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On Jan. 6, as Donald Trump was revving up the rioters who would attempt an insurrection at the Capitol, just a short distance away, he said to them: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” More
Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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A conservative Christian and wealthy businessman, he gave millions to Rick Santorum and Donald Trump in their presidential bids.Foster Friess, a Wyoming businessman who founded an investment firm, made a fortune and gave a lot of it away to Republican presidential candidates and charities, sometimes with flair, died on Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 81.His organization, Foster’s Outriders, which confirmed the death, said he had been receiving care at the Mayo Clinic there for myelodysplastic syndrome, a disorder of the blood cells and bone marrow.Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, who defeated Mr. Friess in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2018, writing on Twitter, called Mr. Friess “a strong and steady voice for Republican and Christian values.”Mr. Friess’s run for governor was his only try at major elected office. In the political arena he was primarily known for his donations, particularly to the presidential bids of Rick Santorum, the former United States senator from Pennsylvania, in the 2012 and 2016 campaigns. After Mr. Santorum left the 2016 race, Mr. Friess became one of the first Republican megadonors to embrace Donald J. Trump.But to many, the most important support that Mr. Friess, an evangelical Christian, and his wife, Lynnette, provided was to charities. Foster’s Outriders and the Lynn and Foster Friess Family Foundation have provided scholarships, financed work for homeless people, supported water projects in Africa and much more. His organization said Mr. Friess had donated $500 million in his lifetime.His 70th birthday party in 2010 in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he lived much of the year, was the stuff of legend. The website wyofile.com described it.“In the invitations to the party, Friess, a born-again Christian, had asked the guests to identify their favorite charity that reflected the values of his favorite quote from Galatians: ‘Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ,’” it wrote in 2011. “He vowed to give $70,000 to the most worthy nominee.”When the time came to announce the winner, the servers at the Four Seasons Resort, where the party was being held, distributed envelopes to the guests.“Friess asked the lucky winner to stand up and shout, and for the other guests to remain seated,” the account continued. “Then he sat back and waited for the mayhem.”As people opened the envelopes, someone at every table stood and shouted, “I won!” He had funded every request, at a cost of $7.7 million.Mr. Friess thanking supporters in 2018 after conceding the Republican nomination to Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming. He had been endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. Alan Rogers/The Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated PressFoster Stephen Friess was born on April 2, 1940, in Rice Lake, Wis. His father, Albert, was a cattle rancher, and his mother, Ethel (Foster) Friess, was a homemaker.“I came from nothing,” he told The New York Times in 2018 during his campaign for governor when asked if he himself might be considered one of the “elites” he was railing against. “My mom dropped out of school in eighth grade to pick cotton and save the family farm. My dad had a high school education.”He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison with a degree in business administration and served in the Army as an intelligence officer for a guided-missile brigade at Fort Bliss in Texas.After working in finance for several years, he founded the investment management firm Friess Associates in 1974 and was soon regarded as a first-rate stock picker. His flagship asset, the Brandywine Fund, swelled to more than $15 billion. He sold a controlling interest in Friess Associates to the Affiliated Managers Group in 2001.On the political side, Mr. Friess did more than support candidates. In 2010, he was a founding investor in The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel’s conservative news and opinion website.In 2012 Mr. Friess supported Mr. Santorum not so much because he agreed with all his policies — “I try to talk him out of them,” he told the broadcaster Lou Dobbs in February 2012 — but because he thought the Republican Party needed a new face.“These old veteran war horses, they have a hard time making it,” he said on “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” “Dole couldn’t make it, McCain couldn’t make it. On the Democratic side, Gore couldn’t make it and Kerry couldn’t make it. So the Democrats bring these fresh faces, they bring Carter from out of nowhere, they bring Clinton from out of nowhere, they bring Obama from beyond nowhere.”Later that month Mr. Friess made headlines when, on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell asked him whether Mr. Santorum’s statements on “the dangers of contraception” would hurt his campaign.“Back in my days,” Mr. Friess said, “they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”Mr. Santorum’s primary campaign started strong but foundered, and Mr. Obama was elected to a second term, defeating Mitt Romney.In the next presidential campaign, Mr. Friess also supported Mr. Santorum initially. In mid-2015, with the Republican field choked with candidates and the nastiness level increasing, he called on the candidates not to “drift off the civility reservation.”In May 2016, with Mr. Santorum out of the race and Mr. Trump having secured the Republican nomination, Mr. Friess threw his support to the Trump cause, though acknowledging that Mr. Trump had advanced by showing the very incivility he had decried — something he expected would change to a more presidential tenor.“Donald’s strategy seems to work,” Mr. Friess told CNN that month, “but I’m convinced he’s going to shift.”Mr. Friess supported Mr. Trump throughout his administration, and when he ran for governor, the Trump family tried to return the favor — the president’s son Donald Jr. endorsed him in an opinion article in The Star Tribune of Casper, Wyo. President Trump himself was quieter, although he did offer a Twitter post late in the campaign endorsing Mr. Friess. Mr. Gordon’s victory was cited by some of as evidence of Mr. Trump’s vulnerability, though others saw it more as a local matter.Three weeks ago, when Darin Smith, a lawyer and businessman who has contended that Mr. Trump “probably” won the 2020 election, announced that he would challenge Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has been critical of Mr. Trump, in the 2022 primaries, he said that Mr. Friess would be his campaign chairman.Mr. Friess’s wife of 58 years, Lynnette Estes Friess, survives him, as do their four children, Traci, Stephen, Carrie, and Michael; a brother, Herman; and 15 grandchildren. More
So many investigations, people.“This is a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history,” Donald Trump said, complaining about the multiple probes into his business practices. More
Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, told The Times that a new, disinformation-driven attempt to inspect 2020 ballots wouldn’t unearth wrongdoing, and would help restore voter confidence.Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, earned widespread praise for his staunch defense of the election results in his state last year in the face of growing threats and pressure from former President Donald J. Trump.As Mr. Trump spread falsehoods about the election, Mr. Raffensperger vocally debunked them, culminating in a 10-page letter addressed to Congress on Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol riot, in which he refuted, point by point, Mr. Trump’s false claims about election fraud in Georgia.But after a Georgia judge ruled late last week that a group of voters must be allowed to view copies of all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in the state’s largest county, in yet another disinformation-driven campaign, Mr. Raffensperger voiced his support for the effort, saying that inspecting the ballots would provide “another layer of transparency and citizen engagement.”As Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods continue to hold sway over many lawmakers and voters, with efforts to review ballots still underway in states across the country, we spoke with Mr. Raffensperger about why he supported the new review ordered by the judge and how he thinks about public trust, or mistrust, in the electoral process. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.At the risk of asking you to repeat yourself: Was there any widespread fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election?No, there was no widespread fraud. We had, and we still do have, several hundred investigations that we’ve opened up. Many of those are procedural, but none would be significant enough to overturn the election results.So why support this most recent order to inspect ballots?So from Day 1, I’ve encouraged Georgians who have concerns about the elections in their counties to pursue those claims through legal avenues. Frankly, Fulton County has a longstanding history of election mismanagement that has weakened voter faith in the system.And I’m very grateful that S.B. 202 [the state’s new voting law] strengthens the ability of the secretary of state’s office to hold counties accountable. I think that’s a good thing.But in a letter you wrote to Congress in January, you refuted the false allegations regarding absentee ballots in Fulton County, nearly the very same claims that are a part of this lawsuit that led to the judge’s order. So what has changed?Unfortunately, the No. 1 issue that we’re facing right now in elections nationwide is voter confidence. Now, in Georgia, it goes back to the 2018 governor’s race, when Stacey Abrams did not concede, and then in 2016, days after President Trump won, the other camp talks about Russian collusion. And so we had those aspersions cast on Trump’s victory.But what happens each time is that voter confidence takes a hit. So whenever we can restore, or have a process that will help restore, voter confidence, I think that’s a good thing — if you have an open and transparent process in which everyone can objectively agree that this is due process that they’re doing, that they’re making sure they’re following the law.At the end of the day, they’re going to get the same results we got after November. And then we can hopefully put this to bed.So even though you know that the allegations in this most recent lawsuit aren’t going to come to fruition, going through another public process will help build confidence?It’s really the process of civic engagement. Let the citizens have an open, transparent process in which other sets of eyeballs can verify what’s already been verified.We’ve already done a 100 percent hand recount of every single absentee ballot, every single early-vote ballot and every date-of-election ballot. So all three forms of voting have been counted in Georgia. Every single one of those paper ballots has been hand-counted.So I know the results aren’t going to change, but it just helps increase voter confidence and it helps our entire nation to move off this issue and really get back to a more stable society.Democrats and voting rights groups have said that these repeated recounts and relitigations of the 2020 presidential contest actually undermine confidence in the election. So I’m wondering how you weigh that.Well, at the end of the day, a Superior Court judge makes a ruling, and we follow the law in Georgia. Many Republican voters, and especially former President Donald Trump, have continued to reject the multiple audits and recounts already carried out in Georgia and demand new investigations. What makes you think this Fulton County inspection will satisfy those who claim that there was widespread fraud?Well, let’s follow this rabbit trail, and get the answers, and then we’ll get answers that will be very similar to what we had back when this election was carried out and we did the audit process. And we can put this to rest and we can move forward.Georgia’s new voting law gives more power over elections to state lawmakers. Do you have any worries that this new inspection of ballots could prompt the Legislature to exert even more control over election administration?All Georgians should take great comfort at the end of the day that we have a fair election process. We have 159 counties that are running these elections, we have 159 county election directors who have personal integrity. People need to understand that the people who are running these elections at the precinct level — those are your friends, those are your neighbors, those are your friends at church, those are your friends from Pilates, Rotary. Your kids could be on the same youth league baseball or soccer team.The glue that holds the process together is the individual personal integrity of local Georgians, plus our office, and what I will stand for is fair and honest elections.I wanted to ask you a little bit about your re-election bid next year. You’re running against Representative Jody Hice, a Republican congressman whom Mr. Trump has endorsed. Are you worried about Donald Trump attacking you and actively working to ensure your defeat?No. We’re going to run our campaign on issues. At the end of the day, we believe that integrity counts. And we’ve done an awful lot to improve the election process in Georgia.The first thing we did was pass House Bill 316, which allowed us to procure new voting machines that use verifiable paper ballots. For 18 years, people were talking about needing a system with paper ballots; I accomplished that.Also, we made progress toward joining the Electronic Registration Information Center [a nonpartisan, nonprofit multistate voter roll database]. So as we updated our voter rolls, we could do it objectively. We also outlawed ballot harvesting. So we’ve been working on election integrity for a long time.Congressman Hice, though, he’s been up in D.C. for over six years, and he has never introduced a single piece of electoral reform legislation. He’s never done anything on election integrity, ever. And now he thinks it’s somehow an interesting issue for him to run on? That’s the challenge sometimes with congressmen. Some of them don’t do much when they get up there.One of the things Mr. Hice did do was vote in Congress to overturn the election results. Do you have any concern that someone who had previously taken steps to overturn a free and fair election could one day run elections in Georgia?Well, if you’re honest with yourself, he’s a double-minded person. In Georgia, he accepted the results for his race, but he didn’t accept the results for President Trump’s race. How can you hold two opposing views at one time? So he’s going to have to live with his vote on Jan. 6.Echoing Mr. Trump’s election lies has almost become a litmus test in Republican primaries. How do you run in this environment?I’m going to run on integrity, and I’m going to run on the truth.When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Trump? Was it the call in January in which he urged you to “find” him votes that became public soon afterward?Yes.Have any of his allies contacted you or other Republicans in Georgia in the last few months to urge you to conduct a recount or review along the lines of Arizona’s?Not that I’m aware of.OK. Last question. We spent a lot of time earlier talking about how faith in elections is damaged. How do you think we restore bipartisan, national faith in elections?I think perhaps we need to have a national dialogue, or a bipartisan meeting of the minds. Because S. 1 and H.R. 1 [two versions of congressional Democrats’ major voting rights bill] are a top-down, federal takeover of elections, and of course you’re going to see pushback from the Republicans, and rightly so. And I’ve spoken out against those.We really need to look at what can we accomplish that makes sure that we restore the trust of all voters from both sides of the aisle, make sure that we have honest and fair elections, that results are accurate.Candidates need to understand their job is to turn out voters, and if they don’t turn out enough voters, they will lose the election, and they have to accept the will of the people. More
The move put the Biden administration in the position of defending the secrecy of a memo related to the disputed decision to clear President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has decided to fight a legal battle to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 that cleared President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.In a late-night filing on Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a scathing district court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. Two senior department officials wrote the document at the same time that they were helping Mr. Barr draft a letter to Congress claiming that the evidence in the report, which was still secret at the time, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.The still-redacted portion of the document examines nearly a dozen episodes presented as raising obstruction of justice concerns that were detailed in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and has at least two sections, according to two people briefed on it.One laid out potential legal theories under which Mr. Trump could have been prosecuted, the people said. The other examined whether the evidence for any of the episodes constituted proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The memo is said to conclude that no charge was viable.The decision to keep hiding that analysis from public scrutiny puts the Biden administration in the politically awkward position of trying to cover up a record that would shed new light on an act by Mr. Barr that Democrats consider notorious. But it also enables the department to defend two institutional interests: its ability to keep internal legal analysis secret and the actions of career officials whom a judge accused of misleading the court.The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about whether to prosecute Mr. Trump because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said that Mr. Barr should offer his opinion of the evidence to shape public understanding of the report.“Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Justice Department officials during the Trump administration.The department also consented to releasing additional portions of the ruling this month by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in which she had labeled its previous filings to her about the memo as “disingenuous.” Portions of her ruling that discussed the first part of the memo had been redacted.The court on Tuesday unsealed a more fulsome version of the ruling. It revealed that Judge Jackson had also accused the department of having “deliberately obscured” material in the memo that contradicted the notion that Mr. Barr needed to offer a public opinion about the prosecutorial merit of the evidence amassed by Mr. Mueller. The exercise, she said, was instead “purely hypothetical” and fundamentally about “getting a jump on public relations.”Noting that she had discovered the existence of this first part of the memo only after she insisted on reading it for herself rather than relying on the department’s representations about it, Judge Jackson also wrote: “D.O.J. made a strategic decision to pretend as if the first portion of the memorandum was not there and to avoid acknowledging that what the writers were actually discussing was how to neutralize the impact of the report in the court of public opinion.”The new Justice Department filing apologized for — but also defended — its Barr-era assertions to the court about the memo. It said that department officials could have been clearer, but that they were nevertheless accurate on the central legal question: whether the nature of the memo was pre-decisional and deliberative and thus exempt from disclosure. Any missteps, it argued, did not warrant releasing the entire document.Mr. Barr’s claim that the evidence did not show that Mr. Trump had committed any chargeable crime of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading. Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure materials about the matter, leading to the fight over the memo.The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress created an impression that the fruits of the inquiry had cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed several actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were sufficient to ask a grand jury to indict him on charges of obstruction of justice.Those actions included Mr. Trump’s attempt to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into putting out a statement or writing a memo that would falsely deny that the president had directed him to fire Mr. Mueller — effectively falsifying evidence that would have contradicted Mr. McGahn’s witness testimony about that event.Mr. McGahn, who refused to relay directions to remove Mr. Mueller and to later falsely deny that episode, according to the Mueller report, will privately testify next week before the House Judiciary Committee about such matters.Mr. Trump’s actions also included dangling a potential pardon to his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Manafort, who had refused to cooperate with Mr. Mueller about certain key matters.Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2019, Mr. Barr offered some explanations for why he did not think charges were merited for a few of the 10 episodes that the Mueller report had recounted as raising obstruction concerns. One of the people said that testimony drew upon and dovetailed with the still-hidden portions of the memo.“We took each of the 10 episodes, and we assessed them against the analytical framework that had been set forth by the special counsel,” Mr. Barr said at the time. “And we concluded that the evidence developed during the special counsel’s investigation was not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.”For example, several episodes centered on Mr. Trump’s use, or attempted use, of his power to remove subordinate officials in the executive branch. They included his firing in 2017 of the F.BI. director James B. Comey Jr. — the act that led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment — and his unsuccessful efforts to persuade subordinates to have Mr. Mueller fired.Mr. Barr testified that “as a matter of law,” the obstruction statutes enacted by Congress did not limit the president’s power to remove a special counsel.That view, which is contested, comports with his own sweeping theory of presidential power. Still, in the deliberations, department officials also focused on the lack of historical precedent for prosecuting a current or former president for firing a subordinate, the two people said.In his testimony, Mr. Barr also maintained that the evidence was insufficient to prove that Mr. Trump had deliberately sought to criminally obstruct the investigation, apart from legal theories.For example, Mr. Barr said, a major reason that Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey was his “refusal to tell the public what he was privately telling the president, which was that the president was not under investigation.” Mr. Trump’s rationale for trying to fire Mr. Mueller was a purported conflict of interest, and had Mr. Trump succeeded, Mr. Barr said, a replacement would “presumably” have been appointed.But the Trump Justice Department never made public its comprehensive analysis of all the episodes the Mueller report laid out. That is the analysis the Biden administration is seeking to keep secret.Judge Jackson had given the department until Monday night to respond to her order to disclose the memo — and, by extension, her finding that officials had been “disingenuous to this court” about its nature in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret.In addition to officials omitting the existence of the first part of the memo in descriptions of it that were submitted to her, Judge Jackson also blasted the characterization of the document as pre-decisional. Mr. Barr, she wrote, had already decided not to initiate any prosecution of Mr. Trump when the memo was written, and it was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to support that decision.In its filing, the Biden Justice Department said that the previous filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that the department’s “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”The department also put forward a narrow view of the problems with its previous statements about the memo, focusing on imprecision about whether Mr. Barr had been considering whether to commence a prosecution of Mr. Trump at that moment — as it had suggested in some places — or whether he was opining on whether Mr. Trump could be charged after he left office.Although Mr. Engel and Mr. O’Callaghan completed the memo after Mr. Barr had decided to say the evidence would not support obstruction charges, the department argued that the legal analysis portion of the memo memorialized advice they had provided before Mr. Barr made that decision.“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Biden Justice Department’s filing said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.Katie Benner More
The Biden administration has decided to fight to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to former Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 clearing President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.In a late-night filing Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a district-court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. It was written at the same time that Mr. Barr sent a letter to Congress claiming the evidence in the then-still secret report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about what the evidence added up to because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said Mr. Barr was justified in making a decision in order to shape public understanding of the report. “Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Trump-era Justice Department officials.The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress had created an impression that the fruits of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed multiple actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were clearly sufficient to ask a grand jury to consider indicting him for obstruction of justice.Those actions included attempting to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into falsifying a record to cover up an earlier attempt by Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller, and dangling a potential pardon at Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.The new Justice Department filing also apologized for and defended its Barr-era court filings about the memo, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson had labeled “disingenuous,” saying that they could have been written more clearly but were nevertheless accurate.“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Justice Department said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.Mr. Barr’s claim — which he made weeks before releasing the Mueller public — that the evidence gathered showed that Mr. Trump did not commit a chargeable offense of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading.Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure of an internal memo about the matter.Earlier this month, Judge Jackson issued a scathing ruling in that case saying that the Barr-era Justice Department had been “disingenuous to this court” about the nature of the memo in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret under an exemption for pre-decisional deliberations. She wrote that she had made the discovery after insisting that she read it herself.While the Barr-era Justice Department told her the memo concerned deliberations about whether Mr. Trump should be charged with obstruction, the memo itself showed that Mr. Barr had already decided not to do so, and the memo was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to quash the idea. She ordered the entire document released.The Biden-era Justice Department had until Monday to respond. In its filing, it acknowledged that its earlier filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that its “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”The decision that Mr. Barr was actually making, the department said, was about whether to decide whether the evidence was sufficient to charge Mr. Trump someday — not whether he should be charged at that moment, since longstanding department legal policy is to consider sitting presidents temporarily immune from prosecution while they are in office.And, it said, the legal analysis in the second part of the memo — the portion it is appealing to keep secret — was, in fact, pre-decisional, even though the memo was completed after Mr. Barr made his decision, because it memorialized legal advice that department lawyers had previously provided to the attorney general. More
Efforts to review 2020 ballots in Georgia and Arizona reflect the staying power of Donald Trump’s falsehoods, and Democrats fear that the findings could be twisted by Republicans.Georgia has already counted its 2020 presidential vote three times, with the same result: President Biden defeated Donald J. Trump narrowly yet decisively. But now portions of the vote will be inspected for a fourth time, after a judge ruled late last week that a group of voters must be allowed to view copies of all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in the state’s largest county.The move carries limited weight. The plaintiffs, led by a known conspiracy theorist, will have no access to the actual ballots, Georgia’s election results have already been certified after recounts and audits showed Mr. Biden as the winner with no evidence of fraud, and the review will have no bearing on the outcome.But the order from Judge Brian Amero of Henry County Superior Court was a victory for a watchdog group of plaintiffs that has said it is in search of instances of ballot fraud, parroting Mr. Trump’s election lies. Election officials in Fulton County, which contains most of Atlanta, worry that if such a review does occur there, it could cast further doubt on the state’s results and give Republican lawmakers ammunition to seek greater power over the administration of elections.“Where does it end? It’s like a never-ending circus, this big lie,” Robb Pitts, the Democratic chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said in an interview on Monday. “When they were accusing Fulton County and me in particular, I listened and I said — I said to the president, his representatives and I said to the secretary of state: ‘If you have evidence of any wrongdoing, bring it to me. If you do not, put up or shut up.’ And I repeat that again today.”The ruling in Georgia, a state that for months has weathered attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies as they falsely claimed the election had been stolen, coincided with a widely criticized Republican-led recount of over two million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., the largest county in another state that stunned Republicans by tipping to Mr. Biden last year after decades of G.O.P. dominance in presidential elections.That recount, which was approved by the Arizona state government and funded privately, resumed on Monday despite wide and bipartisan denunciations of the effort as a political sham and growing evidence that it is powered by “Stop the Steal” allies of Mr. Trump’s.The Arizona Republic reported on Saturday that volunteers being recruited to help recount the Maricopa ballots were being vetted by an organization set up by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of the online retailer Overstock.com and a prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.On Monday, an independent nonprofit news outlet, azmirror.com, reported that the organization conducting the hand recount, Wake Technology Services, had been hired in December for an election audit in Pennsylvania by a nonprofit group run by Sidney Powell, a onetime member of Mr. Trump’s legal team and prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories about the election.Late Monday, Mr. Trump continued to rail against the election results, citing the Arizona recount and the Georgia court ruling. “More to follow,” he said in a statement issued by his office. The efforts to continue questioning the legitimacy of the election in two critical battleground states, nearly seven months after voting concluded, illustrate Mr. Trump’s hold over the Republican Party and the staying power of his false election claims. Even though Mr. Trump is not directly involved in the continued examinations of votes in Arizona and Georgia, his supporters’ widespread refusal to accept the reality of Mr. Biden’s victory has led fellow Republicans to find new and inventive ways to question and delegitimize the 2020 results.A recount of over two million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., the state’s largest, was paused this month and resumed on Monday.Courtney Pedroza for The New York TimesLeading the Georgia ballot review effort is Garland Favorito, a political gadfly in Georgia who has lingered on the conspiracy fringe of American politics for decades. In 2002, he published a book questioning the origin of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He has also trafficked in unproven theories about the Kennedy assassination and, in 2014, he appeared in a video promoting the idea that the 14th Amendment was itself unconstitutional and argued that the federal government was therefore illegitimate and should be overthrown.In an interview, Mr. Favorito cited his “15 years” of experience as a self-styled elections investigator, saying he had been first motivated by Georgia’s purchase of new election machines that did not maintain paper-ballot records. He said that his concerns about the 2020 election stemmed in large part from affidavits filed by former election officials who claimed that they had handled ballots that appeared to be counterfeit because they were either not folded, appeared to be marked by a machine, or were printed on different stock. (There is no evidence of widespread use of counterfeit ballots.)Though Mr. Favorito refused to accept the findings of the recounts and audits already done in Georgia, he said he would be satisfied if, after inspecting the ballot copies, he and his team found no problems.“Once we find out the truth, if the results were correct, we can all go home and sleep at night knowing that it was right all along,” Mr. Favorito said.But he does not view leading Republicans in Georgia — some of whom, like former Senator Kelly Loeffler, have been vocally supportive of his efforts — as allies.“The Republican establishment hasn’t reached out, whatsoever,” he said, adding that he had not voted for Mr. Trump but for a third-party candidate. And the funding for the inspection, he said, would come from “patriots” making small-dollar donations. “We don’t have any big money.”The spread and repetition of false claims about the election follows familiar patterns for disinformation, which often occupies segmented corners of the internet and social media. Forces both algorithmic and organic will surface content — such as theories of election fraud based on grainy social media videos or anonymous allegations — for people who are inclined to agree with it.But what have further fueled Mr. Trump’s election claims, aside from his continued public pronouncements, are the many lawsuits filed by the former president and his allies after the 2020 election.“Even though all of the lawsuits got thrown out, the Trump campaign did file a whole bunch of baseless lawsuits, which adds a layer of legitimacy when you’re reading about a lawsuit that’s been filed versus some rumor, allegation or piece of content online,” said Lisa Kaplan, the founder of Alethea Group, a company that helps fight misinformation. “It ratchets it up a notch.”The Georgia effort could also yet extend beyond the Republican echo chamber in which the 2020 election is still being litigated. The state’s new election law ensures that the General Assembly, which is currently controlled by Republicans, has broad authority over counties through a restructured state election board. The board can, among other things, suspend county election officials.As Mr. Favorito did a victory lap on pro-Trump news outlets, he won praise from top Georgia Republicans. David J. Shafer, the pro-Trump chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, emailed fellow Republicans on Friday calling Judge Amero’s ruling “a very significant and encouraging development.”Ms. Loeffler also praised Mr. Favorito’s effort.“While there is a dire need to investigate a number of other well-documented issues, we must also inspect Fulton County’s absentee ballots to reassure Georgians that their voices are heard and their votes are counted,” she said.Even Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, signaled support for the inspection led by Mr. Favorito’s group.“Allowing this audit provides another layer of transparency and citizen engagement,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement on Friday.The support from Mr. Raffensperger, who is now running for re-election, surprised some political observers in Georgia. It was the secretary of state who stood up to the false claims of election fraud in Georgia espoused by Mr. Trump and who has highlighted the audits conducted by state government officials last year as definitive reaffirmations of the election results. His office also filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit, arguing that Mr. Favorito’s group should not be given physical ballots for security reasons, though Mr. Raffensperger took no stance on the case in his brief.“From day one, I have encouraged Georgians with concerns about the election in their counties to pursue those claims through legal avenues,” Mr. Raffensperger said in his statement.Michael Wines More
