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      Democrats Are Torn Over Working With G.O.P. After Capitol Riot

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      An uneasy détente has emerged between congressional Republicans and Democrats after the Jan. 6 attack, but relationships are badly frayed.WASHINGTON — When a Republican lawmaker approached Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat, on the House floor recently with a routine request that she sign on to a resolution he was introducing, she initially refused.Ms. Escobar personally liked the man, a fellow Texan, and she supported his bill. But she held the Republican, who had voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election just hours after rioters stormed the Capitol, partly responsible for the deadly attack and questioned whether she could work with him.Moments after declining, however, Ms. Escobar had second thoughts.“Go ahead and count me in,” Ms. Escobar recalled telling the man, whom she declined to identify in an interview. “But I just want you to know that what you all did — I haven’t gotten past it. And it was wrong, and it was terrible. And it’s not something that I think we should gloss over.”In the immediate aftermath of the assault on the Capitol that left five dead, irate Democrats vowed to punish Republicans for their roles in perpetuating or indulging former President Donald J. Trump’s fiction of a stolen election that motivated the mob that attacked the building. There was talk of cutting off certain Republicans entirely from the legislative process, denying them the basic courtesies and customs that allow the House to function even in polarized times.Democrats introduced a series of measures to censure, investigate and potentially expel members who, in the words of one resolution, “attempted to overturn the results of the election and incited a white supremacist attempted coup.” But the legislation went nowhere and to date no punishment has been levied against any members of Congress for their actions related to Jan. 6.What has unfolded instead has been something of an uneasy détente on Capitol Hill, as Democrats reckon with what they experienced that day and struggle to determine whether they can salvage their relationships with Republicans — some of whom continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory — and whether they even want to try.“I don’t want to permanently close that door,” Ms. Escobar said. “But I can’t walk through it right now.”Republicans have felt the breach as well. Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, who did not vote to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory but joined a lawsuit challenging the election results, said feelings ran raw after the mob violence at the Capitol.“I had some candid conversations with members that I have a good relationship with. There was a lot of heated emotion,” Mr. Waltz said. Still, he said, “I didn’t experience a freeze.”He recently teamed up with Representative Anthony G. Brown, Democrat of Maryland, to round up 70 Republicans and 70 Democrats for a letter to the Biden administration laying out parameters for an Iran nuclear deal.The dilemma of whether to join such bipartisan efforts is particularly charged for centrist Democrats from conservative-leaning districts, who won office on the promise of working with Republicans but say they find it difficult to accept that some of those same colleagues spread lies that fueled the first invasion of the Capitol since the War of 1812.Adding to the tensions, most Republicans insist that they did nothing wrong, arguing that their push to invalidate the election results was merely an effort to raise concerns about the integrity of the vote. Some have reacted angrily to Democrats’ moves to punish them.Days after Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, voted to throw out electoral votes for Mr. Biden, an aide to Representative Cindy Axne, Democrat of Iowa, curtly rebuffed a request from his office to discuss writing insurance legislation together.Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, voted to throw out electoral votes for President Biden.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“Our office is declining to work with your office at this time, given your boss’s position on the election,” the aide wrote in an email to an aide to Mr. Smith.Mr. Smith later sought to turn the tables on Ms. Axne, posting the email on his official Twitter account after she highlighted her work with Republicans.“That’s odd,” Mr. Smith wrote, appending a screenshot of the exchange. “This is the last message my staff got from you. Are you no longer kicking Republicans off your bills?”A spokesman for Mr. Smith did not respond to a request to elaborate on the incident.Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, who was in the House gallery on Jan. 6, said she had taken it upon herself to try to facilitate a reconciliation — or at least an airing out of differences.“It’s been a really challenging time,” she said. “Literally, people were murdered in our workplace. For some people, that is deeply troublesome, and for some people, they want to move on faster than others are ready.”In the days after the attack, the wounds it laid bare seemed almost too deep to heal. As the mob tore closer to lawmakers on Jan. 6, Representative Dean Phillips, a mild-mannered Minnesota Democrat known for fostering bipartisan relationships, shouted at Republicans, “This is because of you!”Afterward, lawmakers nearly came to blows on the House floor and got into heated arguments in the hallways. Some Democrats were so nervous that their Republican colleagues might draw weapons on the floor that House leaders set up metal detectors outside the chamber, drawing loud protests from gun-toting lawmakers in the Republican Party.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, released a review of Republicans’ incendiary remarks on social media before the attack.Some Democrats, particularly the most progressive lawmakers from safe districts who rarely found occasion to work with Republicans even before the riot, have pressed to penalize the G.O.P. systematically in its aftermath, arguing that there can be no return to normalcy. A spreadsheet of Republicans who voted to overturn the election, outlining how many states’ electoral votes they moved to cast out, has circulated widely among Democratic offices.Lawmakers and their staff members were evacuated from the House chamber on Jan. 6.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressBut there has been little action to truly cut Republicans out of the work of Congress. When Representative Sean Casten of Illinois moved to punish a Republican who had voted to overturn the election results by forcing a recorded vote on his bill to rename a post office — the kind of measure that normally sails through unchallenged — only 15 other Democrats joined Mr. Casten in opposing it. As some rank-and-file Democrats sought to expel the Republican conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the move was “not a leadership position.” (Leaders did, however, take the unusual step of stripping Ms. Greene of her committee seats.)The reluctance stems, at least in part, from politics. Democrats owe their majority to a group of lawmakers from competitive districts who say their constituents elected them to work with Republicans to get legislation done.“Retreating or closing myself off to any kind of conversations or working with folks on the other side of the aisle — it doesn’t feel like an option for me,” said Representative Sharice Davids, the only Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation. “Even when it feels hard.”Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was in the House gallery on Jan. 6 and had what she believed was a panic attack as she crouched on the floor and heard the noise from the mob grow closer. But she said in an interview that she had “moved past the election issue,” adding that she was “not one to hold grudges.”“I haven’t talked to a single Republican about that day. Nothing. At all,” said Ms. Wild, who has resumed working with Pennsylvania Republicans on legislation, even though most of them voted to overturn the election. “I don’t want it to get in the way of other things that I want to work on with them. I know that it would, because I would be angry.”Many House Republicans have refrained from discussing the attack, while some have tried to rewrite history and argue that they never claimed the election was “stolen,” despite their objections. One tried to remove mentions of the assault from a resolution honoring the police officers who defended the Capitol that day. Some have continued to deny that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected, while still others have sought to deflect attention from the riot or downplay the factors that drove it.When the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing recently to examine domestic extremism in the military, Representative Pat Fallon, Republican of Texas, complained that the session was “political theater” and a waste of the panel’s time.The chairman, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, tartly replied that the topic deserved discussion, since “20 percent of the people that have been arrested from the Capitol Hill riots had a history of serving in the military.”Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the Administration Committee, objected to Ms. Lofgren’s report cataloging his colleagues’ incendiary social media posts. One Democrat, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, recently removed a Republican from a bill the two had worked on together for years, in line with his new policy of collaborating only with lawmakers who publicly state that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.But he said he had drawn some optimism from a blunt conversation with Representative Jody B. Hice, Republican of Georgia, whom he has worked with on environmental issues, about a speech Mr. Hice gave questioning his state’s electoral votes for Mr. Biden.Mr. Hice said in a statement that he was proud that he and Mr. Schneider could “put aside our differences” on “many of the hot-button political debates of the day” to work together.Still, Mr. Schneider said that many other Republicans were still questioning Mr. Biden’s legitimacy — and that some were even continuing to put lawmakers at risk with incendiary remarks.“The fact that there is — how many at this point? — that it’s not an insignificant number who are still trying to have it both ways, makes it harder to get something done in Congress,” he said. More

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      Boehner Blasts Trump, Saying He ‘Incited That Bloody Insurrection’

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      In his new book, John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, sharply rebukes the former president for his role in the “mob violence” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, issues a stinging denunciation in his new book of Donald J. Trump, saying that the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”The criticism from Mr. Boehner in his book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” represents an extraordinary public rebuke by a former speaker of the House toward a former president from his own party and shows how much the Republican Party has shifted since Mr. Boehner left Congress in 2015. And his remarks came as Mr. Trump has sought to retain his grip on Republican lawmakers’ loyalty from his new political base in South Florida.The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, sharply criticized Mr. Trump at the end of the Senate trial for the former president’s second impeachment, pointing to his role in the Capitol riot. Others, like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 in the House Republican leadership, have also excoriated him.But Mr. Boehner’s remarks went a step further, serving as a rejection of what the party he once helped lead has morphed into over the last several years. While he has criticized Mr. Trump in the past, it’s his comments about the events of Jan. 6 that have the most resonance.In the book, an excerpt from which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Boehner writes that Mr. Trump’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence,” adding, “It was painful to watch.”At another point, he writes, “I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for what came after the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.”Former President Donald J. Trump speaking at a rally in front of the White House on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe adds: “Watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity.” Nodding to the divisions between the parties in Congress now, he writes, “Whatever they end up doing, or not doing, none of it will compare to one of the lowest points of American democracy that we lived through in January 2021.”Mr. Trump, he goes on, “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” Mr. Boehner writes, “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”In an emailed statement, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, called Mr. Boehner a “Swamp Creature” and accused him of favoring “Communist China” (The former speaker’s lobbying firm represents the Chinese Embassy in the United States). In a separate email to The Times, Mr. Trump asked of Mr. Boehner, whose love of merlot wine is legendary in Washington: “Was he drinking when he made this statement? Just another RINO who couldn’t do the job!”The former president has continued to make wild and false claims about widespread voter fraud in the election, despite multiple court rulings against him and the certification of President Biden’s victory.Of members of the House and the Senate who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, Mr. Boehner writes: “Some of the people involved did not surprise me in the least. The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism.”Mr. Boehner, whose tenure in the House Republican leadership coincided with the congressional obstruction of the Obama years and who was subsumed by the rise of the Tea Party and House members who were rewarded by conservative media appearances, writes that the G.O.P. must “take back control from the faction that had grown to include everyone from garden-variety whack jobs to insurrectionists.”For now, Mr. Trump has retained support among Republican voters. A slim majority would like to see him as the party’s nominee again if he runs in 2024, something he has told advisers he’s serious about considering. And some House G.O.P. officials are deeply concerned about keeping him on their side in their efforts to retake control in the midterm elections next year. More

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      Lynne Patton Fined and Barred From Government Over RNC Video

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      Lynne Patton recruited and interviewed public housing tenants in New York City for a pro-Trump re-election video. The residents accused her of tricking them into participating.The video aired on the final night of the Republican National Convention in August, a two-minute clip featuring four New York City public housing tenants praising President Donald J. Trump’s record and bashing the city’s mayor.But within hours of the broadcast, three of the tenants said they were tricked into appearing in the video, did not support Mr. Trump and accused a top federal housing official, Lynne Patton, of orchestrating the production and misleading them about its intentions.While Ms. Patton had claimed the White House signed off on her involvement, a federal agency on Tuesday found that Ms. Patton had violated a federal law known as the Hatch Act that bars most federal employees from using their government position to engage in political activities.Ms. Patton admitted to the violation, the agency said, and agreed in a settlement to pay a $1,000 fine and not to serve in the federal government for at least four years. She left her job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the end of Mr. Trump’s term in January.“By using information and NYCHA connections available to her solely by virtue of her HUD position, Patton improperly harnessed the authority of her federal position to assist the Trump campaign,” the Office of Special Counsel, the agency that enforces the Hatch Act, said in a statement. NYCHA, or the New York City Housing Authority, oversees the public housing system.In her three years as the top regional administrator over federal housing in New York and New Jersey, Ms. Patton said she helped improve New York’s troubled public housing system. But Ms. Patton had also carved out a role as a Trump cheerleader who often mixed politics and governance.She was among a number of midlevel political appointees in the Trump administration who had little if any experience in their fields and who used their positions to promote the president and his views, often amplifying falsehoods and other misinformation. On Tuesday, Ms. Patton, who was a personal assistant to the Trump family before working for the federal government, said in an email that she did not regret having created the video.“Unfortunately, after consulting multiple Hatch Act lawyers post-employment, receiving incorrect and/or incomplete legal advice, even in good faith, from your own agency does not an affirmative defense make,” Ms. Patton wrote.In the email, Ms. Patton falsely claimed that the tenants had recanted their allegations against her and had acknowledged that they knew how the video would be used. She interviewed them over four hours in a New York City Housing Authority building last summer with a video crew.Claudia Perez, one of the four tenants who appeared in the video, on Tuesday reiterated her assertion that Ms. Patton had deceived the group into believing the interview would be used to highlight chronic problems at the housing authority. Ms. Perez, who said she voted for President Biden in the November election, said she would not have participated in a pro-Trump video.“She just wants attention, and I’m not going to give it to her,” Ms. Perez said in response to Ms. Patton’s remarks on Tuesday, adding that she deserved more severe punishment. “I don’t think it was stern enough.”After the video was broadcast, several federal watchdog groups, including the Campaign for Accountability, filed complaints with the Office of Special Counsel urging an investigation into Ms. Patton’s role in the production of the clip.In a statement, Michelle Kuppersmith, the executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, described Ms. Patton as a repeat offender of the Hatch Act. Ms. Kuppersmith said she was pleased that the special counsel had followed up on the complaint.“Laws like the Hatch Act exist for a reason and we hope this sends a message to other officials that violating the law has consequences,” she said.The video was not the first time that Ms. Patton was found to have run afoul of the Hatch Act. In 2019, the Office of Special Counsel determined that she violated the law when she displayed a Trump campaign hat in her New York office and for “liking” political tweets.While Ms. Patton worked for the federal government she also pursued a role in a proposed reality TV show featuring two other prominent Trump supporters, Candace Owens and Katrina Pierson. Ms. Patton claimed that a production company had wanted her to appear on a reality show for several years.To avoid a possible Hatch Act violation, she offered to temporarily resign or take an unpaid absence from HUD so she could film the series, according to records obtained by the American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group. The show, which she told HUD could include scenes from Trump campaign events, never materialized.At the time of the convention video, Ms. Patton was the HUD administrator for the New York region and had some oversight of the city’s public housing agency. She entered the orbit of the Trump family around 2009 after meeting Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Mr. Trump, who connected her with Eric Trump, one of the former president’s sons. Ms. Patton first joined HUD as an assistant under Ben Carson, then the department secretary, and then relocated to its regional office in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Patton said she had produced tangible results, including spurring the city’s housing authority, long plagued by mismanagement and substandard conditions, to hire companies to help clean its 326 developments.In the final months of the 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Patton echoed some of Mr. Trump’s most outlandish falsehoods about the election and his opponent, Mr. Biden.In a Facebook post last July, Ms. Patton suggested that she had no interest in helping tackle the homelessness crisis in New York because its leaders opposed Mr. Trump. “EVERY Democratic run city deserves EVERYTHING coming to it,” she wrote. More

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      How Georgia's New Law Risks Making Election Subversion Easier

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      A reminder from a January phone call that the reform bill by congressional Democrats may not have the proper protections.What would have happened if the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had responded, “OK, I’ll try,” in a January phone call after President Trump asked him to “find” 11,000 votes?No one can be sure. What is clear is that the question has been overlooked in recent months. Public attention has mostly moved on from Mr. Trump’s bid to overturn the election; activists and politicians are focused more on whether to restrict or expand voting access, particularly by mail.But trying to reverse an election result without credible evidence of widespread fraud is an act of a different magnitude than narrowing access. A successful effort to subvert an election would pose grave and fundamental risks to democracy, risking political violence and secessionism.Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration. This includes allowing the state elections board, now newly controlled by appointees of the Republican State Legislature, to appoint a single person to take control of typically bipartisan county election boards, which have important power over vote counting and voter eligibility.The law also gives the Legislature the authority to appoint the chair of the state election board and two more of its five voting members, allowing it to appoint a majority of the board. It strips the secretary of state of the chair and a vote.Even without this law, there would still be a risk of election subversion: Election officials and administrators all over the country possess important powers, including certification of election results, that could be abused in pursuit of partisan gain. And it’s a risk that H.R. 1, the reform bill congressional Democrats are pushing, does relatively little to address.The new Georgia law does not inherently make it easier to “find” 11,000 votes. Almost all of the powers that the Legislature might use already existed — they were just vested in other people or bodies. They could have been abused before and could be in the future, regardless of the new law.And the law has eligibility requirements for a chair that exclude many of the sort of people who would seem likeliest to abuse their authority, including anyone who has been a political candidate, campaign contributor or party organizer in the two years before the appointment. This is not guaranteed to preclude a rabid partisan leading the board, but no such checks had existed on the secretary of state. (Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, previously served in the Georgia House of Representatives.)The law takes power from the very person, Mr. Raffensperger, who a mere three months ago rebuffed Mr. Trump’s plea to find 11,000 votes. State legislators demoted Mr. Raffensperger for a reason: Many were probably sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s allegations. And if the Legislature had a problem with how Mr. Raffensperger handled the 2020 election, it is reasonable to wonder whether it might have supported board members aggressively backing the claims advanced by Mr. Trump.Can state boards, county boards or anyone else use their administrative powers to flip electoral outcomes? After the November election, a majority of Republican members of Congress and state attorneys general signed on to efforts that would have invalidated millions of votes and brought about a constitutional crisis. With that backdrop, it seems naïve to assume that no one would try to abuse such power, whether in Georgia or elsewhere.It’s worth going back to Mr. Trump’s infamous call. While the oft-quoted line about “finding” votes makes it sound as if he wanted Mr. Raffensperger to manufacture votes out of thin air, Mr. Trump said he had already found the votes, in the form of thousands of ballots he said were cast illegally:“We have all the votes we need. You know, we won the state. If you took, these are the most minimal numbers, the numbers that I gave you, those are numbers that are certified, your absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses, your out-of-state voters, 4,925. You know when you add them up, it’s many more times, it’s many times the 11,779 number.”In addition to the 4,925 out-of-state voters mentioned, Mr. Trump baselessly asserted in the call that there were hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots with forged signatures. He alleged, based on imperfect matches between lists of voters, that there were 4,502 voters who voted but weren’t registered; 18,325 voters with vacant addresses; 904 voters who voted only with a P.O. box address; and nearly 5,000 votes by dead people. And with virtually no evidence whosever, he alleged great malfeasance in Atlanta’s Fulton County, including 18,000 votes having to do with someone who did something nefarious and “3,000 pounds” of shredded ballots.County and state election officials hold a variety of powers relevant to such claims. They evaluate whether to accept or reject ballots, and they certify results. In Georgia, they hear eligibility challenges. It would have been hard to employ these powers to aid Mr. Trump, let alone to survive a subsequent court challenge. But there are levers that they could have at least tried to pull, even if it’s not clear what would have come of it.One option is that the state board could have usurped the power of Fulton County, based on the president’s allegations in the general election and other allegations from the primary (the law requires evidence of failed administration in at least two elections over the prior two years). The state board could have either used the president’s allegations as a basis to refuse to certify the result or to disqualify otherwise eligible voters.It would be hard or even impossible to pull this off immediately after an election. The law requires a fairly drawn-out hearing process before the state can interfere in county elections. The preliminary hearing can’t be held for at least 30 days after an initial petition, which is after the Georgia certification deadline. But perhaps a nefarious board could lay the groundwork earlier, potentially putting a newly appointed superintendent in control before the elections, when he or she would have the ability to pre-emptively disqualify voters and ballots.County election boards heard similar kinds of challenges to voter eligibility during the Georgia runoff. The state Republican Party and a Texas group challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in December, based on whether a voter appeared to match someone on the Postal Service list of people in the National Change of Address Registry. A few small counties actually went through with trying to invalidate voters on this basis.This eligibility challenge was rejected by the U.S. District Court Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, who happens to be the sister of Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia to Brian Kemp. But although the eligibility challenge faltered in the runoff, it is not obvious that ironclad protections exist against eligibility challenges, either as a matter of court precedent or federal law. A narrower challenge could have had a better chance of surviving a court challenge. And the new Georgia law makes these kinds of challenges easier, by allowing a single person to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters.Another option to thwart an election might be to stop certification. The new Georgia law does not do much to make it easier to block certification, as the secretary of state — not the board or the Legislature — still certifies results statewide.But county election boards, including in Georgia, generally certify their election results, which the secretary of state then certifies statewide. Mr. Trump tried to thwart efforts to certify the results certification, turning routine hearings into televised events. In the end, Mr. Trump’s effort failed. Election officials overwhelmingly acted to preserve the integrity of the election, despite immense political pressure to act. Even so, the president did manage to persuade a handful of officials to vote against certification on dubious grounds.If secretaries of state had not certified election results, whether in Georgia or elsewhere, it might have plunged the country into crisis with uncertain consequences. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether there’s a chance of something similar occurring in the future, given how many House Republicans refused to certify the electoral count.Election administrators may have other options to undermine elections, besides disqualifying ballots and voters or decertifying the results, either in Georgia or in other states.All of this represents an obvious threat to American democracy. And yet the risk of election subversion has been overshadowed by the fight over new restrictions on voting, especially by mail. Progressives have been concerned about these kinds of restrictions for years, and the reform bill H.R. 1 was written in part as a response. But since the law was mainly devised before the 2020 election, its provisions don’t directly address the new risk that election officials could subvert election results. There’s no provision, for instance, requiring nonpartisan administration or certification of federal elections.H.R. 1 does have provisions that would indirectly limit the options available to actors who might try to subvert elections. One notable example is a provision against voter caging, which precludes eligibility challenges based on matched lists, like the change of address notification challenge attempted in December. It also includes provisions that ensure basic election administration, like requiring that people don’t wait in line longer than 30 minutes.But with the main focus of the proposed law being to improve democracy, by expanding voting access and more, it is not at all obvious whether H.R. 1 amounts to a comprehensive effort to protect democracy. And even if it does have the protections it needs, the risk of election subversion has received such little attention that relevant provisions might not be included in a slimmed-down bill. Those provisions have not been mentioned in most proposals for a narrower bill. More

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      How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

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      Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in February. Katie Currid for The New York TimesMarketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious ramifications.“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the “deceptive design” genre.“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.How Refunds to Trump Donors Soared in 2020Refunds are shown as the percentage of money received by each operation to date via WinRed and ActBlue. More

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      One Republican’s Lonely Fight Against a Flood of Disinformation

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      After losing an ugly congressional race last year, Denver Riggleman is leading a charge against the conspiracy-mongering coursing through his party. He doesn’t have many allies.AFTON, Va. — Denver Riggleman stood virtually alone.It was Oct. 2, on the floor of the House of Representatives, and he rose as one of only two Republicans in the chamber to speak in favor of a resolution denouncing QAnon. Mr. Riggleman, a freshman congressman from Virginia, had his own personal experiences with fringe ideas, both as a target of them and as a curious observer of the power they hold over true believers. He saw a dangerous movement becoming more intertwined with his party, and worried that it was only growing thanks to words of encouragement from President Donald J. Trump.“Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?” asked Mr. Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer. “We should not be playing with fire.”Six months later, conspiracy theories like QAnon remain a threat that most Republicans would rather ignore than confront, and Mr. Riggleman is out of office. But he is ever more determined to try to expose disinformation from the far right that is swaying legions in the Republican base to believe in a false reality.Mr. Riggleman is a living example of the political price of falling out of lock step with the hard right. He lost a G.O.P. primary race last June after he officiated at the wedding of a gay couple. And once he started calling out QAnon, whose followers believe that a satanic network of child molesters runs the Democratic Party, he received death threats and was attacked as a traitor, including by members of his own family.The undoing of Mr. Riggleman — and now his unlikely crusade — is revealing about a dimension of conservative politics today. The fight against radicalism within the G.O.P. is a deeply lonely one, waged mostly by Republicans like him who are no longer in office, and by the small handful of elected officials who have decided that they are willing to speak up even if it means that they, too, could be headed for an early retirement.“I’ve been telling people: ‘You don’t understand. This is getting worse, not better,’” Mr. Riggleman said, sitting on a stool at his family bar one recent afternoon. “People are angry. And they’re angry at the truth tellers.”Mr. Riggleman, 51, is now back home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he and his wife run the bar and a distillery. And for his next move in a career that has included jobs at the National Security Agency and founding a military contracting business, he is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.His experience with the issues and emotions at work is both professional and personal. He was so intrigued by false belief systems that he self-published a book about the myth of Bigfoot and the people who are unshakably devoted to it.Mr. Riggleman is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.Matt Eich for The New York TimesMr. Riggleman, who first ran and won in 2018 after the Republican incumbent in his district retired, joined the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and was endorsed by Mr. Trump. Now he says it “gives me shivers” to be called a Republican. He hopes to show that there is still a way to beat back the lies and false beliefs that have spread from the fringe to the mainstream. It is a heavy lift, and one that depends on overcoming two strong impulses: politicians’ fear of losing elections and people’s reluctance to accept that they were taken in by a lie.Mr. Riggleman summarized his conversations with the 70 percent of House Republicans he said were privately appalled at the former president’s conduct but wouldn’t dare speak out.“‘We couldn’t do that in our district. We would lose,’” he said. “That’s it. It’s that simple.”Stocky, fast-talking and inexhaustibly curious, the former congressman is now working for a group of prominent experts and academics at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of disinformation in American politics and how to thwart it. The group has undertaken several extensive investigations into how extremists have used propaganda and faked information to sow division over some of the most contentious issues of the day, like the coronavirus pandemic and police violence.Their reports have also given lawmakers a better understanding of the QAnon belief system and other radical ideologies that helped fuel the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.Mr. Riggleman said he had written one report about the involvement of far-right militants and white supremacist groups in the attack specifically at the request of a Republican member who needed help convincing colleagues that far-left groups were not the culprits.Getting lawmakers to see radical movements like QAnon as a threat has been difficult. Joel Finkelstein, the director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said that in June, when the group tried to sound the alarm on QAnon to members of Congress, Mr. Riggleman was the only one who responded with a sense of urgency and agreed to help.“We were screaming it from the rooftops,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “We said: ‘This is going to be a problem. They’re growing increasingly militant in their conspiracies.’” When the institute’s members spoke to Mr. Riggleman, he said, “We showed him our data and he said, ‘Holy moly.’”Far from a theoretical or overblown concern, disinformation and its role in perpetuating false beliefs about Mr. Trump’s election loss and its aftermath are problems that some Republicans believe could cripple their party if left ignored.In a sign of how widespread these conspiracy theories are, a recent poll from Suffolk University and USA Today found that 58 percent of Trump voters wrongly believed the storming of the Capitol was mostly inspired by far-left radicals associated with antifa and involved only a few Trump supporters.“There was a troika of us who said, ‘This is going to a bad place,’” said Paul Mitchell, who represented Michigan in the House for two terms before retiring early this year in frustration. He said he had watched as members dismissed Mr. Riggleman, despite his experience in intelligence. “There weren’t many people who gave a damn what your expertise was,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It was inconsequential compared to the talking points.”Bob Good defeated Mr. Riggleman in a state Republican Party convention in June.Amy Friedenberger/The Roanoke Times, via Associated PressMr. Riggleman’s loss last summer in a closely held party convention allowed him to be more outspoken. The winner, Representative Bob Good, is a former associate athletic director at Liberty University who took issue with Mr. Riggleman’s officiation at the gay wedding and called him “out of step” with the party’s base.And as Mr. Riggleman kept it up and spoke out more aggressively against Mr. Trump after the election, his fight got lonelier.“I had a colleague of mine pat me on the shoulder and say: ‘Denver, you’re just too paranoid. You’re killing yourself for the rest of your life politically by going after the big man like this,’” Mr. Riggleman recalled.When he returned to Virginia for good in January, he said he sometimes felt just as isolated. Family members, former constituents and patrons at the distillery insisted that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump. And they couldn’t be talked out of it, no matter how hard he tried.He recalled a recent conversation with one couple he is friends with that he said was especially exasperating.“I go over stats,” he said. “I go over figures. I go over the 50 states, how that actually works. How machines that aren’t connected are very hard to hack. How you’d have to pay off hundreds of thousands of people to do this.”“Did not convince them,” he added.Other friends of his, some of whom are also members of the growing group of former Republican lawmakers now publicly criticizing Mr. Trump, said that many conservative politicians saw no incentive in trying to dispel disinformation even when they know it’s false.“What some of these guys have told me privately is it’s still kind of self-preservation,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois who ran a short-lived primary campaign against Mr. Trump last year. “‘I want to hang onto the gig. And this is a fever, it will break.’”That is mistaken, Mr. Walsh said, because he sees no breaking the spell Mr. Trump has over Republican voters anytime soon. “It’s done, and it was done a few years ago,” he said.Mr. Riggleman, who is contemplating a run for governor in Virginia and is writing a book about his experience with the dark side of Republican politics, sees a way forward in his experience with Bigfoot. The sasquatch was how many people first learned about him as a politician, after an opponent accused him of harboring a fascination with “Bigfoot erotica,” in 2018.“I do not dabble in monster porn,” he retorts in his book, “Bigfoot … It’s Complicated,” which he based in part on a trip he took in 2004 on a Bigfoot expedition.Mr. Riggleman paid $2,000 to go on a Bigfoot expedition with his wife in 2004.Matt Eich for The New York TimesThe book is full of passages that, if pulled out and scrubbed of references to the mythical creature, could be describing politics in 2021.Mr. Riggleman quotes one true believer explaining why he is absolutely convinced Bigfoot is real, even though he has never seen it. In an answer that could have come straight from the lips of someone defending the myth that Mr. Trump actually won the 2020 election, the man says matter-of-factly: “Evidence is overwhelming. Check out the internet. All kinds of sightings and facts.”At another point, Mr. Riggleman describes a conversation he had with someone who asked if he really thought that all the people claiming to have seen Bigfoot over the years were liars. “I don’t think that,” Mr. Riggleman responds. “I do believe that people see what they want to see.”He did find one way to crack the Bigfoot false belief system: telling true believers that they were being ripped off to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars to go on expeditions where they would never actually see the creature.“They got very angry,” he said. But eventually, some started to come around. More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s Latino Support Was More Widespread Than Thought, Report Finds

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      While Latinos played a major role in Democratic victories last year, Donald Trump’s outreach to them proved successful in states around the country, not just in certain geographic areas.Even as Latino voters played a meaningful role in tipping the Senate and the presidency to the Democrats last year, former President Donald J. Trump succeeded in peeling away significant amounts of Latino support, and not just in conservative-leaning geographic areas, according to a post-mortem analysis of the election that was released on Friday.Conducted by the Democratically aligned research firm Equis Labs, the report found that certain demographics within the Latino electorate had proved increasingly willing to embrace Mr. Trump as the 2020 campaign went on, including conservative Latinas and those with a relatively low level of political engagement.Using data from Equis Labs’ polls in a number of swing states, as well as focus groups, the study found that within those groups, there was a shift toward Mr. Trump across the country, not solely in areas like Miami or the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where the growth in Mr. Trump’s Latino support has been widely reported.“In 2020, a segment of Latino voters demonstrated that they are more ‘swing’ than commonly assumed,” the report stated.Ultimately, Mr. Trump outperformed his 2016 showing among Latino voters, earning the support of about one in three nationwide, even as Joseph R. Biden Jr. won those voters by a roughly two-to-one margin over all, according to exit polls.All told, close to 17 million Latino voters turned out in the general election, according to a separate analysis published in January by the U.C.L.A. Latino Policy & Politics Initiative. That represented an uptick of more than 30 percent from 2016 — and the highest level of Latino participation in history.With the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic downturn taking center stage on the campaign trail, Equis Labs found that many Latino voters — particularly conservatives — had focused more heavily on economic issues than they had four years earlier. This helped Mr. Trump by putting the spotlight on an issue that was seen as one of his strong suits and by drawing some attention away from his anti-immigrant language.In focus groups, Equis Labs’ interviewers noticed that Mr. Trump’s history as a businessman was seen as a positive attribute by many Latino voters, who viewed him as well positioned to guide the economy through the pandemic-driven recession. Partly as a result, the analysis found, many conservative Latino voters who had been hanging back at the start of the campaign came around to supporting him.Driving up turnout among low-propensity voters — something that Senator Bernie Sanders had sought to do during his campaign for the Democratic nomination — did not necessarily translate into gains for Democrats in the general election, the study found. People who were likely to vote generally grew more negative on Mr. Trump’s job performance over the course of 2020, but among those who reported being less likely to participate in the election, his job approval rose.This finding is likely to fuel hand-wringing among Democratic strategists who worried that Mr. Biden had not done enough to court skeptical Latino voters ahead of November.The movement toward Mr. Trump appeared mostly “to be among those with the lowest partisan formation,” the analysts wrote. “We know enough to say these look like true swing voters. Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward. Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own.”Chuck Coughlin, a Republican pollster in Arizona, said he was unsurprised by the results of the Equis Labs report, given what he said had been a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to win Latino support.“You saw it in the rallies out here,” he said. “They did a rally down in Yuma. They did a rally at the Honeywell plant out here. All of those featured Hispanic small-business owners. They were working that crowd.”He said the Trump campaign’s messaging on economic and social issues had resonated for many Latino voters, particularly older ones. “They’re pro-business, they’re pro-gun, they don’t like higher taxes, they don’t trust the government,” he said. “It’s the same constituency that you see among Anglo Trump voters.”While the report didn’t closely analyze voters by their nations of origin, it did demonstrate that Mr. Trump’s relative success among Latino voters compared with four years earlier was not limited to areas with large populations of Cuban-Americans, Venezuelan-Americans and other demographics that have typically trended more conservative.Carmen Peláez, a playwright and filmmaker in Miami who helped lead the campaign group Cubanos con Biden, said that after the election, many observers had sought to ascribe Mr. Trump’s improvement among Florida Latinos to a shift among Cuban-Americans in the southern part of the state.The findings from Equis Labs validated her experience last year, she said, which showed that Latinos of all nationalities had been targeted online with advertisements and messages that scared them away from Democrats.“People love blaming the Cubans, but you can’t just blame the Cubans,” she said. “There is a cancer in our community, and it’s disinformation, and it’s hitting all of us.”Ms. Peláez said Democrats had habitually taken Latino voters for granted by mistakenly assuming that they knew those voters’ political habits and attitudes. Cuban-Americans, for example, are often painted with a broad brush as conservative.“It was assumed all Latinos would be pro-immigration or they were taken for granted because they were assumed to be a lost vote,” she said. “There’s never a lost vote if you are really willing to engage. But willing to engage means setting aside your own prejudices.” More