald,” before warning that if Mr. DeSantis wins re-election in 2022, neither he nor Florida will have any more use for Mr. Trump. “The clock is ticking, Donald. What are you going to do about it?”Mr. DeSantis is far from the only Republican with a serious interest in this question.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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      Alvin Bragg Likely to Take Over Trump Investigation

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      With his main rival, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceding, Alvin Bragg is poised to lead the investigation into Donald J. Trump’s family business.Alvin Bragg, a career prosecutor with experience taking on white-collar crime and corruption, is poised to become Manhattan’s next district attorney, a job that will include overseeing the most prominent and contentious criminal case in the United States: the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump’s family business.Given the overwhelming edge Democrats hold in Manhattan, Mr. Bragg is heavily favored to win the general election in November after his foremost opponent in the Democratic primary, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceded on Friday.If he wins, Mr. Bragg would immediately take over a high-stakes inquiry that on Thursday yielded a 15-count indictment against the Trump Organization, the Trump family business, and one of its key executives, Allen Weisselberg.The indictment charged Mr. Weisselberg in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on close to $1.8 million in benefits and bonuses and the company with profiting from his alleged actions. The charges were the first of what could be a number of others in the long-running inquiry, which will continue to focus on Mr. Trump’s company, as well as on the former president himself.Mr. Weisselberg has so far rebuffed pressure to cooperate with investigators. Should he continue to do so, Mr. Bragg would oversee any trial in the case. And if the investigation involving Mr. Trump’s business continues after the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., leave office in January, Mr. Bragg will take charge of the inquiry.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Bragg acknowledged the highly consequential nature of the investigation into Mr. Trump, but he said he was equally focused on other important tasks.“We’re also talking about the gun-trafficking issues, the scope of the entire system and the collateral consequences,” he said. “It’s all a profound responsibility.”Mr. Bragg, 47, would be the first Black person to lead an office that still prosecutes more Black people than members of any other racial group. During the campaign, he sought to balance concerns about public safety with a vision for a more equitable criminal justice system.A former federal prosecutor and deputy New York State attorney general, he led seven other candidates for the Democratic nomination when polls closed last week with the race too close to call.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who trailed Mr. Bragg by about three percentage points, had pinned her hopes on tens of thousands of absentee ballots. But as those ballots began to be tallied this week, they showed she was not picking up enough votes in key districts to cut into Mr. Bragg’s overall lead. On Friday, she ceded the race and congratulated him.“I spoke with Alvin Bragg earlier today and congratulated him on his historic election as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney,” she said in a statement. “We had important disagreements throughout the campaign, but I am confident in Alvin’s commitment to justice, and I stand ready to support him.”Tali Farhadian Weinstein campaigned on the Upper East Side on Primary Day. She conceded the race on Friday. Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesMany of Mr. Bragg’s priorities and proposed policies align with those of progressive prosecutors who have remade district attorney’s offices around the United States in recent years. But he defied easy classification during the race, explaining the nuances of his positions by referring to his experience growing up in Harlem.Mr. Bragg’s supporters have said that his racial identity, as well as policies that account for the harm that prosecution can do to communities of color, was one of the key reasons that they favored him.Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor and a supporter of Mr. Bragg’s, said the combination was important to understanding how he might lead the office.“When we’re in this moment of racial reckoning, it’s really important the leader of the Manhattan D.A.’s office understands the real concerns about public safety,” Professor Murphy said. But, she added, the district attorney should also “understand that the police themselves can be a harm-causing agent in the community as well.”Mr. Bragg said repeatedly during the campaign that he had sued Mr. Trump or his administration more than 100 times during his tenure at the attorney general’s office. He also said he expected to be attacked by Mr. Trump, who said this week that the investigation was a form of “political persecution” being led by “New York radical-left prosecutors.”Mr. Vance, who did not seek re-election, is coordinating his efforts with Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump and the case against Mr. Weisselberg and Mr. Trump’s business.“He can handle this,” Mr. Bharara said.For much of the primary, Mr. Bragg was thought to be trailing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, another former federal prosecutor who also served as counsel to the former U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, and the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez. She dominated the fund-raising battle and gave her own campaign $8.2 million, more than three times as much money as anyone else raised overall, and led in most polls.But a late resistance to her candidacy grew, in part because of the money she spent on the race. On Primary Day, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters from supporting Ms. Farhadian Weinstein during a radio interview, and cited Mr. Bragg and another contender, Tahanie Aboushi, as better choices.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a brief interview on Friday that she would continue to be an advocate for issues she focused on during the campaign, particularly violence against women, which she said was startlingly common and underreported.Mr. Bragg will face Thomas Kenniff, the Republican candidate, in November. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y., a member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order. In recent weeks, he had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, but then switched to criticizing Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg’s campaign was helped by endorsements from several key figures and groups, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York; Zephyr Teachout, an activist and former candidate for governor; The New York Times Editorial Board (which is separate from the newsroom); and the political action committees of Planned Parenthood and Color of Change. Color of Change’s committee pledged $1 million to Mr. Bragg and spent close to $500,0000.Mr. Bragg made inroads with some unlikely allies, often through a willingness to hear and incorporate others’ positions. He impressed Five Boro Defenders, a public defenders group, enough that the group invited him to a “decarceral debate” in February where candidates were asked to explain how their policies would help reduce the number of people incarcerated in prisons and jails.“He was always the traditional prosecutor that probably fit most squarely into that progressive prosecutor peg and not necessarily into a decarceral peg,” said Amanda Jack, a member of the group. “But the consensus among us was that he was just really willing to listen and learn in the interview.”Ms. Teachout said that Mr. Bragg’s willingness to learn was exemplified in a memo that he prepared to walk potential supporters through his plans for the office. and that led her to endorse him. She called it “a really significant document.”The memo put Mr. Bragg’s priorities front and center. In it, he pledged to form new units to hold police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions; to provide more resources to bureaus that investigate white-collar crime; and to stop tying success within the office to conviction rates.“The need for reform in our office’s policies and practices is urgent,” the document concluded. “It is critical that the changes described in this memorandum take effect immediately.”Mr. Bragg, a lifelong Harlem resident, said he had been moved to pursue a career in law by his experiences growing up, including several encounters in which guns were held to his head by civilians and police officers.He attended Harvard and Harvard Law School, was a clerk for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., worked as a civil rights lawyer and later became a prosecutor, first in the New York attorney general’s office and later in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.When he returned to the attorney general’s office in 2013, he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians and eventually rose to become a chief deputy attorney general.His classmates noted his potential when he was an undergraduate. A lengthy 1995 profile in The Harvard Crimson reported on his having said that he was unlikely to seek elected office. The paper was unconvinced.“Whatever he does eventually,” the article said, “today there is a definite sense of the anointed about him.” More

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      2020 Election Spurs Resignations and Retirements of Officials

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      The draining work of 2020 has spurred resignations and retirements. In a recent survey, one in three officials said they felt unsafe in the jobs.WASHINGTON — In November, Roxanna Moritz won her fourth term unopposed as the chief election officer in metro Davenport, Iowa, with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot.Five months later, she quit. “I emotionally couldn’t take the stress anymore,” she said in an interview.For Ms. Moritz, a Democrat, the initial trigger was a Republican-led investigation into her decision to give hazard pay to poll workers who had braved the coronavirus pandemic last fall. But what sealed her decision was a new law enacted by the Iowa legislature in February that made voting harder — and imposed fines and criminal penalties on election officials for errors like her failure to seek approval for $9,400 in extra pay.“I could be charged with a felony. I could lose my voting rights,” she said. “So I decided to leave.”Ms. Moritz is one casualty of a year in which election officials were repeatedly threatened, scapegoated and left exhausted — all while managing a historically bitter presidential vote during a pandemic.She has company. In 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections has left. One in four election officials in Kansas either quit or lost re-election in November. Twenty-one directors or deputies have left or will leave election posts in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, according to a tally by the reporting consortiums Spotlight PA and Votebeat.Some of those represent ordinary churn in a job where many appointees are nearing retirement, and others are subject to the vagaries of elections. In a survey of some 850 election officials by Reed College and the Democracy Fund in April, more than one in six said they planned to retire before the 2024 election.Others are leaving early, and more departures are in the wings. In Michigan, most of the 1,500 clerks who handle elections run for office, said Mary Clark, the president of the state Association of Municipal Clerks. “That said,” she added, “I am beginning to hear rumblings from a few appointed city clerks who are wondering if this ‘climate’ is worth the stress.”Election workers sorting ballots at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia last November.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesAt a gathering of Florida election officials this month, “multiple people came up to me to say, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this,’” said David Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “There are the threats, the stress, the attacks on democracy on the officers, on the staff.“We may lose a generation of professionalism and expertise in election administration,” he said. “It’s hard to measure the impact.”In interviews, some election officials said they also worried that a flood of departures in the next two years could drain elections of nonpartisan expertise at a hinge moment for American democracy — or worse, encourage partisans to fill the vacuum. They cite moves by partisans alleging that the last election was stolen in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere to run for statewide offices that control election administration.That may be less likely at the local level, but the pain is no less acute. “We’re losing awesome election administrators who have tenure and know what they’re doing,” said Michelle Wilcox, the director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections in Wapakoneta, Ohio.The 2020 election was brutal for election officials by any measure. Beyond the added burden of a record turnout, many effectively found themselves conducting two votes — the one they had traditionally overseen at polling places, and a second mail-in vote that dwarfed that of past elections. The pandemic led to shortages of poll workers and money for masks and other protection equipment and vastly complicated voting preparations.Atop that, baseless claims of rigged voting and vote-counting by President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans elevated once-obscure auditors and clerks to public figures. And it made them targets for vilification by Trump supporters.A report issued last week by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University underscored the consequences: In a survey of election officials, one in three said they felt unsafe in the jobs. One in five said they were concerned about death threats.Better than three in four said the explosion of disinformation about elections had made their jobs harder. More than half said it had made them more dangerous.“The fact that one in three election workers doesn’t feel safe in their jobs is an extraordinary number and a real challenge to our democracy,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior democracy fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The center contributed to the report.Election challengers yelled as they watched workers count absentee ballots in Detroit last November. Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIf lies and misstatements continue to fuel mistrust of elections and a hostility toward those who run them, “the entire infrastructure of how the nation governs itself becomes at risk,” he said.In Ohio, Ms. Wilcox said she and her office staff logged some 200 additional hours to conduct a November election that drew 25,940 voters — an almost 80 percent turnout.The 2020 vote, she said, was the first to include training in de-escalating standoffs with angry voters who refused to wear masks, and the first in which officials spent considerable time addressing baseless claims of fraud.“It was tough,” she said. “I was like, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’”In Butler County, Pa., Shari Brewer resigned as director of the Board of Elections in April 2020 — even before the state’s presidential primary.“I could see what was coming,” she said. “We had already budgeted for extra help and overtime, and this was the first primary in Pennsylvania where mail-in ballots were implemented” — a state law allowing no-excuse absentee balloting had passed the previous year.The workload increased, and no help arrived. So after 10 years — and still at the bottom of the county’s pay scale, she added — she threw in the towel.Indeed, the report issued last week said election officials singled out the crushing workload as a reason for leaving. Behind that, Mr. Rapoport said, is the failure of governments to address what he called an enormously underfunded election system that is a linchpin of democracy.The report called on the Justice Department to create an election threat task force to track down and prosecute those who terrorize election workers and for states to allot money to add security for officials. It recommended that federal and state governments, social media companies and internet search engines develop ways to better combat false election claims and take them offline more quickly.And it also asked states to take steps to shield election officials from political pressure and politically motivated lawsuits and investigations.Officials processing ballots in Madison, Wis., in November.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesParadoxically, Republican-controlled legislatures have moved in the opposite direction on some of those issues. Texas and Arizona have enacted laws explicitly banning private donations to support election work, embracing false claims from the right that private foundations in 2020 directed contributions to Democratic strongholds. Republicans in a dozen states have considered launching Arizona-style investigations of the 2020 vote despite warnings that they are feeding a movement of election-fraud believers.Ms. Clark, the head of the Michigan clerks’ association, said she believed that the pace of departures there would be influenced by the fate of Republican-backed legislation that would tighten voting rules and restrict election officials’ authority.And in Iowa, the Republican-controlled legislature voted this spring to shorten early-voting periods, clamp down on absentee ballot rules, sharply limit ballot drop boxes — and take aim at the county auditors who run elections. One clause eliminates much of their ability to take steps to make voting easier. Another makes it a felony to disregard election guidance from the secretary of state and levies fines of up to $10,000 for “technical infractions” of their duties.In Davenport, Ms. Moritz said, the pandemic and election-fraud drumbeat all but upended preparations for last year’s election. Tensions rose after she sparred with the Republican-run county board of supervisors over accepting donations to offset rising election costs.When poll workers were hired, she said, she checked with officials to make sure there was enough money in her $80-million-a-year budget to cover hazard pay. But the supervisors had set their pay at $12 an hour, and she failed to ask them for permission to increase it.Ms. Moritz says she made a mistake. “Nobody benefited from it but the poll workers,” she said. Two weeks after the election, when the county attorney called to tell her the pay was being investigated, she said, “I literally puked in my garbage can.”The supervisors have said their inquiry was not politically motivated, and the state auditor, a Democrat, is looking into the misstep. But in the storm of publicity that followed the supervisors’ inquiry, Ms. Moritz said, she began to receive threats. And any thought of staying on vanished after the legislature began to consider reining in auditors’ powers and penalizing them for errors like hers.“People are starting to second-guess if this is the profession they want to be in,” she said. “It was always a stressful job, and now it’s more so. And all these things coming down the pipe make it worse.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      The Strange, Sad Death of America’s Political Imagination

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      .interactive-content { max-width: 100%; width: 100%; } .opinionlabel { text-transform: uppercase; color: #D0021B; font: 700 0.9375rem/1.1rem “nyt-cheltenham”, georgia, “times new roman”, times, serif; letter-spacing: 0.07em; } .secondary{ color: white; } .opinionlabel.secondary:after { content: “”; display: block; width: 65px; height: 1px; background-color: white; margin: 20px auto 0; } h1.headline.nosecondary:before { content: “”; display: block; width: 65px; […] More

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      Legal Threats Hover Over Trump as He Hints at a 2024 Bid

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      As the former president weighs another run for the White House, he’s confronting various investigations and lawsuits. Here’s a rundown.Donald Trump hit the campaign trail again last weekend, and he certainly seemed happy to be back in the spotlight. He bashed President Biden and undocumented immigrants, repeated his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, and hinted at a possible run for the presidency again in 2024.But as he contemplates a return to politics, he has a more immediate question to contend with: Will he be able to stay out of legal trouble?On Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the former president’s real estate company, the Trump Organization, with running a 15-year scheme to help executives avoid taxation. A top Trump executive, Allen Weisselberg, was accused of dodging taxes on $1.7 million in income; he surrendered to the D.A.’s office on Thursday morning.Mr. Weisselberg’s was the first indictment to come out of a lengthy investigation that is being conducted by that office, and it could signal a turning point. If he agrees to testify against the former president, Mr. Weisselberg would be a powerful witness: He has long been one of Mr. Trump’s closest financial advisers, and Mr. Trump once praised him for his willingness to do “whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line.”After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump was impeached for a second time — something that hadn’t happened to any previous U.S. president. If he were to be indicted on a criminal charge, that too would be a first for a former president.Ed Rollins, the chairman of the Great America PAC, which backed Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns but has not pledged to support him in 2024, said that Mr. Trump remained the presumptive front-runner for the Republican nomination. Still, he said in an interview, the threat of criminal prosecution “certainly makes it more difficult” for Mr. Trump to claim the party’s mantle.“You have to be adding people, adding players, convincing people that, ‘My loss was detrimental to the country,’” Mr. Rollins added. “People are going to be saying: ‘Tell me why I should go back to you. Why should I put money into your campaign?’”And the Manhattan D.A.’s investigation is only one of a smattering of legal obstacles that Mr. Trump may need to overcome, as he considers a possible return. Here’s a look at the many investigations and lawsuits that he’s currently fighting — touching on his business dealings, accusations of misconduct toward women, and his role in drumming up the Capitol riot.Taxes and financial affairsMr. Weisselberg was indicted as part of a long-running investigation by Cyrus Vance, the district attorney for Manhattan. At Mr. Weisselberg’s arraignment on Thursday afternoon, prosecutors described a 15-year tax fraud scheme and leveled 15 felony counts against him, the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation.Mr. Vance has assembled a grand jury and is in the process of determining whether to bring charges against Mr. Trump; the body has already questioned a number of the former president’s associates. Prosecutors have seized Mr. Weisselberg’s personal tax and financial records, as well as those of his daughter-in-law.Letitia James, the New York attorney general, also opened a parallel investigation into whether the Trump Organization had manipulated property values to avoid taxes and gain other financial benefits. In May, Ms. James’s office announced that its investigation, which began as a civil concern, had expanded into the criminal realm and would join Mr. Vance’s inquiry.The former president’s niece, the psychiatrist and author Mary Trump, has also sued him for fraud. Last year, she filed a suit claiming that Mr. Trump had defrauded her out of tens of millions of dollars. She had claimed that when her father, Fred Trump Jr., died, she was prevented from accessing her stake in his will, and that her share was slowly depleted by Donald Trump and other family members. After Fred Trump Sr. died, the remaining Trump siblings sought to exclude Mary from the family holdings entirely, she said.She accepted a settlement in 2001, but after a 2018 Times investigation drew back the curtain on the family’s finances, she filed a lawsuit accusing her uncle and his siblings of fraud and breaching fiduciary trust. The suit is still pending.Defamation claimsThe most high-profile lawsuit against Donald Trump may be the one brought by E. Jean Carroll, a journalist and advice columnist, whose 2019 book accuses him of raping her in the 1990s. After Mr. Trump publicly denied the allegation and said Ms. Carroll was “not my type,” she sued him for damaging her reputation and career.When Mr. Trump was still in office, the Justice Department sought to stanch the lawsuit by arguing that he was legally protected from defamation suits filed over things he said while executing his duties as president. A federal judge ruled against the administration, but the agency’s lawyers appealed.Under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, Biden’s Justice Department has continued the appeal, saying that Mr. Trump’s remarks should be protected under the Federal Tort Claims Act.Another woman, Summer Zervos, sued Mr. Trump in 2017, days before he took office, saying that he had damaged her reputation and her financial well-being when he denied her accusation of sexual assault. The dispute stems from her time as a contestant on “The Apprentice,” when she claims he groped and kissed her against her will.Because he made the statement in question before becoming president, Mr. Trump’s remarks aren’t protected under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The suit is currently before the New York Court of Appeals.His actions on Jan. 6Members of Congress and Capitol Police officers have filed separate suits seeking to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his role in organizing and riling up the rioters who stormed the government building on Jan. 6.Representatives Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Eric Swalwell of California, both Democrats, have both filed suits arguing that Mr. Trump violated the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law that makes it a crime for people to conspire to prevent elected officials from discharging their duties.In a different suit, a pair of Capitol Police officers who were injured on Jan. 6 are seeking damages from Mr. Trump for his part in the events of that day. The officers, James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, say in the suit that they were hit with bear spray, assaulted with flagpoles and crushed against a door by the attackers as they tried to fight them back.The attorney general of Washington, D.C., Karl Racine, has also opened an investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s incendiary language rose to the level of criminal incitement.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