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      Trump Says He Will Nominate Kash Patel to Run F.B.I.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump turned to a firebrand loyalist to become director of the bureau, which he sees as part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against him.President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post.He called Mr. Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American people.”Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Weigh Dumping Jerrold Nadler for Jamie Raskin in House Judiciary Committee

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      Some House Democrats want to oust aging committee leaders like Representative Jerrold Nadler in favor of younger lawmakers who they see as better suited to take on the president.House Democrats are considering pushing aside some of their most senior leaders from top posts in the next Congress, driven by a worry that aging members are not up to the task of countering President-elect Donald J. Trump and his loyal Republican allies in Congress.The debate has grown most intense in recent days as dozens of Democrats have been privately pressing Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland to challenge Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York for his position as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. They are doing so out of concern that Mr. Nadler will be ineffective in pushing back against any efforts by Mr. Trump to abuse his power.Mr. Nadler, 77, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, has made it clear he has no plans to step aside. And while Mr. Raskin, 61, is mulling a challenge, he has not yet decided whether to pursue one, according to colleagues familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.“As a New Yorker, I have stood up to Donald Trump my entire career,” Mr. Nadler wrote in a letter to colleagues announcing his run for re-election to the post, in which he emphasized his history of going after Mr. Trump. “When he became president, I led the Judiciary Committee’s efforts to hold him accountable for his various abuses of power, culminating in two historic impeachments.”Mr. Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law, developed a progressive fan base for his work as the lead impeachment manager against Mr. Trump in 2021 and as the top Democrat on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that year. He is seen by many colleagues as more aggressive, articulate and shrewd than Mr. Nadler when it comes to taking on the former and future president.Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been among those privately encouraging him to challenge Mr. Nadler, according to the people familiar with the internal discussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Note to Democrats: It’s Time to Take Up Your Hammers

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      I would prefer to live in a world where the recent news that more than 146,000 New York City schoolchildren experienced homelessness during the last school year was regarded as a crisis demanding immediate changes in public policy. But if helping children isn’t enough to move New York’s political leaders to action — and, by all indications, it most certainly is not — they might consider doing it for the sake of the Democratic Party.There is a straight line from homeless schoolchildren to Donald Trump’s election victory.Homelessness is the most extreme manifestation of the nation’s housing crisis. America simply isn’t building enough housing, which has driven up prices, which has made it difficult for millions of households to keep up with monthly rent or mortgage payments. Every year, some of those people suffer at least a brief period of homelessness.Popular anger about the high cost of housing, which is by far the largest expense for most American households, helped to fuel Mr. Trump’s comeback. He recorded his strongest gains compared with the 2020 election in the areas where living costs are highest, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan think tank.The results are more than a backlash against the party that happened to be in power. The animating principle of the Democratic Party is that government can improve the lives of the American people. The housing crisis is manifest proof that government is failing to do so. And it surely has not escaped the attention of the electorate that the crisis is most acute in New York City, Los Angeles and other places long governed by Democrats.Republicans promise to cut taxes and they cut taxes. Democrats promise to use tax dollars to solve problems and one in eight public school students in New York experienced homelessness last year. It is the ninth straight year the number of homeless schoolchildren in New York topped 100,000.The good news is that Democrats still have the power to do better. While the party will soon be sidelined in Washington, it is primarily local and state laws that impede home building, including zoning laws that limit development, building codes that raise costs and local control measures that give existing residents the power to prevent growth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years

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      Penelope Hegseth made the accusation in an email to her son in 2018, amid his contentious divorce. She said on Friday that she regretted the email and had apologized to him.The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.”Questions about Mr. Hegseth’s treatment of women have emerged in the weeks since Mr. Trump chose him, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to lead the Pentagon. The issue is expected to be a subject of scrutiny during Senate confirmation hearings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shouldn’t Trump Voters Be Viewed as Traitors?

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      The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether voters should be held accountable for their chosen candidate’s behavior.From my perspective, the attack on the Capitol spurred on by Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, the efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 election with false electors and unfounded court cases and the persistent effort to discredit those election results without evidence amounted to an attempt to overthrow a pillar of our democracy. More to the point, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115 includes crimes against the nation described as treason, misprision of treason, rebellion or insurrection, seditious conspiracy and advocating the overthrow of government. I hold anyone voting for Trump at least morally guilty for the consequences of Jan. 6 and everything that follows the recent election. Would you agree that people who vote for Trump in light of these circumstances are themselves guilty of treasonous acts? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:Something like three-quarters of Americans, surveys over the past year report, think democracy in America is threatened. To go by exit-poll data, those voters supported Trump in about the same proportions as those who thought democracy was secure. In a study published last year, researchers at U.C. Berkeley and M.I.T. provided evidence that democratic back-sliding around the world — with citizens voting for authoritarian leaders — is driven in part by voters who believe in democracy but doubt that the other side does. The researchers found that such voters, once shown the actual levels of support for democracy among their opponents, became less likely to vote for candidates who violated democratic norms. The general point is that not understanding the actual views of people of other parties — and assuming the worst of them — can be dangerous for democracy.Trump voters, for the most part, don’t think he committed treason. And your position can’t be that unknowingly voting for someone guilty of treason is itself treasonous. Perhaps you think that they should believe him to have been treasonous. Similar issues were aired when Henry Wallace, otherwise a highly dissimilar figure, ran for president in 1948. He had denounced the Marshall Plan, wanted the Soviet Union to play a role in the governance of Germany’s western industrial heartland and — detractors thought — was a Stalin apologist.Historians can debate whether he was a voice of conscience or a pawn of America’s adversaries. But suppose you were among those who viewed him as a traitor. To have extended the indictment to his supporters would have been to criminalize political disagreement. Besides, if voting for someone who has done bad things makes you guilty of them, most voters are in deep trouble. It’s easy to be inflamed by someone with a habit of making inflammatory statements. But there may be a cost when you deem those who vote for the other side as ‘‘the enemy from within.’’ That’s a term that Trump has freely employed, of course. You’ll want to ask yourself whether protecting democracy is best served by adopting this attitude.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Girds for a Test of Its Independence

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      President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to install loyalists have left officials fearful that he intends to carry out his threats of retribution but hopeful that rule-of-law norms can hold.It was an early case of Donald J. Trump seeking retribution through the Justice Department.In the first year of Mr. Trump’s first presidency, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed a top federal prosecutor to review whether the F.B.I. had failed to fully pursue investigations involving Hillary Clinton, including an inquiry into the Clinton Foundation’s ties to a Russian uranium mining operation.The appointment of the prosecutor, John W. Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was championed by many on the right eager to turn the spotlight away from Mr. Trump’s ties to Moscow. But when Mr. Huber’s work ended years later with no charges or public report, Mr. Trump publicly called him a “garbage disposal unit for important documents.”As Mr. Trump begins filling out his administration and putting his stamp on Washington again, few issues loom larger than the resilience of the Justice Department’s tradition of independence and its commitment to the rule of law.Mr. Trump’s grievance-laden campaign rhetoric has left many current and former agency officials fearful that he will seek to turn it into a department of revenge aimed at foes inside and outside government.They said they worried that Mr. Trump’s past experiences with the Justice Department mean he is less likely this time to settle for an investigation like Mr. Huber’s — one that leads to little punishment or pain for anyone.In an interview, Mr. Huber characterized his work during Mr. Trump’s first term as a sign of the Justice Department’s ability to withstand any political pressure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History

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      Almost five years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck. And with the advent of flu season, that luck may well be running out.The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.All that would be more than bad enough, but we face these threats gravely hobbled by the Biden administration’s failure — one might even say refusal — to respond adequately to this disease or to prepare us for viral outbreaks that may follow. And the United States just registered its first known case of an exceptionally severe strain of Mpox.As bad as the Biden administration has been on pandemic prevention, of course, it’s about to be replaced by something far worse. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s vast public health agency, has already stated he would not prioritize research or vaccine distribution were we to face another pandemic. Kennedy may even be hastening its arrival through his advocacy for raw milk, which can carry high levels of the H5N1 virus and is considered a possible vector for its transmission.We might be fine. Viruses don’t always manage to adapt to new species, despite all the opportunities. But if there is a bird flu pandemic soon, it will be among the most foreseeable catastrophes in history.Devastating influenza pandemics arise throughout the ages because the virus is always looking for a way in, shape shifting to jump among species in ever novel forms. Flu viruses have a special trick: If two different types infect the same host — a farmworker with regular flu who also gets H5N1 from a cow — they can swap whole segments of their RNA, potentially creating an entirely new and deadly virus that has the ability to spread among humans. It’s likely that the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, started as a flu virus of avian origin that passed through a pig in eastern Kansas. From there it likely infected its first human victim before circling the globe on a deadly journey that killed more people than World War I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Inverted Morality of MAGA

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      I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to “extreme conservative.” As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More