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      Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans

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      Over the last few months, the incredulous question — How can Donald Trump possibly be leading the polls; there must be some mistake — has given way to the clear reality: Something in American life would need to change for Joe Biden to be favored for re-election in November 2024.The good news for Biden is that it’s easy to imagine developments that would help his re-election bid. Notwithstanding a fashionable liberal despair about how bad vibes are deceiving Americans about the state of the economy, there’s plenty of room for improvements — in inflation-adjusted wages, interest rates, the stock market — that could sweeten the country’s economic mood. (Just sustaining the economic trajectory of the last few months through next summer would almost certainly boost Biden’s approval ratings.)The looming Trump trials, meanwhile, promise to refocus the country’s persuadable voters on what they dislike about the former president; that, too, has to be worth something in the swing states where Biden is currently struggling.In both those cases, though, the president doesn’t have much control over events. No major economic package is likely to pass Congress, and whatever influence you think his White House did or didn’t exert over Trump’s indictments, Biden staffers won’t be supervising jury selection.There is an issue that’s hurting Biden, however, where the Republican Party is (officially, at least) quite open to working with the president, provided that he’s willing to break with his own party’s interest groups: the security of the southern border, where Border Patrol apprehensions remain stubbornly high even as the president’s approval ratings on immigration sit about 30 points underwater.There is a commonplace interpretation of the immigration debate that treats the unpopularity of an uncontrolled border primarily as an optics problem: People are happy enough to have immigrants in their own communities, but they see border disorder on their television screens and it makes them fearful about government incompetence. Sometimes this interpretation comes packaged with the suggestion that the people who worry most about immigration are rural voters who rarely see a migrant in real life, as opposed to liberal urbanites who both experience and appreciate diversity.The last year or so of blue-city immigration anxiety has revealed the limits of this interpretation: Place enough stress on New York or Chicago, and you will get demands for immigration control in even the most liberal parts of the country.But really, there’s never been good reason to think that immigration anxiety only manifests itself telescopically, among people whose main exposure to the trend is alarmist Fox News chyrons.Consider a new paper from Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena, respectively a Tufts University economics Ph.D and a Defense Department analyst, which uses Mexican-government ID data to track the flow of Mexican migrants into counties in the United States, and finds that exposure to immigrants increases conservatism among natives. As the migrant flow goes up, so does the vote for Republicans in House elections: “A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican Party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points.” And the inflow also shifts local policy rightward, reducing public spending and shifting money toward law enforcement as opposed to education.This suggests that a pro-immigration liberalism inevitably faces a balancing act: High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative, so a policy that’s too radically open is a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed.You can see this pattern in U.S. politics writ large. The foreign-born population in the United States climbed through the Obama presidency, to 44 million from 38 million, and as a share of the overall population it was nearing the highs of the late 19th and early 20th century — a fact that almost certainly helped Donald Trump ride anti-immigration sentiment to the Republican nomination and the presidency.Then under Trump there was some stabilization — the foreign-born population was about the same just before Covid-19 hit as it had been in 2016 — which probably help defuse the issue for Democrats, increase American sympathy for migrants, and make Biden’s victory possible. But since 2020 the numbers are rising sharply once again, and the estimated foreign-born share of the American population now exceeds the highs of the last great age of immigration. Which, again unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump.Border control in an age of easy global movement is not a simple policy problem, even for conservative governments. But policy does matter, and while the measures that the White House is reportedly floating as potential concessions to Republicans — raising the standard for asylum claims, fast-tracking deportation procedures — aren’t quite a pledge to finish the border wall (maybe that’s next summer’s pivot), they should have some effect on the flow of migrants north.Which makes them a distinctive sort of policy concession: A “sacrifice” that this White House has every political reason to offer, because Biden’s re-election becomes more likely if Republicans accept.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      ¿Cómo cubrir a Trump? Univision, como otros medios, busca una respuesta

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      Los reclamos contra Univision comenzaron en cuanto se emitió su entrevista con Donald Trump. Un mes después, aún no han cesado.Para los críticos de Univision, la entrevista del 9 de noviembre —con sus preguntas fáciles y pocas preguntas de seguimiento del entrevistador, Enrique Acevedo— ha confirmado sus temores desde que la cadena, tradicionalmente de tendencia de izquierda, se fusionó con la cadena mexicana Televisa a principios del año pasado en un acuerdo de 4.800 millones de dólares. La cadena, argumentan ellos, estaba dando un preocupante giro a la derecha con sus nuevos propietarios, que tienen fama de cultivar relaciones con los principales políticos de México, donde Televisa ha sido un temido artífice de figuras de influencia durante más de 50 años.Las maniobras de última hora de Univision levantaron aún más sospechas. Pocas horas antes de la emisión de la entrevista, la cadena retiró su invitación a la campaña de Biden para emitir anuncios durante el especial de una hora con Trump, citando lo que parecía ser una nueva política de la empresa. Apenas una hora después, Univision canceló abruptamente una entrevista con el director de medios hispanos de la campaña de Biden.Pero la razón de los cambios en la cadena no puede explicarse solo por consideraciones políticas, según las entrevistas con más de una decena de periodistas y ejecutivos actuales y retirados de Univision, entre ellos Acevedo y Daniel Coronell, presidente de noticias de la cadena.Los medios de comunicación hispanos son susceptibles a la misma inquietud que afecta a otras redacciones estadounidenses. Las audiencias de las noticias de televisión en español están en declive, lo que se suma a la presión de una economía desigual. Y el dilema sobre cómo cubrir a Trump —¿debe tener una cobertura exhaustiva, mínima o incluso alguna?— preocupa a Univision tanto como a sus homólogos en inglés.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?  More

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      Kenneth Chesebro Is a Key Witness as ‘Fake Electors’ Face Charges

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      Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to deploy people claiming to be Trump electors in states won by President Biden, is cooperating with inquiries in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.Twenty-four of the so-called fake Trump electors now face criminal charges in three different states, and one of the legal architects of the plan to deploy them, Kenneth Chesebro, has emerged as a witness in all of the cases.Mr. Chesebro, a Harvard-trained lawyer, helped develop the plan to have Republicans in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 present themselves as Trump electors. The scheme was part of an effort to have Congress block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021.Earlier this week, a Nevada grand jury indicted six former Trump electors, including top leaders of the state’s Republican Party, on charges of forging and submitting fraudulent documents.In August, a grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 allies, including three who were fake electors in Georgia. And in July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought charges against all 16 Republicans who acted as Trump electors in her state. (In October, she dropped charges against one of them, James Renner, in exchange for his cooperation.)Interest in Mr. Chesebro intensified after he pleaded guilty in October to a single felony charge of conspiracy in Georgia and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He had originally been charged with seven felonies, including one charge under the state racketeering law.“Everything happened after the plea in Georgia,” said Manny Arora, one of Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers in Georgia. “Everyone wants to talk about the memos and who he communicated with.”The lawyer was referring to memos written by Mr. Chesebro after the 2020 election that outlined what he himself called “a bold, controversial strategy” that was likely to be rejected by the Supreme Court. Since his plea agreement in Georgia, Mr. Arora said, Mr. Chesebro was interviewed in Detroit by Ms. Nessel’s office, and he was also listed as a witness this week in the Nevada indictment.Asked if Mr. Chesebro had agreements in place to avoid prosecution in the various jurisdictions, another one of his lawyers, Robert Langford, said “that would be a prudent criminal defense, that’s typically what you do,” adding that he did not “want to comment on anything happening in any of the states.”Mr. Chesebro is also expected in Arizona next week, where the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has been conducting her own inquiry into the electors plot for several months, people with knowledge of that inquiry said. (Mr. Chesebro’s Michigan and Arizona appearances were reported earlier by CNN and The Washington Post.)Mr. Chesebro worked for Vice President Al Gore during the presidential election recount battle of 2000 but later came to back Mr. Trump. He and another lawyer, John Eastman, are seen as the key legal architects of the plan to use bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump, a development that left some of his old colleagues scratching their heads.“When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him,” Lawrence Tribe, who was Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel and a Chesebro mentor, recently said.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers continue to generally defend his conduct, saying he was simply an attorney offering legal advice during the 2020 election. But Mr. Arora said that the legal team in Georgia decided to take a plea agreement because the document that was signed by the fake electors in Georgia did not include language explaining that what they were signing was a contingency plan, pending litigation.“They didn’t do that in Georgia,” he explained. “Because he was involved in it and that language wasn’t in there, we decided to plead to that count. It wasn’t because the whole thing was fraudulent or that this was a scam.”The three state electors investigations have taken very different approaches.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a broad racketeering case that includes Mr. Trump and top aides like Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff. Ms. Willis reached cooperation agreements with most of the fake electors before charges were brought.The Michigan and Nevada cases center on the electors themselves, rather than those who aided their actions, though Ms. Nessel has said that her inquiry remains open.Underlying claims of widespread election fraud that propelled the alleged fake electors scheme have never been substantiated. New legal filings this week from Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Justice Department who has charged Mr. Trump in his own federal election inquiry, underscore the illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s chronic claims of election fraud, highlighting that as far back as 2012 he was making baseless contentions about President Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.Mr. Trump made similar statements after his 2016 loss in the Iowa caucus, when he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” and after he lost the popular vote in the general election to Hillary Clinton, which he said he won “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” More

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      ‘What the Heck?’ CNN’s Debate Plans Leave New Hampshire Officials Confused.

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      The news network said it would host a Republican primary debate in New Hampshire at Saint Anselm College. That was news to Saint Anselm.With great fanfare this week, CNN announced it would host the network’s first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, gathering the Republican candidates for a marquee event on Jan. 21 at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.There was only one problem: Saint Anselm had no idea what CNN was talking about.“We were surprised to be included on a press release by a network about a debate which we had not planned or booked,” Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm, said in a statement on Friday.The chairman of New Hampshire’s Republican Party, Chris Ager, went a little further.“The CNN thing came out and everybody’s like, ‘What the heck?’” Mr. Ager said in an interview. “I’m still scratching my head. And I still haven’t been contacted by CNN at all.”There is, however, a competing debate scheduled to take place three days earlier, hosted by CNN’s rivals at ABC News. The ABC debate, on Jan. 18, is set to be held at Saint Anselm, and it has the approval of both the college and state Republican officials. “We’ve been working for months planning with ABC,” Mr. Ager said. “We’ve already done a run-through of the facility. We’ve agreed on a lot of the details.”The CNN announcement, Mr. Ager said, caught his team off guard. “For a big, professional organization like that, putting out a location on this date and the location doesn’t know — something’s not quite right,” he said.A CNN spokeswoman said on Friday: “We can’t speak to any miscommunication within Saint Anselm, but we are moving forward with our plans to host a debate in New Hampshire on Jan. 21.”ABC is the traditional host of presidential debates in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary. Its local station, WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., which is a co-host of the Jan. 18 debate, is New Hampshire’s only affiliate of the Big Three broadcast networks.Mr. Ager said he also had concerns about CNN holding a debate just two days before the Jan. 23 primary, which he said would leave candidates little time to respond to any major moments onstage.“In New Hampshire, we like to give everybody a fair shot as much as possible,” he said.The apparent debate snafu came as the Republican National Committee announced that candidates were free to appear at any debate, eliminating a previous requirement that the candidates could participate only in debates formally approved by the party. The rule change, announced Friday, will potentially offer more national exposure to the remaining candidates, as they try to make inroads against the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump has so far refused to appear at any of the four televised Republican primary debates. He has not signaled if he will appear at the ABC event in New Hampshire on Jan. 18.CNN also said this week that it would host a televised debate in Des Moines on Jan. 10 at Drake University, ahead of the Iowa caucuses.Drake University issued a news release promoting that event, so it appears the institution was aware of the network’s plans.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Finding George Santos’s Replacement Is Proving Difficult for Republicans

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      Party leaders have vowed not to repeat the vetting mistakes they made with the expelled congressman. But getting to yes is proving messy.If New York Republicans had hoped to quickly and cleanly turn the page on the embarrassing saga of George Santos, the week since his expulsion from Congress has not exactly gone as planned.While party leaders hunkered down in the Long Island suburbs to game out the critical special election to replace him, it emerged that one of their top candidates for the nomination, Mazi Melesa Pilip, was not technically a Republican at all, but a registered Democrat.Another Republican who had entered the race earlier this year was convicted of taking part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.Word leaked that party officials were interviewing a more serious contender: a former state assemblyman known to have potentially damaging ties to Mr. Santos through a bizarre business proposition that one person involved said resembled the classic email scheme with a Nigerian prince.And records were unearthed in news reports showing that another front-runner, Mike Sapraicone, had not only been sued for suppressing evidence in a murder case as a New York City police officer but later made political contributions totaling $40,000 to an unexpected recipient: the race’s Democratic nominee, Tom Suozzi.The torrent of revelations washed away the message of order and unity that top Republicans sought to project in the wake of Mr. Santos’s hurricane. And suspicions that many of the unsavory disclosures about the candidates had been seeded in the press by rival Republican camps left some fretting that the party was playing straight into Democrats’ hands.“It definitely looks messy,” said Chapin Fay, a Republican political consultant advising some of the candidates. “Just let the Republicans kill themselves even before a candidate is chosen.”In many ways, the Republicans’ predicament is the result of their determination to avoid a repeat of Mr. Santos. The federally indicted serial fabulist slipped past Republican and Democratic vetters in 2020 and 2022, winning the seat connecting Queens and Nassau County last fall before his entire life story began to unravel as a series of fictions and outright frauds.Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican chairman leading the selection process, views Mr. Santos as a stain on his personal record. He said he would likely only select a candidate already well known to the party and has also retained outside help from research firms to identify major vulnerabilities before making the nomination.“There’s a personal thing to some people that, Hey, a mistake was made, this guy has blemished our party, this is our chance to correct it,” Mr. Cairo said in a recent interview, expressing confidence that the party would unite behind the best candidate.But that takes time, and as Mr. Cairo’s deliberations stretch into another week, candidates and their allies appear to have taken matters into their own hands, as they hunt for damaging information to boost their cause or hurt a rival’s. Property records have been checked. Old podcasts dug up. Voting records scrutinized.Even Mr. Santos took a break from recording lucrative videos on Cameo to stir the pot, urging his followers to call Mr. Cairo to insist that he not select “a Democrat in Republican skin” like Ms. Pilip or Mr. Sapraicone.Democrats have had their own awkwardness. On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul made Mr. Suozzi drive to Albany to all but grovel for her support. But there was never really any doubt that the well-known former congressman would be his party’s pick, and Democrats quickly united around his nomination.Mr. Fay, who began his career as an opposition researcher, argued that “mudslinging” now could actually help inoculate the eventual Republican nominee against key weaknesses by the time the Feb. 13 special election heated up.For Ms. Pilip in particular, who has become a top contender on the strength of a remarkable political biography, being outed as a registered Democrat may not be such a bad thing in a district that leans slightly left. In fact, crossover appeal has helped before: Ms. Pilip, a Black former member of the Israel Defense Forces, flipped a local legislative district in 2021 while running on the Republican Party ballot line.In a statement, Mr. Cairo indicated that Ms. Pilip’s registration, which was first reported by Politico, was known to party leaders. He said they had long supported her because she was “philosophically in sync with the Republican team.”In another reflection of her status as a formidable candidate, an unsigned, untraceable email was sent to multiple reporters Friday morning seeking to tarnish her name by including a link to a photograph on social media of Ms. Pilip embracing Mr. Santos.The hits on other Republican hopefuls may be more problematic.Take Mr. Sapraicone. On Monday, Politico reported on a 2021 lawsuit accusing him and other former New York Police Department detectives of having coerced a false confession and suppressed exonerating evidence that kept a man behind bars for two decades. (He denied knowing about the suit.)On Wednesday, an old news report resurfaced about his donations to Mr. Suozzi. And on Thursday, Politico ran another item reporting how on a podcast earlier this year, the Republican described once being afraid of a police officer because he was Black. The Sapraicone campaign said he had shared the story to show how he had grown to embrace “diverse communities” as a police officer.In an interview, Mr. Sapraicone said he was determined not to get rattled.“This is all new water to me,” he said. “I see these sharp elbows coming left and right here. I don’t think any of this stuff is productive no matter where it’s coming from.”Philip Sean Grillo, who declared his candidacy in May, certainly did not help the party’s cause when he was convicted in the Jan. 6 case. A wave of headlines tied him to Mr. Santos and the special election, though his candidacy has never been taken seriously.Party leaders also had to contend with sticky potential issues in private involving more serious candidates, like Michael LiPetri, the former Republican state assemblyman. Mr. LiPetri is well liked within Long Island Republican circles, but his nomination would almost certainly open the party to more Santos-tinged attacks.The New York Times reported last summer that Mr. LiPetri worked with Mr. Santos to approach a campaign donor with an unusual proposition. They asked the donor to create a limited liability company to help a wealthy unnamed Polish citizen buy cryptocurrency while his fortune was evidently frozen in a bank account. The deal never went through.Mr. LiPetri, who sought to play down his role when The Times initially disclosed his involvement, did not respond to requests for comment.Gleeful Democratic operatives said they could package any of the disclosures into general election ammunition if given the opportunity.“We wish the Grand Old Party the best in their flailing endeavors,” said Ellie Dougherty, a spokeswoman for House Democrats’ campaign arm, calling the other side “dysfunctional.”But not every Republican was worrying. One veteran of hard-fought campaigns on Long Island said his fellow Republicans should quit the hand-wringing.“All the sniping between the people who support X and Y and Z?” said the Republican, former Senator Alfonse D’Amato. “Doesn’t mean anything in the finals.” More

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      Conundrum of Covering Trump Lands at Univision’s Doorstep

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      The howls of protest against Univision began as soon as its interview with Donald J. Trump aired. A month later, they still haven’t stopped.To critics of Univision, the Nov. 9 interview — with its gentle questioning and limited follow-ups from the interviewer, Enrique Acevedo — has confirmed their fears since the traditionally left-leaning network merged with the Mexican broadcaster Televisa early last year in a $4.8 billion deal. The network, they said, was taking a troubling turn to the right under its new owners, who have a reputation for cultivating relationships with leading politicians in Mexico, where Televisa has been a feared kingmaker for more than 50 years.Last-minute maneuvering at Univision raised further suspicions. Just hours before the interview aired, the network reversed its invitation to the Biden campaign to run ads during the hourlong special with Mr. Trump, citing what appeared to be a new company policy. Scarcely an hour later, Univision abruptly canceled an interview with the Biden campaign’s director of Hispanic media.But the reason for changes at the network can’t be explained by political considerations alone, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Univision journalists and executives, including Mr. Acevedo and Daniel Coronell, the network’s president of news.Hispanic media is proving susceptible to the same upheaval straining other American newsrooms. Spanish-language television news audiences are in decline, compounding pressure from an uneven economy. And the dilemma over how to report on Mr. Trump — should he get exhaustive, minimal or even no coverage? — is vexing Univision just as it is its English-language counterparts.Univision executives have said they are making a pivot toward the center — a strategy that reflects the split political preferences of the Hispanic electorate and the need to broaden their audience.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?  More

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      Hunter Biden Charged With Evading Taxes on Millions From Foreign Firms

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      The Justice Department charged President Biden’s son after a long-running and wide-ranging investigation with substantial political repercussions.A federal grand jury charged Hunter Biden on Thursday with a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses, the second indictment against him this year and a major new development in a case Republicans have made the cornerstone of a possible impeachment of President Biden.Mr. Biden, the president’s son, faces three counts each of evasion of a tax assessment, failure to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return, according to the 56-page indictment — a withering play-by-play of personal indulgence with potentially enormous political costs for his father.The charges, filed in California, came five months after he appeared to be on the verge of a plea deal that would have avoided jail time and potentially granted him broad immunity from future prosecution stemming from his business dealings. But the agreement collapsed, and in September, he was indicted in Delaware on three charges stemming from his illegal purchase of a handgun in 2018, a period when he used drugs heavily and was prohibited from owning a firearm.The tax charges have always been the more serious element of the inquiry by the special counsel, David C. Weiss, who began investigating the president’s son five years ago as the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware. Mr. Weiss was retained when President Biden took office in 2021.Mr. Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” Mr. Weiss wrote.“Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” he added.If convicted, he could face a maximum of 17 years in prison, Justice Department officials said.Read the Tax Indictment Against Hunter BidenThe president’s son was indicted on nine counts accusing him of evading federal taxes on millions of dollars he has made in his work with foreign companies.Read Document 56 pagesThe charges, while serious, were far less explosive than ones pushed by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who have been angry with the department for failing to find wider criminal wrongdoing by the president’s son and family.But the failure of Mr. Biden’s lawyers to reach a new settlement after talks with Mr. Weiss fell apart has now subjected Mr. Biden to the perils of two criminal proceedings in two jurisdictions, with unpredictable outcomes.Many of the facts laid out in Thursday’s indictment were already widely known, and the litany of Mr. Biden’s actions tracks closely with a narrative he drafted with prosecutors in the plea deal that collapsed over the summer under the withering scrutiny of a federal judge in Delaware.Prosecutors said that he “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company,” Owasco PC, by withdrawing millions from the coffers that he used to subsidize “an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.” They also accused him of taking false business deductions.Mr. Weiss called out Mr. Biden for failing to pay child support and his reliance on associates, including the Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, to pay his way. Prosecutors included a chart that tracked the cash he siphoned from Owasco’s coffers — $1.6 million in A.T.M. withdrawals, $683,212 for “payments — various women,” nearly $400,000 for clothing and accessories, and around $750,000 for restaurants, health and beauty products, groceries, and other retail purchases.Throughout the document, Mr. Weiss presented an unflattering split-screen of Mr. Biden, scooping up millions in income and gifts from friends while stubbornly refusing to pay his taxes. That pattern even persisted into 2020, after he had borrowed money to pay off his tax liabilities from the previous few years, prosecutors wrote.“Defendant spent $17,500 each month, totaling approximately $200,000 from January through Oct. 15, 2020, on a lavish house on a canal in Venice Beach, Calif.,” they wrote, adding that “the I.R.S. stood as the last creditor to be paid.”In a statement, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, said Mr. Weiss had “bowed to Republican pressure” and accused him of reneging on their previous agreement. He said the special counsel had not responded to his request for a meeting a few days ago to discuss the details of the case.“If Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” he said.The indictment includes a more detailed description of Mr. Biden’s activities and tangled business deals than the government had previously made public. Taken in its totality, the filing paints a damning portrait of personal irresponsibility by a man who leveraged his last name to finance his vices while willfully ignoring his tax liabilities.The Hunter Biden case sits at the crowded intersection of America’s colliding political and legal systems. There is now a very real prospect that President Biden’s son will be defending himself in two federal criminal trials during a presidential election year — as former President Donald J. Trump, his father’s likely opponent, confronts the possibility of two federal criminal trials in his classified documents and election interference cases.The additional charges come on the cusp of a vote by the Republican-led House to formalize its impeachment inquiry into President Biden, which is largely based on unsubstantiated allegations that he benefited from his son’s lucrative consulting work for companies in Ukraine and China.Republican leaders in the House released draft text of a procedural impeachment resolution against President Biden on Thursday, just hours before word of the new charges started to percolate through official Washington. It is not clear what effect the indictment will have on their inquiry.The indictment contains no reference to President Biden. But prosecutors pointed out that Hunter Biden’s compensation from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, dropped from $1 million a year in 2016, when his father was still in office, to $500,000 in March 2017, two months after he left office.The decision to indict the president’s troubled son was an extraordinary step for Mr. Weiss, who was named a special counsel in August by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.The Justice Department has been investigating Mr. Biden since at least 2018. Despite examining an array of matters — including Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, ties to oligarchs and business deals in China — the investigation ultimately narrowed to questions about his taxes, like his failure to file his 2017 and 2018 returns on time, and the gun purchase.The special counsel, David C. Weiss, has been investigating an array of issues surrounding Hunter Biden.Will Oliver/EPA, via ShutterstockThe investigation appeared to have come to a conclusion in June when Mr. Weiss and Mr. Biden’s lawyers announced that Mr. Biden would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges.As part of the deal, prosecutors charged Mr. Biden with lying about whether he was using drugs but, under a so-called pretrial diversion agreement, agreed not to prosecute Mr. Biden on that. In return, Mr. Biden agreed to admit that he had used drugs at the time of the purchase and the deal remained contingent on him remaining drug free for the next two years.But the deal abruptly imploded.At a hearing in July, Judge Maryellen Noreika of the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., sharply questioned elements of the deal, telling the two sides repeatedly that she had no intention of being “a rubber stamp.”One objection centered on a provision that would have offered Mr. Biden broad insulation against further prosecution on matters under scrutiny during the federal inquiry. Mr. Weiss’s prosecutors and Mr. Biden’s lawyer at the time, Christopher J. Clark, disagreed on whether that shielded him from being prosecuted in connection with his foreign business dealings.The other objection had to do with the diversion program on the gun charge, under which the judge would play a role in determining whether Mr. Biden was meeting the terms of the deal.Judge Noreika said she was not trying to sink the agreement, but to strengthen it by ironing out ambiguities and inconsistencies. But by the end, the sides had splintered, prosecutors filed paperwork indicating they would proceed with a prosecution and the embattled Mr. Weiss requested to be named special counsel, which requires him to file a report at the conclusion of the investigation.Since taking control of the House in January, top Republicans have used their new investigative power to push the narrative that the president has been complicit in an effort engineered by Hunter Biden to enrich his family by profiting from their positions of power, especially through business and investment transactions abroad.The investigation has become a central focus of House Republicans, and of Mr. Trump, who has seized upon it as a counter to his own legal woes. Earlier this year, two former I.R.S. agents who worked on the investigation testified before a House committee that they had been discouraged from fully investigating interactions of Hunter Biden and his father, and that Mr. Weiss had complained that he did not have the authority to expand the investigation to other jurisdictions.Mr. Weiss denied those claims.On Thursday, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House oversight committee, credited the “two brave I.R.S. whistle-blowers” for forcing Mr. Weiss to abandon plea negotiations and file charges.“The Department of Justice got caught in its attempt to give Hunter Biden an unprecedented sweetheart plea deal,” Mr. Comer said in a statement, adding that the men should be applauded “for their courage to expose the truth.”Luke Broadwater More

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      Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

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      I just finished reading Tim Alberta’s masterly new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s a powerful and emotionally resonant account of the transformation in evangelical politics that has brought us to the current moment: A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.One of the troubling aspects of the Trump era for me, as a churchgoing evangelical, has been watching the evolution of his support among white evangelicals. During the 2016 primaries, I took some solace in the fact that Trump’s support seemed to decline the more a voter went to church. According to the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study, he received majority support from white evangelicals who seldom or never attended church, but he received barely over a third of the votes of white evangelicals who attended weekly.As we headed into the general election, a self-justifying narrative emerged. Countless churchgoing evangelicals told friends and neighbors that Trump had been their last choice among Republicans but that they had to vote for him against Hillary Clinton as the only pro-life option remaining.Soon enough, however, the churchgoing dynamic flipped. I noticed the change among people I knew before I saw it in the data. After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.Then the data started to confirm my observations. In 2018, Paul Djupe, a Denison University professor, and Ryan Burge, a statistician and associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, reported that Republican approval for Trump was positively correlated with church attendance: The more often people went to church, the more likely they were to strongly approve of Trump. By 2020, white evangelicals who attended church monthly or more were more likely to support Trump than evangelical voters who attended rarely or not at all.I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”Alberta captures this rage well in his book. He tells a gut-wrenching anecdote about receiving a nasty note in 2019 at the funeral of his father, a pastor. After Alberta spoke at the service, he was handed the note from a member of the congregation condemning him as part of an “evil plot” to “undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States” and demanding that he seek absolution by investigating the “deep state.” This would be a strange message to direct at a journalist under any circumstance. But to do so at his father’s funeral is grotesque.Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity. It’s the sense of shared purpose and community that makes any form of fundamentalism truly potent. There is an undeniable allure to the idea that you’re joining a community that has achieved an understanding of life’s mysteries or discovered a path to resolving injustice. As angry as fundamentalists may feel, at the same time, there is true joy among comrades in the foxhole — at least as long as they remain comrades.I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.When you recognize the psychology of fundamentalism, fundamentalist Christian enthusiasm for Trump makes considerably more sense. His fundamentalist supporters are certain that he is fulfilling a divine purpose. They are ferocious in their response to opponents, especially those Christians they believe to be weak or squishes. And they experience great joy in their motivated, activist solidarity.But the keys to fundamentalist success are also the source of its ultimate failure. Certainty, ferocity and solidarity can combine to create powerful social and political movements. They can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity.We’ve seen this phenomenon in both secular and religious spaces across the political spectrum. A small number of extremely confident and aggressive people can turn an organization upside down. Political activists who possess fundamentalist intensity can push through resistance — at least until their inherent intolerance creates sufficient backlash to trigger real opposition.That’s how fundamentalism fails. Certainty, which gives so much purpose, ultimately struggles in the face of complex realities. Ferocity, which allows fundamentalists to bully and intimidate opponents, also limits the ability to win converts. And solidarity, which creates community, can become stifling, as it encourages conformity and punishes those who raise good-faith questions.Why do so many fundamentalists love Trump? Because in his certainty, ferocity and demands of loyalty, he’s a far more culturally familiar figure than a person of restraint and rectitude such as the departing senator Mitt Romney, who has the piety of a true believer but does not possess the ferocity of the fundamentalist. Thus Romney was culturally out of step with the millions of Christians who wanted, in the words of Jeffress, “the meanest, toughest son of a gun” they could find.That’s why Trumpism, too, is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s engineered to destroy, not to build. The very characteristics that give it life also plant the seeds of its destruction. And so as we watch the continued marriage between Trumpism and fundamentalism dominate the right, the proper question isn’t whether fundamentalism will permanently remake American culture in its own image. Rather, it’s how much damage it will do before it collapses under the weight of its own rage and sin. More