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      Chris Christie Meets With Zelensky in Surprise Trip to Ukraine

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      Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Friday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he praised for demonstrating “the resolve it takes to survive a war and ultimately win it.”Mr. Christie is the second 2024 G.O.P. hopeful to visit Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, signaling his support for Ukraine in a war that has divided the Republican candidates and Republican voters. Former Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Ukraine in June.Escorted by a Ukrainian security detail, Mr. Christie visited sites near Kyiv that were devastated during Russia’s drive toward the Ukrainian capital in the first months of the invasion, including Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where Russian soldiers massacred more than 400 people last April.“There are hundreds of millions of people in our country who support you,” Mr. Christie told local officials in Moshchun, a village northwest of Kyiv, during a visit to a memorial overlooking a trench used by Ukrainian soldiers during a battle in March of last year.The United States has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in military and security assistance since Russia’s invasion more than a year ago, with President Biden often framing the extraordinary level of support as part of an existential fight for democracy against authoritarian aggression as well as being vital to national security interests.A majority of Americans continue to approve of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the conflict, but that support has softened over time, owing mostly to increasing Republican opposition. The percentage of Republicans saying the United States is providing “too much” support to Ukraine has grown to 44 percent from 9 percent since the Russian invasion in February 2022, according to polling by the Pew Research Center.That shift has been led by former President Donald Trump, whose first impeachment resulted from his 2019 phone call to Mr. Zelensky pressuring him to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals after freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Mr. Trump, who maintained that he did not pressure Mr. Zelensky, has said defending Ukraine is not a vital national interest for the United States.In a CNN town hall in May, he refused to say whether he would continue President Biden’s policy of supplying weapons and ammunition to Ukraine if he returned to the White House, or whether he supported Mr. Zelensky or Russian President Vladimir Putin in the conflict.“I want everybody to stop dying,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Christie said that in his meeting with Mr. Zelensky, which was closed to reporters, the Ukrainian president “spoke about his desire for there to be bipartisan support for Ukraine.” He said the subject of Mr. Trump did not come up. “There was no conversation from him about the race that I’m in,” Mr. Christie said. He said Mr. Zelensky told him, “Whoever the next president is, I need to have that person feel a partnership with Ukraine.”Ukraine policy is an area in which Mr. Christie, a 2016 Trump rival-turned Trump adviser-turned Trump critic, has sought to draw a sharp contrast between himself and the former president, calling Mr. Trump a “puppet of Putin” and mocking his recent claim that he could negotiate “in one day” a truce between Mr. Zelensky and the Russian leader.“Move over Churchill, Trump is here to save the day,” Mr. Christie tweeted last month.“I think he really likes strongmen,” Mr. Christie said late Thursday of Mr. Trump in an interview aboard a train to Kyiv. “I think those are his role models in terms of the way he would like to control power if left to his own devices.”Mr. Christie also criticized the Biden administration for not doing more to support the Ukrainian war effort, in particular its delays in supplying Mr. Zelensky’s government with F-16 fighter jets, which Mr. Biden had resisted doing for a year before approving the move in May. “I would have been sending them months ago,” Mr. Christie said. He also favors NATO membership for Ukraine.A New York Times/Siena poll this week showed Mr. Christie trailing far behind Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming favorite in the race, with the support of 54 percent of likely Republican primary voters.“I wish you political luck,” Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, told Mr. Christie during his visit to the city.“We all hope for that, right?” Mr. Christie replied, clapping him on the back. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Insists He Is Not Antisemitic During House Hearing

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      At a hearing convened by House Republicans, the Democratic presidential candidate defended himself against charges of racism and antisemitism.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Capitol Hill on Thursday and pointedly declared that he is neither an antisemite nor a racist, while giving a fiery defense of free speech and accusing the Biden administration and his political opponents of trying to silence him.Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who turned to anti-vaccine activism and has trafficked in conspiracy theories, was referring to the storm that erupted after The New York Post published a video in which he told a private audience that Covid-19 “attacks certain races disproportionately” and may have been “ethnically targeted” to do more harm to white and Black people than to Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.Mr. Kennedy appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — a panel created by Republicans to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of federal law enforcement and national security agencies. He said he had “never been anti-vax” and had taken all recommended vaccines except the coronavirus vaccine.Thursday’s hearing was devoted to allegations by Mr. Kennedy and Republicans that the Biden administration is trying to censor people with differing views. It was rooted in a lawsuit, filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and known as Missouri v. Biden, that accused the administration of colluding with social media companies to suppress free speech on Covid-19, elections and other matters.The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, opened the hearing by citing an email that emerged in that case, in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet in which Mr. Kennedy suggested — without evidence — that the baseball legend Hank Aaron may have died from the coronavirus vaccine.The tweet, which was not taken down, said Mr. Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly” following vaccination. There was no such wave of suspicious deaths. As Mr. Kennedy often does, he phrased his language carefully; he did not explicitly link the vaccine to the deaths, but rather said the deaths occurred “closely following administration of #COVID #vaccines.”Representative Jim Jordan opened the hearing by citing an email in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet by Mr. Kennedy.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThursday’s session had all the makings of a Washington spectacle. A long line had formed outside the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building by the time Mr. Kennedy arrived. Kennedy supporters stood outside the building holding a Kennedy 2024 banner.Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?Democrats accused Republicans of giving Mr. Kennedy a forum for bigotry and pseudoscience. “Free speech is not an absolute,” said Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the subcommittee. “The Supreme Court has stated that. And others’ free speech that is allowed — hateful, abusive rhetoric — does not need to be promoted in the halls of the People’s House.”Even by Mr. Kennedy’s standards for stoking controversy, his recent comments about Covid-19 were shocking. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who is Jewish, tried unsuccessfully on Thursday to force the panel into executive session; she insisted that Mr. Kennedy had violated House rules by making “despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.” She also helped organize Democrats to sign a letter calling on Republican leaders to disinvite him from the hearing.Mr. Kennedy waved the letter about during his opening remarks. “I know many of the people who wrote this letter,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s a single person who signed this letter who believes I’m antisemitic.”Mr. Kennedy has been steeped in Democratic politics for his entire life, but his campaign has drawn supporters from the fringes of both political parties. He has made common cause with Republicans and Trump supporters who accuse the federal government of conspiring with social media companies to suppress conservative content.Thursday’s hearing was billed as a session to “examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case and Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.” One of the lawyers involved in that case, D. John Sauer, also testified, as did Emma-Jo Morris, a journalist at Breitbart News, and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.Mr. Kennedy showed a flash of the old Kennedy style, invoking his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat and legislative giant who frequently worked across the aisle. He called for kindness and respect, recalling how his uncle brought Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican with whom he partnered on major legislation, to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.And Mr. Kennedy was joined by a former member of Congress: Dennis J. Kucinich, who served in the House as a Democrat from Ohio and is Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager.“We need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times,” Mr. Kennedy declared at one point, “and that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”Amid the vitriol, members of both parties did come together around a lament from Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia.“I’ve been in this Congress 15 years, and I never thought we’d descend to this level of Orwellian dystopia,” Mr. Connolly said.Representatives Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Harriet M. Hageman, Republican of Wyoming, nodded their heads and smiled. “I agree with that,” they said in unison. More

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      Ron DeSantis Calls for ‘Deadly Force’ Against Suspected Drug Traffickers

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      Campaigning in a Texas border city, the Florida governor laid out a series of hard-right immigration proposals, including some that would face legal roadblocks or test the limits of presidential authority.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made a campaign stop in the border city of Eagle Pass, Texas.Brent McdonaldGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday proposed a host of hard-right immigration policies, floating the idea of using deadly force against suspected drug traffickers and others breaking through border barriers while “demonstrating hostile intent.”“Of course you use deadly force,” Mr. DeSantis said after a campaign event on a sweltering morning in Eagle Pass, a small Texas border city. “If you drop a couple of these cartel operatives trying to do that, you’re not going to have to worry about that anymore,” he added. He said they would end up “stone-cold dead.”He did not clarify how Border Patrol officers or other law enforcement authorities might determine which people crossing the border were smuggling drugs. He said only that “if someone is breaking through the border wall” while “demonstrating hostile intent or hostile action, you have to be able to meet that with the appropriate use of force.”Mr. DeSantis’s proposal served as an escalation of Republican messaging on the border and was part of a host of plans he unveiled in an effort to match the hard-line immigration stance of former President Donald J. Trump, who privately suggested shooting migrants in the legs during his administration.Mr. DeSantis said that if elected, he would seek to tear down some of the pillars of American immigration law, such as the automatic granting of citizenship to those born in the United States.And he said his administration would “fully deputize” state and local law enforcement officers in states like Texas to arrest and deport migrants back to Mexico — a power now reserved for the federal government — and to detain migrant children indefinitely, despite a court order imposing strict limits on the practice. He also promised to end “phony asylum claims.”“Of course you use deadly force,” Mr. DeSantis said of drug traffickers after the campaign event, held on a sweltering morning in Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThose policies are sure to appeal to conservative voters in the Republican presidential primary contest, but they would be likely to run into legal roadblocks and could test the limits of presidential authority. The Constitution has been held to guarantee birthright citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states cannot enact their own immigration policy.And while Mr. DeSantis argued that the country needed harsh new immigration rules because the current ones were encouraging dangerous border crossings and the mistreatment of migrant children, some of his proposals could also endanger migrants, including the use of “deadly force” against people cutting through the border wall.“You do it one time and they will never do it again,” he said.His campaign said in a news release that he would follow “appropriate rules of engagement” and that the rules would apply to “those trying to smuggle drugs into the United States.” (The overwhelming majority of drugs are smuggled in commercial vehicles coming across official ports of entry, not carried by migrants, according to U.S. border authorities.)Another plan Mr. DeSantis put forward, which would require certain asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, was previously employed by Mr. Trump, drawing criticism for forcing migrants to live in squalid tent camps where some were reportedly subjected to sexual assault, kidnapping and torture.Mr. DeSantis has made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign, but he has presented few specifics until now. Other policy proposals he released on Monday included:Deploying the military to “assist” Border Patrol agents until a wall is finished.Cracking down on Mexican drug cartel activity, including by blocking precursor chemicals used to manufacture drugs “from entering Mexican ports,” if the Mexican government does not act to stop the cartels.Detaining all migrants who cross the border without authorization until their immigration court hearing date. (Such a policy would most likely require the creation of a vast new prison system.)“These are ideas that have rightly been categorized for a really long time as radical and extremist,” said Aron Thorn, a senior lawyer in the Beyond Borders Program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.The policy rollout on Monday suggested that Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 percentage points in national polls, was trying to outflank the former president on immigration. Mr. DeSantis — whose “stop the invasion” language is a hallmark of America’s far right — has argued that he is the candidate most likely to enact conservative immigration policies. He has accused Mr. Trump of “running to the left,” saying that “this is a different guy today than when he was running in 2015 and 2016.”But even among voters who came to see Mr. DeSantis on Monday at a cinder-block-and-steel Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Eagle Pass, some said that they remained more inclined to vote for Mr. Trump.“He’s Trump 2.0, but this isn’t his time,” said John Sassano, 60, a retired teacher in Eagle Pass who described himself as a former Democrat. “I’d love to see him as V.P.”Sandy Bradley, 66, a retired government worker, traveled with two friends from Del Rio, a nearby border town, to hear Mr. DeSantis, buying festive cowboy hats at a Walmart on the way. “I think he will catch up,” she said, adding that Mr. DeSantis seemed to share her Christian values.She added that she wanted a candidate who would address illegal immigration and “stop all the influx.”Mr. DeSantis went directly from the event to a news conference at a ranch along the Rio Grande outside town where the state of Texas had recently constructed fencing with concertina wire in an area where migrants often cross.“This is an ongoing problem,” said Ruben Garibay, who owns the ranch. Mr. Garibay, wearing a black cowboy hat and speaking in the shade of a tree as the temperature neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit, said he had agreed to host Mr. DeSantis but had yet to make up his mind about which candidate to support. “It’s a little early in the game,” he said.Mr. Trump first deployed a so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which the Biden administration later reversed. He also proposed ending birthright citizenship during his first campaign, although he failed to do so while in office, and has recently renewed those calls as a candidate. And, of course, he ran in 2016 on building a wall at the southern border, an issue that helped propel him to the White House.On his social media site on Monday, Mr. Trump said that Mr. DeSantis’s “sole purpose in making the trip was to reiterate the fact that he would do all of the things done by me in creating the strongest Border, by far, in U.S. history.”Hundreds of migrants waiting inside a makeshift migrant camp to be loaded onto buses and taken for processing at a Customs and Border Protection substation in El Paso, Texas, in May. Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesAs governor, Mr. DeSantis last month sent hundreds of Florida law enforcement officers and Florida National Guard members to Texas, saying President Biden had failed to secure the border, a repeat of a similar effort in 2021 ahead of Mr. DeSantis’s re-election campaign.This year, Mr. DeSantis also signed a bill cracking down on undocumented immigrants that was seen as one of the harshest such measures in the country. And he announced a national coalition of more than 90 local sheriffs who said they would band together to fight gang activity and illegal drugs that they argue are the result of the Biden administration’s border policies. (Only a few of the sheriffs are from border states.)Some immigration analysts questioned the viability of Mr. DeSantis’s proposals, suggesting they were driven by the political imperatives of a presidential campaign.“The bulk of the proposal is the usual laundry list of Republican talking points that have not been successful, either in Congress or in the court of public opinion,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, citing the idea to end birthright citizenship, among other proposals. “The purpose is probably not a serious policy debate but instead to focus on an issue that is a weakness for Biden and a sensitive one for Trump.”And Jennie Murray, the president of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit group that advocates immigration policies that address economic and national security needs, pointed to the difficulties in actually carrying out Mr. DeSantis’s plans.“Deporting huge numbers of immigrants would be costly and extremely detrimental, especially during these times of historic labor shortages,” she said.Miriam Jordan More