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      How Nikki Haley Responded to a Question About Illegal Abortions

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      The former South Carolina governor — who is trying to break out in a packed 2024 Republican presidential primary — gave a nuanced response on one of the thorniest issues facing Republicans.At town halls and political events in New Hampshire, where she has made far more campaign stops than her rivals, Nikki Haley has mostly sidestepped any discussion of abortion, a fraught issue for the Republican Party.As the G.O.P. activist base tries to pull state lawmakers further to the right in curbing access to abortion, moderates worry that the hard-line stance has already handed electoral wins to Democrats and could have dire consequences in 2024. Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, has tried to pull off a difficult balancing act on the issue, and her attempts haven’t always resonated — partly because, her critics say, she has avoided discussing details.On Tuesday, with more than 100 people gathered in a drizzle for a town hall at a picturesque vineyard in Hollis, Christina Zlotnick, 55, an undeclared voter from Amherst, posed a hard question. Ms. Haley provided little by way of concrete policy proposals, but this time she drew an enthusiastic response.A Question for Nikki Haley“You said on TV that women who get abortions should not be put in jail and should not be subject to the death penalty. But how exactly should women who get illegal abortions — women like me — how do you specifically think we should be punished?”The SubtextSince the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-dominated state legislatures have rushed to institute new laws outlawing or imposing stringent restrictions on abortion, even as the issue has fueled Democratic victories across the nation, with Americans supporting at least some access to the procedure at record levels. Most abortions are now banned in 14 states. Some state laws stipulate narrow but vague exceptions, and carry years of prison time. Last week, a teenager in Nebraska who used abortion pills to end her pregnancy, and who pleaded guilty to illegally concealing human remains, was sentenced to 90 days in jail. At the time, abortion was banned in Nebraska after 20 weeks.In the past, anti-abortion activists have largely maintained that they don’t support punishing women who seek out the procedure illegally. But more recently, some state lawmakers have proposed legislation with criminal consequences for patients as well as those who may help them.Haley’s Answer“In order for us to have a federal law, we’re going to have to have consensus. What does that consensus look like? Can’t we all agree that we don’t want late-term abortion? Can’t we all agree that we want to encourage more adoptions and good-quality adoption so that children feel more love, not less? Can’t we all agree that doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortion shouldn’t have to perform them? Can’t we all agree that contraception should be accessible? And can’t we all agree that a woman who gets an abortion should not be subject to the death penalty or get arrested? That’s where I think we start — we start, and we do it with a level of respect. No more demonizing this issue. We’re going to humanize this issue. I had a roommate who was raped in college. I wouldn’t wish on anyone what she went through, wondering if she was OK. Everybody has a story. Let’s be respectful of everybody’s story, and let’s figure out what we can do together instead of sitting there and tearing each other apart.”The SubtextMs. Haley began her reply by flatly stating that she did not believe women needed to be punished, adding that she was “unapologetically pro-life,” but did not “judge anyone for being pro-choice.” She went on to explain her support for the Supreme Court decision that thrust the issue back to the states but said she did see a role for the federal government in setting abortion policy, as long as there was congressional consensus between Republicans and Democrats.Her answer mostly echoed her previous remarks on abortion, but delivered with passion, it seemed to pack a more powerful punch in front of a smaller, friendlier audience. Attendees nodded along or expressed whoops and hollers in agreement, breaking into applause as she ended.Many Republican and independent women at her events this week have said they see Ms. Haley as a strong leader and messenger on abortion, as the only Republican woman in the presidential race, and believe she might be able to blunt attacks from Democrats on the issue. Ms. Haley’s positions on the topic tend to be more moderate than the rest of the field, and it is among the issues she has used to set up her bid as a test of the Republican Party’s attitudes about female leaders, without leaning too far into her gender.After the event, Ms. Zlotnick, who once had to take a drug to end an unviable pregnancy — a procedure that is not illegal — said she phrased her question as a hypothetical because if she found herself in different circumstances, she would consider having an illegal abortion. She said she was a strong believer in reproductive rights but had been satisfied with Ms. Haley’s response. More

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      Giuliani Concedes He Made False Statements About Georgia Election Workers

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      Rudolph W. Giuliani said he still had “legal defenses” in a case brought by two election workers who said he had defamed them as he asserted that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.Rudolph W. Giuliani has conceded that while acting as a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, he made false statements by asserting that two Georgia election workers had mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.The concession by Mr. Giuliani came in court papers filed on Tuesday night as part of a defamation lawsuit that the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, had brought against him in Federal District Court in Washington in December 2021.The suit accused Mr. Giuliani and others of promoting a video that purported to show Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss — who are mother and daughter — of manipulating ballots while working at the State Farm Arena for the Fulton County Board of Elections.In a two-page declaration, Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that he had in fact made the statements about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss that led to the filing of the suit and that the remarks “carry meaning that is defamatory per se.” He also admitted that his statements were “actionable” and “false” and that he no longer disputed the “factual elements of liability” the election workers had raised in their suit.But Mr. Giuliani, insisting that he still had “legal defenses” in the case, said that he continued to believe his accusations about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were “constitutionally protected” under the First Amendment. He also refused to acknowledge that his statements had caused the women any damage — a key element required to collect a judgment in a defamation case.The declaration was filed as Mr. Giuliani was confronting potentially painful sanctions for having purportedly failed to live up to his discovery obligations in the case. It appeared to be part of an effort to move past the discovery phase, which had saddled Mr. Giuliani with crippling expenses.In the declaration, he acknowledged making his concessions “to avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes.”Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, said he had made the concessions to move the case more quickly to a point where a motion to dismiss could be filed.Michael J. Gottlieb, a lawyer for Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, said that Mr. Giuliani’s declaration conceded that his clients had “honorably performed their civic duties in the 2020 presidential election in full compliance with the law, and the allegations of election fraud he and former President Trump made against them have been false since Day 1.”“While certain issues, including damages, remain to be decided by the court, our clients are pleased with this major milestone in their fight for justice,” Mr. Gottlieb added, “and look forward to presenting what remains of this case at trial.”The lawsuit filed by Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss was among the first to be brought by individual election workers who found themselves dragged into the alternate universe of right-wing politicians and media figures who claimed that Mr. Trump had won the election. The two women had originally sued other defendants, including the One America News Network and some of its top officials, but ultimately settled the case against everyone except Mr. Giuliani.It was one of a series of defamation cases where plaintiffs sought to use the courts to seek accountability against public figures or media outlets that lied about the outcome of the 2020 election and its aftermath.In April, Fox News paid more than $787 million to settle claims by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the election. Ray Epps, an Arizona man who took part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, sued Fox this month, claiming that its former host Tucker Carlson had promoted a “fantastical story” that Mr. Epps was an undercover government agent who instigated the violence that day as a way to disparage Mr. Trump and his supporters.Last year, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss appeared as witnesses at a public hearing of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 and told the story of what happened after Mr. Giuliani amplified the false claims that they had pulled thousands of fraudulent ballots from a suitcase in their vote-counting station and illegally fed them through voting machines.Although Fulton County and Georgia officials immediately debunked the accusations, Mr. Giuliani kept promoting them, ultimately comparing the women — both of whom are Black — to drug dealers and calling during a hearing with Georgia state legislators for their homes to be searched.Mr. Trump invoked Ms. Freeman’s name 18 times during a phone call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. In the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,800 votes — enough to swing the results in Georgia away from the winner, Joseph R. Biden Jr.“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Ms. Freeman testified to the House committee, adding as her voice rose with emotion, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”The defamation suit is only one of several legal problems Mr. Giuliani faces.Three weeks ago, a legal ethics committee in Washington said he should be disbarred for his “unparalleled” attempts to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.A few weeks earlier, Mr. Giuliani sat for a voluntary interview with prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, answering questions about, among other things, a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that Mr. Biden had won. And he could face charges in an investigation, led by the district attorney in Fulton County, into efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Anti-Trump Ads in Iowa Feature Republican Voters Who Turned Against Him

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      Hoping to persuade G.O.P. voters that Donald Trump cannot win another general election, the Republican Accountability Project is running ads that feature voters who grew disillusioned with him.A Republican group that opposes Donald J. Trump is unveiling an advertising campaign featuring voters who supported him in the past two presidential elections but have now turned against him, in an effort to put questions of electability at the center of the G.O.P. primary race.The group, the Republican Accountability Project, is spending $1.5 million on ads in Iowa to try to persuade likely Trump voters that the former president would struggle to win the 2024 general election. The organization’s goal is to help lift another contender to the Republican nomination — anyone but Mr. Trump.The ads feature first-person testimonials from Iowans explaining that they like Mr. Trump but fear he could fail to win back the White House for Republicans by being unable to appeal to swing voters.In one spot, Fran, a two-time Trump supporter, says she “really appreciated” his presidency. But she adds that she will not support him again in the primary.“Donald Trump has way too much political baggage,” she says. “The next Republican candidate has to be somebody who can convince swing voters, independents, to vote for them. Because Donald Trump can’t.”The campaign will be shown on broadcast, cable and digital ads in Iowa’s two biggest media markets through the summer. Polling shows Mr. Trump with a commanding lead in the state, and his closest rival — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has struggled in recent days to reset his campaign, as he trails the front-runner by double digits.The tactic of using testimonials from former Trump supporters has been tried before — both by the Republican Accountability Project and Democratic groups in 2020 — to undercut Mr. Trump with independent and moderate voters. But it has never been aimed at persuading strong Trump supporters to move away from him.The ads are the next evolution for the Republican Accountability Project, which sees Mr. Trump as posing serious threats to democracy and has spent years trying to push him out of political life. Its effort has been funded by donors from both sides of the aisle.Sarah Longwell, the group’s executive director, said the question of electability was Mr. Trump’s biggest weakness.A portion of the Republican Party — perhaps 30 percent — supports the former president but worries he could not win the White House, Ms. Longwell said. The Iowa ad campaign is meant to send a message not only to those primary voters but also to the Republican challengers in the field, who Ms. Longwell thinks should focus more on Mr. Trump’s political vulnerabilities.“Part of the problem has been that there hasn’t been another candidate to emerge who voters intuitively see as more electable,” Ms. Longwell said. “The No. 1 reason Trump is dominating right now is because of lack of political talent from the people who are challenging him.”Iowa is already emerging as a crucial battleground in the primary race. A decisive January victory by Mr. Trump in the state, which has retained its place as the starting gate of the Republican nominating fight, would propel him into the next primary contests with momentum that could be difficult to stop.“We believe strategically there’s basically only one path for somebody to unseat Trump’s dominant hold,” Ms. Longwell said. “Beat him in Iowa and you change the contours of the race quickly.” More

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      Do You Know a Politically Motived Prosecution When You See One?

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      As the criminal indictments of Donald Trump continue to pile up like boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, the former president’s defenders have settled on a response: They don’t claim their man is innocent of the scores of federal and state charges against him — a tough case to make under the circumstances. Instead they accuse the Biden administration and Democratic prosecutors of politicizing law enforcement and cooking up an insurance policy to protect President Biden, who trails Mr. Trump in some polls about a very possible 2024 rematch.“So what do they do now?” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked last week, after Mr. Trump announced that he had received a second target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, this time over his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “Weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.”Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the few plausible Republican nominees besides Mr. Trump, warned that the government is “criminalizing political differences.”It’s not only about Mr. Trump; griping about politicized law enforcement has become a cottage industry on the right these days. No sooner did Republicans take back the House of Representatives than they formed a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which meets regularly to air grievances and grill witnesses about their supposed anti-conservative animus, including Christopher Wray, the (Trump-nominated) F.B.I. director.If you’re feeling bewildered by all the claims and counterclaims of politicization, you’re not alone. Take the F.B.I.’s probe of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, which is still being hashed out in the halls of Congress seven years later: In February, Democratic lawmakers demanded an investigation of the investigators who investigated the investigators who were previously investigated for their investigation of a transnational plot to interfere in a presidential election. Got that?But even if the charge of politicized justice is levied by a bad-faith buffoon like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the weaponization subcommittee, it is a profoundly important one. There is no simple way to separate politics completely from law enforcement. The Justice Department will always be led by a political appointee, and most state and local prosecutors are elected. If Americans are going to have faith in the fairness of their justice system, every effort must be taken to assure the public that political motives are not infecting prosecutors’ charging decisions. That means extremely clear rules for investigators and prosecutors and eternal vigilance for the rest of us.At the same time, politically powerful people must be held to the same rules as everyone else, even if they happen to be of a different party from those investigating them. So how to distinguish an investigation or prosecution based solely on the facts from one motivated improperly by politics?Sometimes the investigators make it easy by just coming out and admitting that it’s really political. Mr. McCarthy did that in 2015, when he bragged on Fox News that the House Benghazi hearings had knocked a seemingly “unbeatable” Hillary Clinton down in the polls. More recently, James Comer of Kentucky, who heads the House committee that is relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden, made a similar argument about the effect of the committee’s work on President Biden’s political fortunes. (Mr. Comer tried to walk back his comment a day later.)More often, though, it takes some work to determine whether an investigation or prosecution is on the level.The key thing to remember is that even if the subject is a politically powerful person or the outcome of a trial could have a political impact, that doesn’t necessarily mean the action itself is political. To assume otherwise is to “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice, and at the same time you remove from the public the ability to impose any accountability for misconduct, which enables it to happen again.”In May, Protect Democracy published a very useful report, co-written by Ms. Parker, laying out several factors that help the public assess whether a prosecution is political.First, what is the case about? Is there straightforward evidence of criminal behavior by a politician? Have people who are not powerful politicians been prosecuted in the past for similar behavior?Second, what are top law-enforcement officials saying? Is the president respecting due process, or is he demanding investigations or prosecutions of specific people? Is he keeping his distance from the case, or is he publicly attacking prosecutors, judges and jurors? Is the attorney general staying quiet, or is he offering public opinions on the guilt of the accused?Third, is the Justice Department following its internal procedures and guidelines for walling off political interference? Most of these guidelines arose in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the department to go after his political enemies and later obstructed the investigation into his own behavior. Until recently, the guidelines were observed by presidents and attorneys general of both parties.Finally, how have other institutions responded? Did judges and juries follow proper procedure in the case, and did they agree that the defendant was guilty? Did an agency’s inspector general find any wrongdoing by investigators or prosecutors?None of these factors are decisive by themselves. An investigation might take a novel legal approach; an honest case may still lose in court. But considering them together makes it easier to identify when law enforcement has been weaponized for political ends.To see how it works in practice, let’s take a closer look at two recent examples: first, the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s withholding of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and, second, the investigation by John Durham into the F.B.I.’s Russia probe.In the first example, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., under Attorney General Merrick Garland, waited more than a year to pursue an investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack with any urgency — largely out of the fear that they would be seen as politically motivated.With a punctiliousness that has exasperated many liberals, Mr. Garland has kept his mouth shut about Mr. Smith’s prosecutions, except to say that the department would pursue anyone responsible for the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Garland almost never mentions Mr. Trump by name. And Mr. Smith has been silent outside of the news conference he held last month to announce the charges in the documents case.In that case, Mr. Smith presented a tower of evidence that Mr. Trump violated multiple federal laws. There are also many examples of nonpowerful people — say, Reality Winner — who were prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to years in prison for leaking a single classified document. Mr. Trump kept dozens. Even a federal judge who was earlier accused of being too accommodating to Mr. Trump has effectively signaled the documents case is legitimate, setting a trial date for May and refusing the Trump team’s demand to delay it until after the 2024 election.In the Jan. 6 case, the government has already won convictions against hundreds of people for their roles in the Capitol attack, many involving some of the same laws identified in Mr. Smith’s latest target letter to Mr. Trump.“Prosecutors will hear all sorts of allegations that it’s all political, that it will damage the republic for all of history,” Ms. Parker, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor, told me. “But they have to charge through that if what they’ve got is a case that on the facts and law would be brought against anybody else.”President Biden’s behavior has been more of a mixed bag. He and his advisers are keen to advertise his disciplined silence about Mr. Trump’s legal travails. “I have never once — not one single time — suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do,” he said in June. Yet he has commented publicly and inappropriately on both investigations over the years.It’s impossible to justify these remarks, but it is possible to consider them in light of the other factors above and to decide that Mr. Smith’s investigations are not infected with a political motive.Contrast that with the investigation by John Durham, the federal prosecutor appointed by Mr. Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia probe.Even before it began, the Durham investigation was suffused with clear political bias. Mr. Trump had repeatedly attacked the F.B.I. over its handling of the Russia probe and called for an investigation, breaching the traditional separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Mr. Barr had also spoken publicly in ways that seemed to prejudge the outcome of any investigation and inserted himself into an investigation focused on absolving Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.Not every investigation or prosecution will offer such clear-cut evidence of the presence or absence of political motivations. But as with everything relating to Mr. Trump, one generally doesn’t have to look far to find his pursuit of vengeance; he has taken to describing himself as the “retribution” of his followers. If he wins, he has promised to obliterate the Justice Department’s independence from the presidency and “go after” Mr. Biden and “the entire Biden crime family.”For the moment, at least, Mr. Trump is not the prosecutor but the prosecuted. And there should be no fear of pursuing the cases against him — especially those pertaining to his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020 — wherever they lead.“If we can’t bring those kinds of cases just because the person is politically powerful, how do we say we have a democracy?” asked Ms. Parker. “Because in that case we have people who are above the law, and they are so far above the law that they can destroy the central feature of democracy, which is elections, in which the people choose their leaders.”Source photograph by pepifoto, via Getty Images.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Jan. 6 Prosecutors Gather More Evidence as Trump Indictment Decision Looms

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      The special counsel, Jack Smith, continues to push ahead on several fronts as he assembles evidence about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to retain power after the 2020 election.Even as the special counsel, Jack Smith, appears to be edging closer toward bringing charges against former President Donald J. Trump in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, prosecutors have been continuing to investigate multiple strands of the case.In recent weeks, Mr. Smith’s team has pushed forward in collecting new evidence and in arranging new interviews with witnesses who could shed light on Mr. Trump’s mind-set in the chaotic postelection period or on other subjects important to the inquiry. At the same time, word has emerged of previously undisclosed investigative efforts, hinting at the breadth and scope of the issues prosecutors are examining.In the past few days, a lawyer for Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who worked closely after the election with Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, gave hundreds of pages of documents to prosecutors working with Mr. Smith.The documents detailed efforts by Mr. Kerik and Mr. Giuliani to identify and investigate allegations of fraud in the election — an issue that is likely to be front and center as prosecutors seek to understand what Mr. Trump may have been thinking when he set in motion various efforts to maintain his grip on power.While it remains unclear precisely when Mr. Smith may seek an indictment of the former president, the clearest signal yet that one was in the offing came last week from Mr. Trump, who announced on social media that he had received a so-called target letter from prosecutors alluding to at least three charges he might face.Those charges included conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and a Reconstruction-era civil rights statute that makes it a crime for people to conspire to threaten or intimidate others from exercising rights provided to them by federal law or the Constitution.It is not uncommon for prosecutors to keep investigating a criminal case up to the moment an indictment is returned. They can even press forward after charges are filed. But prosecutors are not supposed to use a grand jury of the sort that has been used to investigate Mr. Trump to gather fresh evidence after charges are brought — unless they intend to use the information to seek additional charges.The production of documents by Mr. Kerik, who was convicted of tax fraud but pardoned by Mr. Trump, came even as his lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, was arranging for Mr. Kerik to sit down with Mr. Smith’s prosecutors for a voluntary interview next month. Mr. Giuliani did a similar interview with Mr. Smith’s team in June.Among the previously unknown steps taken by Mr. Smith’s team was an interview conducted about three months ago with Richard P. Donoghue, a former top official in the Justice Department at the end of Mr. Trump’s time in office. NBC News reported on the interview on Monday night, and Mr. Donoghue confirmed on Tuesday that it took place. But he declined to comment on what he discussed with Mr. Smith’s prosecutors.Mr. Smith’s team conducted an interview with Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, who appeared before the House select committee investigating Jan. 6.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesIn late 2021, Mr. Donoghue, who served as the acting deputy attorney general under Mr. Trump, told the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 that he and Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general at the time, repeatedly sought to rebuff Mr. Trump’s claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud. At one point, Mr. Donoghue testified, Mr. Trump urged him and Mr. Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”Mr. Donoghue also told the committee that in the waning days of his presidency, Mr. Trump wanted to replace Mr. Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a loyalist within the Justice Department. Mr. Clark, whose home was searched as part of the election interference inquiry into Mr. Trump, had helped to a draft a letter suggesting that fraud had affected the election results and urging Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, to call for the creation of a fake slate of electors to the Electoral College declaring that Mr. Trump had won that state, not Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Smith’s team has also reached out to Mr. Kemp seeking an interview, Garrison Douglas, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp, said on Tuesday. But Mr. Douglas declined to say whether the interview, which was reported by The Washington Post, had been merely scheduled or had already taken place.Georgia was a key location in Mr. Trump’s campaign to pressure local officials to throw him the election in their states. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, recorded Mr. Trump on a phone call in early January 2021, asking him to “find” sufficient votes for him to win the state.Mr. Smith’s prosecutors have also shown interest in a different line of inquiry in recent months, asking questions about a meeting that Mr. Trump held in February 2020 with officials who briefed him about election security for the upcoming race. The special counsel’s interest in the meeting, where Mr. Trump praised what officials told him were improvements in election security, was reported earlier by CNN.During the meeting, Mr. Trump attacked Joseph Maguire, who was then serving as acting director of national intelligence, for having days earlier given a briefing on Russian interference in the 2016 election to Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and other members of the panel, according to people familiar with the events.Mr. Trump viewed Mr. Schiff as an enemy after he focused extensively on whether Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with Russia during his 2016 campaign and he played an instrumental role in his first impeachment.At the meeting, officials from the F.B.I. and other agencies also told Mr. Trump about their preparations to secure the election from interference. Mr. Trump was so taken by what he heard that he wanted to hold a news conference to tout the security of the election, according to a person with knowledge of the talks.Mr. Trump’s apparent excitement at the meeting could shed light on his state of mind and what factual knowledge he had as he spread baseless lies about election fraud months later.In a related line of inquiry, prosecutors under Mr. Smith have asked questions as to when and how federal officials went about securing the election, and how they coordinated those efforts with secretaries of state in various states, according to a person familiar with the matter. Prosecutors have also sought to determine how regularly the White House was briefed on election security measures.Richard Fausset More

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      Where Trump, DeSantis and Other 2024 Candidates Stand on Immigration

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      Support for a wall is now routine, and some presidential candidates say they would use military force to secure the border if elected.The blistering immigration policy that Donald J. Trump enacted when he was in the White House shifted his party’s baseline on the issue to the right.His policies are now standard Republican fare: Calls to “build the wall” once set apart the right-wing fringe, but several Republican candidates now support even more exceptional measures, such as using military force to secure the border or ending birthright citizenship.Here is a look at where the candidates stand.Donald J. TrumpHis policies cemented hard-line immigration stances in the G.O.P. mainstream.Mr. Trump’s administration separated thousands of migrant families — traumatizing children and causing a public outcry. As recently as May, during a CNN event, he did not rule out reinstating that policy.His administration also forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings, leading to the development of squalid refugee camps, and held children in crowded, unsanitary facilities.While his signature campaign promise in 2016 was to build a border wall, fewer than 500 miles of barriers were built along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border, largely in places that already had them. (At points, he suggested spikes, a moat and permission for officials to shoot migrants in the legs.)Mr. Trump toured the southern border wall near Alamo, Texas, in January 2021. Some of his 2024 rivals say they would continue work on the border wall; Mr. Trump built fewer than 500 miles during his tenure.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOne of his first actions upon taking office was to ban travelers from several majority-Muslim countries. In 2019, he began denying permanent residency to immigrants deemed likely to require public assistance, a rule that disproportionately affected people from Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Congress did not enact his proposals to slash legal immigration by limiting American citizens’ ability to bring in relatives and by adding education and skill requirements, but he cut it drastically in 2020 through pandemic-related actions.Ron DeSantisHe has tried to run to the right of Trump on immigration, but is mostly aligned with him.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has outlined an aggressive policy that includes mass deportations, indefinite detention of children (in violation of a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores agreement), and license to kill some border crossers.“We have to have appropriate rules of engagement to say, if you’re cutting through a border wall on sovereign U.S. territory and you’re trying to poison Americans, you’re going to end up stone cold dead,” he told Fox News, shortly after saying while in Texas that he would authorize “deadly force” against people “demonstrating hostile intent.”He also wants to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, an idea Mr. Trump floated in 2018 that rejects the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Any such effort by a president would almost immediately wind up in court.Mr. DeSantis wants to finish building a border wall; require asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting hearings, as Mr. Trump did; deputize state and local officials to carry out deportations; and deploy the military to the border, which could violate a federal prohibition on using the military for civilian law enforcement. He has said he would declare a national emergency, allowing more unilateral action.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida held a campaign event in Eagle Pass, Texas, last month. He has tried to stake out territory to the right of Mr. Trump on some campaign platforms, including immigration.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesChris ChristieHe mostly toes the G.O.P. line, but is also critical of Trump on the issue.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has proposed sending the National Guard to the border to stop illegal crossings and intercept fentanyl (though fentanyl mostly comes into the U.S. through official ports of entry, hidden in legitimate commerce).He has criticized Mr. Trump as all talk on border security, noting that his wall covers only a quarter of the border. But he also said on CNN last month that since the wall had been started, “you might as well finish it,” even though “I probably wouldn’t have done that at the start.” He argues that Mr. Trump erred by enacting immigration policy through executive actions that President Biden could easily undo.Mr. Christie has changed his mind on a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — in 2010, he urged Congress to create one; then, during his first presidential campaign in 2015, he said he considered it “extreme.” His campaign did not respond to a request to confirm his current position or to elaborate on what other immigration policies he supports.Nikki HaleyShe is largely aligned with the bulk of the field and supports most of Trump’s policies.When she was governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley signed a law requiring businesses to use a federal database to check prospective employees’ immigration status, mandating that police officers check the status of some people they stopped for unrelated reasons, and making it a crime to “harbor or transport” an undocumented immigrant. She has cited this as a national model, though a judge blocked parts of the law and the state agreed to soften it.Nikki Haley has expressed support for some of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, but not separating families.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesMs. Haley has also said that she wants to restore Mr. Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, add 25,000 Border Patrol and ICE agents, withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that limit cooperation with immigration officials, and immediately deport migrants. But she does not support separating families, she said.Like Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, she wants to limit birthright citizenship. “For those that are in this country legally, of course I think we go according to the Constitution, and that’s fine,” she told Fox News. “But it’s the illegal immigrations that we have to make sure that just because they get here, if they have a child, you’re just building on the problems.”She told CBS News that she wanted legal immigration to be based on “merit” and businesses’ needs.Tim ScottHe is largely aligned with the bulk of the field and supports most of Trump’s policies.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina introduced legislation alongside other Republican senators this year to withhold funding from sanctuary cities and to redirect funding that Democrats had allocated for new I.R.S. agents to border security instead. Neither bill is viable in the Democrat-controlled Senate.Mr. Scott told NBC News that he supported a requirement for asylum seekers, if they cross other countries en route to the U.S. border, to request asylum in those countries before requesting it in the United States — a policy that Mr. Biden has enacted and that a judge blocked on Tuesday.In the same interview, he said he supported a border wall, new surveillance technology and an increased military presence along the border. He said he would not rule out the possibility of sending troops into Mexico to combat drug cartels.Senator Tim Scott has said that he supports a border wall, new surveillance technology and an increased military presence along the border.Travis Dove for The New York TimesLike many candidates, Mr. Scott also wants to reinstate the Title 42 policy that allowed rapid explusion of migrants on pandemic-related public health grounds. He argued in an interview with Fox News that fentanyl, rather than the coronavirus, was the public health crisis that now justified the policy.Mike PenceHe is largely aligned with the bulk of the field and supports most of Trump’s policies.Former Vice President Mike Pence said last year that he supported a return to Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, including continuing to build a border wall, banning the establishment of sanctuary cities and reinstating the “remain in Mexico” requirement for asylum seekers.He said in a CNN town hall event that he would not, however, reinstate family separation because “we got to stop putting Band-Aids on the problem.”In the same event, he called for a “guest worker” program under which people seeking jobs in agriculture and other industries could “come and for a short period of time pay taxes, participate in our economy, and go home.”Mr. Pence also vociferously opposed the Biden administration’s lifting of Title 42 and wants to reinstate it — as well as a requirement that legal immigrants demonstrate that they will not rely on public assistance.Vivek RamaswamyHe has proposed some of the most aggressive stances of any candidate.Vivek Ramaswamy has called for securing the border by any means necessary, including military force. This could violate an 1878 law that forbids the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement, but Mr. Ramaswamy argues that securing the border isn’t civilian law enforcement.He wants to “universally” deport undocumented immigrants and opposes any path to legal residence because “we are a nation of laws,” he said at a campaign event. “That is something we cannot compromise on.”He added that, for people brought to the United States as children, he would be open to a process allowing them to return after being deported. But all legal immigration, he says, should run on a “meritocratic” points system, with lottery-based paths eliminated.His anti-immigrant language has been incendiary. On Fox News, he said citing undocumented immigrants’ economic contributions was tantamount to making economic arguments for slavery: “‘The vegetables will rot in the field, we need people to pluck our crops’ — this is a thing that Democrats were saying in the South in the 1860s to justify a different form of immoral and illegal behavior,” he said.Asa HutchinsonHe is somewhat more moderate than Trump, but still advocates strict policies.Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, in a Fox News opinion essay, called for adding Border Patrol agents and authorizing murder charges against people accused of supplying fentanyl that leads to deaths. “We should ensure those who bring evil across our borders and sow criminality throughout our country are proportionately punished,” he wrote.In an interview with the New Hampshire news station WMUR, he didn’t rule out supporting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but said a secure border was a prerequisite for any such immigration reform. He also said that he supported a wall in some places, but that it wasn’t feasible along the full border.As governor, Mr. Hutchinson signed a law to make immigrants with federal work permits eligible for professional licenses. He also authorized the deployment of 40 Arkansas National Guard troops to the border in Texas in 2021.Doug BurgumHe expresses some more moderate views but hasn’t made detailed proposals.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has expressed support for lowering barriers to legal immigration, a stance that sets him apart from most other candidates in the field.In an interview with Forbes, he criticized the obstacles encountered by seasonal agricultural workers and prospective tech employees, saying, “We put them through two, three, four, five years of red tape, and then we let people illegally cross the southern border, so the two things juxtaposed against each other make no sense.”In the same interview, he accused President Biden of being weak on border security and said, “We can’t have a discussion in this country about legal immigration until we solve the illegal immigration.” But he has not described how to do that, and his campaign did not respond to a request for details.As governor, he signed legislation to create an Office of Legal Immigration to help North Dakota businesses hire foreign workers. He has also sent state National Guard troops to the border in Texas.Will HurdHe is on the more moderate end of the G.O.P. field.As a member of Congress, Will Hurd described a border wall as a “third-century solution to a 21st-century problem,” called the separation of migrant families “unacceptable,” and said Mr. Trump’s ban on travelers from several Muslim countries “endangers the lives of thousands of American men and women in our military, diplomatic corps and intelligence services.”He has also criticized Mr. Biden’s policies from the opposite direction, telling CBS News that the president is “treating everybody that comes into the country as an asylum seeker.”What Mr. Hurd himself would do is less clear, and his campaign did not respond to a request for information. He told NBC News that he wanted to “streamline” legal immigration, but offered no details. He has supported protections for “Dreamers” who migrated illegally as children, and he has also previously called for a new version of the post-World War II Marshall Plan to strengthen Central American economies and reduce the poverty and instability driving migration.Francis SuarezHe is on the more moderate end of the G.O.P. field.Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami opposes many of the far-right immigration policies outlined by many other candidates, including by his governor, Mr. DeSantis. He argued on Fox Business that the aggressive immigration bill Mr. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature had enacted was “having an adverse impact on small businesses in our state.”He said that he believed the country was “not ready” for amnesty for undocumented immigrants, but that he was open to creating some legal status that would protect them from deportation. Of actually deporting all of them, he said, “It’s not possible.”He has otherwise been vague, saying that he wants to make legal immigration “merit-based and skill-based” and that he believes he has “credibility” on the issue as a Hispanic Republican, but not proposing specific policies. His campaign did not respond to a request for details. More

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      Trump to Skip Iowa State Fair Interview With Gov. Kim Reynolds

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      Gov. Kim Reynolds next month will hold “Fair-Side Chats” with candidates including Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott and Perry Johnson, but not the former president.When Gov. Kim Reynolds interviews nearly the entire Republican presidential field at the Iowa State Fair next month in a series of one-on-one chats, there will be an especially notable absence: former President Donald J. Trump, the race’s clear front-runner.Ms. Reynolds’s office on Tuesday released a list of participants for the interview series that did not include Mr. Trump. The former president, who has expressed his anger at Ms. Reynolds for not endorsing him, declined an invitation to participate.While it is traditional for Iowa governors to stay on the sidelines of presidential primaries, Mr. Trump’s camp believes Ms. Reynolds is neutral in name only, pointing to a series of events she has attended with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief rival.Mr. Trump appears intent on prolonging his public feud with the popular Ms. Reynolds, which has angered and puzzled conservatives in the state. One Republican state senator even flipped his endorsement from Mr. Trump to Mr. DeSantis after the spat. Mr. Trump, confident in his lead over the rest of the field, has shown a wider willingness to skip important primary events, potentially including the first Republican presidential debate in late August, which he has not committed to attending.The interviews with Ms. Reynolds, called the “Fair-Side Chats,” will take place between Aug. 10 and Aug. 18 at JR’s SouthPork Ranch at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines. The Iowa State Fair — famous for its fried foods on sticks and life-size butter cow sculpture — is a crucial opportunity for presidential hopefuls to mingle with voters ahead of the state’s caucuses in January.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said the former president planned to attend the state fair — just not the interview with Ms. Reynolds.“President Trump looks forward to interacting with tens of thousands of Iowans at the fair in an open and unfiltered setting,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement.Of the other major Republican presidential candidates, only former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey will not participate in an interview with Ms. Reynolds. Mr. Christie’s campaign has said he is choosing to compete in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the other early nominating states, over Iowa.Otherwise, the remaining major candidates, including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, as well as long shots like the businessman Perry Johnson, agreed to attend.“The Iowa State Fair showcases the best of Iowa — from our people to our culture and wonderful agriculture industry — and it’s the perfect venue for a conversation with the candidates,” Ms. Reynolds said in a statement.Mr. DeSantis, meanwhile, has seemed to eagerly cultivate his relationship with Ms. Reynolds, telling reporters at a campaign stop in the state this month that he would consider her as a running mate, should he win the nomination.“I mean, she’s one of the top public servants in America,” he said.Recent polls show Mr. DeSantis in second place in Iowa, a state many of his allies say he must win, trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 percentage points. The governor is scheduled to begin a bus tour of the Des Moines area on Thursday before speaking at a dinner for the Republican Party of Iowa on Friday. Almost all the other candidates, including Mr. Trump, are also set to speak at the dinner. More

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      What the Joe Manchin-No Labels Fantasy Gets Wrong About America

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      For as long as Americans have had partisan political competition, they have hated partisanship itself.By his second term in office, in the mid-1790s, President George Washington faced organized political opponents in the form of Democratic-Republican societies that had spread throughout the country.“There was the Society for the Preservation of Liberty in Virginia, the Sons of St. Tammany and the Democratic Society in New York, the Constitutional Society in Boston, the Society of Political Inquiries, the German Republican Society and the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and similar groups scattered in all the states,” the historian Susan Dunn notes in “Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism.”In the wake of the Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s, Washington blamed these societies for “encouraging dissension and fomenting disorder,” as Dunn puts it. He accused them of spreading their “nefarious doctrines with a view to poison and discontent the minds of the people.” Washington’s farewell plea to avoid faction — “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” — was in many respects a response to the spread of partisan feeling during the last years of his administration.Speaking of which, Thomas Jefferson was an eager partisan. By 1797, he had emerged as the leader of the Democratic-Republican opposition to the Adams administration. In his own words, he hoped to “sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection for it.” And yet he also hoped, in his inaugural address, that Americans would put aside partisanship and unite as one: “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle,” Jefferson wrote. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”You can find this distaste for faction and longing for unity throughout American history, up to the present. Americans, including their political leadership, have a real and serious distaste for partisanship and political parties even as they are, and have been, as political and partisan a people as has ever existed.I was reminded of all this while reading a recent opinion essay by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, in which he dreamed of a world without politics or partisanship — a world of “common sense solutions” and bipartisan camaraderie.“What is clear to all those who wish to listen is that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in unity,” Manchin wrote in USA Today. “We are stronger as a nation when we embrace compromise, common sense and common ground.”Manchin was writing in part to explain why he appeared last week at a town hall in New Hampshire sponsored by No Labels, a centrist political group that has railed against partisanship and extremism as a voice of the so-called radical center since 2010. “Both parties follow the mood of the moment,” declared Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, during the group’s inaugural event in December of that year. “They incite anger instead of addressing it — for their own partisan interests.”No Labels is still around, and its diagnosis of American politics still rests on the idea that the parties are too partisan — each captured by the most extreme members of its coalition. “These partisan extremes are in the business of feeding political division and dysfunction every day,” wrote Manchin, whose appearance at the town hall came amid speculation that he might make a third-party presidential run under the No Labels banner. “They attack our institutions, whether it is our Capitol, our elected leaders or our justice system, without caring about the lasting damage it does.”There is something deeply strange, if not outright bizarre, about a narrative that puts the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol in the same category of political action as Black Lives Matter protests, the liberal criticism of the Supreme Court or whatever it is that Manchin has in mind. Stranger still is that he does this while calling, with all apparent sincerity, for more dialogue: “I believe there is a better way to govern and lead this nation forward that embraces respectful discourse, debate and discussion.”We could spend the rest of our time here on the way that Manchin’s call for debate excludes tens of millions of Americans with passionate, informed but less popular views that offend the sensibilities of centrist politicians. Or we could focus on the fact that much of No Labels’ actual advocacy appears to be little more than a stalking horse for an unpopular agenda of benefit cuts and fiscal retrenchment.For now, though, I want to highlight the fact that there’s no way to realize this long-running fantasy of politics without partisanship. Organized conflict is an unavoidable part of democratically structured political life for the simple reason that politics is about governing and governing is about choices.For any given choice, there will be proponents and critics, supporters and opponents. Political participants will develop, in short order, different ideas about what is and what should be, and they will gather and work together to make their vision a reality. Soon enough, through no one’s precise design, you have political parties and partisanship. This, in essence, is what happened to the United States, which was founded in opposition to faction but developed, in less than a decade, a coherent system of organized political conflict.That’s not to say our political system is perfect. Far from it. But if there is a solution, it will involve an effort to harness and structure our partisanship and polarization through responsive institutions, not pretending it away in favor of a manufactured and exclusionary unity.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More