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    Trump Hires #BillionDollarLawyer

    As top allies of Donald J. Trump are called to testify in Atlanta, he has hired a high-profile local attorney best known for representing rappers.ATLANTA — Amid a deepening swirl of federal and state investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has hired a prominent Atlanta lawyer to represent him in a criminal inquiry into election interference in Georgia.The lawyer, Drew Findling, has represented an array of rap stars including Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos, and is known by the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer. But he is also well regarded for a range of criminal defense work that he has done in Georgia, and his hiring underscores the seriousness of the investigation — as well as the potential legal jeopardy for Mr. Trump.The investigation is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta. At least 17 people have been designated as targets who could face criminal charges. Mr. Trump is not among them, but a special grand jury is continuing to consider evidence and testimony, with several top Trump advisers still to appear. Ms. Willis has said that she is weighing a number of potential criminal charges, including racketeering and conspiracy.In a hearing on Tuesday, a state judge told lawyers for Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that their client needed to travel to Atlanta to testify next week. On Wednesday, lawyers for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina faced a skeptical reception from a federal judge to their efforts to quash a subpoena from Ms. Willis’s office seeking the senator’s testimony. The lawyers for Mr. Graham who appeared in court included Donald McGahn, former White House counsel for Mr. Trump.Mr. Findling brings decades of trial experience ranging from high-profile murder cases to local political corruption scandals. But in the past, he has been openly — indeed, scathingly — critical of the former president.Understand Georgia’s Trump InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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    Trump Hires ‘Billion Dollar Lawyer’

    As top allies of Donald J. Trump are called to testify in Atlanta, he hires a high-profile local attorney best known for representing rappers.ATLANTA — Amid a deepening swirl of federal and state investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has hired a high-powered Atlanta lawyer to represent him in an inquiry into election interference in Georgia.The lawyer, Drew Findling, has represented an array of rap stars including Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos, and is known by the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer.But he has not been a fan of Mr. Trump; in one 2018 post on Twitter, after Mr. Trump criticized LeBron James, Mr. Findling referred to Mr. Trump as “the racist architect of fraudulent Trump University.” In 2017, after Mr. Trump fired the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, Mr. Findling said on Twitter that it was “a sign of FEAR that he would aggressively investigate the stench hovering over this POTUS.”He has also called Mr. Trump’s history of harsh comments about the five Black and Latino men who as teenagers were wrongly convicted of the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park “racist, cruel, sick, unforgivable, and un-American!”Mr. Findling, who has been an advocate of criminal justice reform and a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In addition to becoming a sort of celebrity among celebrities for his vigorous defense of famous hip-hop artists — with multiple appearances in Instagram photos alongside A-list rappers, often sporting dark sunglasses — Mr. Findling has done criminal defense work for a number of high-profile political clients in the Atlanta area.Among them was Mitzi Bickers, who once worked in the administration of former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and who was convicted in March on nine federal corruption counts as part of a multimillion-dollar contracting and kickback scandal.Another client, Victor Hill, is the sheriff of Clayton County, a suburban area south of Atlanta. Mr. Hill, an African American with a tough-on-crime reputation, has been indicted on numerous federal civil rights charges for the alleged mistreatment of detainees at the local jail, and has been suspended from his position pending trial.The investigation into postelection meddling is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta. To date, at least 17 people have been designated as targets who could face criminal charges. Mr. Trump is not among them, but evidence and testimony are still being taken in by a special grand jury, and Ms. Willis has said she is weighing a number of potential criminal charges, including racketeering and conspiracy.In a hearing on Tuesday, a state judge told lawyers for Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that their client needed to travel to Atlanta to testify next week. And in a hearing in federal court here Wednesday, lawyers for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina faced a skeptical reception from a judge on their efforts to quash a subpoena from Ms. Willis’s office seeking the senator’s testimony. More

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    Hunting for Voter Fraud, Conspiracy Theorists Organize ‘Stakeouts’

    One night last month, on the recommendation of a man known online as Captain K, a small group gathered in an Arizona parking lot and waited in folding chairs, hoping to catch the people they believed were trying to destroy American democracy by submitting fake early voting ballots.Captain K — which is what Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who espouses voting fraud conspiracy theories, calls himself — had set the plan in motion. In July, as states like Arizona were preparing for their primary elections, he posted a proposal on the messaging app Telegram: “All-night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA.” The post received more than 70,000 views.Similar calls were galvanizing people in at least nine other states, signaling the latest outgrowth from rampant election fraud conspiracy theories coursing through the Republican Party.In the nearly two years since former President Donald J. Trump catapulted false claims of widespread voter fraud from the political fringes to the conservative mainstream, a constellation of his supporters have drifted from one theory to another in a frantic but unsuccessful search for evidence.Many are now focused on ballot drop boxes — where people can deposit their votes into secure and locked containers — under the unfounded belief that mysterious operatives, or so-called ballot mules, are stuffing them with fake ballots or otherwise tampering with them. And they are recruiting observers to monitor countless drop boxes across the country, tapping the millions of Americans who have been swayed by bogus election claims.In most cases, organizing efforts are nascent, with supporters posting unconfirmed plans to watch local drop boxes. But some small-scale “stakeouts” have been advertised using Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab and Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Mr. Trump. Several websites dedicated to the cause went online this year, including at least one meant to coordinate volunteers.Some high-profile politicians have embraced the idea. Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, asked followers on Twitter whether they would “be willing to take a shift watching a drop box to catch potential Ballot Mules.”Supporters have compared the events to harmless neighborhood watches or tailgate parties fueled by pizza and beer. But some online commenters discussed bringing AR-15s and other firearms, and have voiced their desire to make citizens’ arrests and log license plates. That has set off concerns among election officials and law enforcement that what supporters describe as legal patriotic oversight could easily slip into illegal voter intimidation, privacy violations, electioneering or confrontations.“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, the executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”Screenshot from Truth SocialMr. Keshel, whose post as Captain K inspired the Arizona gathering, said in an interview that monitoring drop boxes could catch illegal “ballot harvesting,” or voters depositing ballots for other people. The practice is legal in some states, like California, but is mostly illegal in battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence that widespread illegal ballot harvesting occurred in the 2020 presidential election.“In order to quality-control a process that is ripe for cheating, I suppose there’s no way other than monitoring,” Mr. Keshel said. “In fact, they have monitoring at polling stations when you go up, so I don’t see the difference.”The legality of monitoring the boxes is hazy, Mr. Weil said. Laws governing supervision of polling places — such as whether watchers may document voters entering or exiting — differ across states and have mostly not been adapted to ballot boxes.In 2020, election officials embraced ballot boxes as a legal solution to socially distanced voting during the coronavirus pandemic. All but 10 states allowed them.But many conservatives have argued that the boxes enable election fraud. The talk has been egged on by “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which uses leaps of logic and dubious evidence to claim that an army of partisan “mules” traveled between ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent votes. The documentary proved popular on the Republican campaign trail and among right-wing commentators, who were eager for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.“Ballot mules” have quickly become a central character in false stories about the 2020 election. Between November 2020 and the first reference to “2000 Mules” on Twitter in January 2022, the term “ballot mules” came up only 329 times, according to data from Zignal Labs. Since then, the term has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter, 63 percent of the time alongside discussion of the documentary. Salem Media Group, the executive producer of the documentary, claimed in May that the film had earned more than $10 million.Rise of the ‘Ballot Mule’Mentions of “ballot mules” surged in May after the debunked documentary “2000 Mules” claimed that an army of operatives stuffed ballot boxes during the 2020 election.

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    Digital mentions of “ballot mules” per week
    Note: Includes mentions on digital platforms including social media, broadcast, traditional media, and other online sites. Source: Zignal LabsBy The New York TimesThe push for civilian oversight of ballot boxes has gained traction at the same time as legislative efforts to boost surveillance of drop-off sites. A state law passed this year in Utah requires 24-hour video surveillance to be installed at all unattended ballot boxes, an often challenging undertaking that has cost taxpayers in one county hundreds of thousands of dollars. County commissioners in Douglas County in Nebraska, which includes Omaha, voted in June to allocate $130,000 for drop box cameras to supplement existing cameras that the county does not own.In June, Arizona lawmakers approved a budget that included $500,000 for a pilot program for ballot box monitoring. The 16 boxes included will have round-the-clock photo and video surveillance, rejecting ballots if the cameras are nonfunctional, and will accept only a single ballot at a time, producing receipts for each ballot submitted.Many supporters of the stakeouts have argued that drop boxes should be banned entirely. Some have posted video tours of drop box sites, claiming that cameras are pointed in the wrong direction or that the locations cannot be properly secured.Melody Jennings, a minister and counselor who founded the right-wing group Clean Elections USA, claimed credit for the Arizona gathering on Truth Social and said it was the group’s “first run.” She said in a podcast interview that any surveillance teams she organized would try to record all voters who used drop boxes. The primaries, she said, were a “dry run” for the midterms in November. Ms. Jennings did not respond to requests for comment.After the Arizona gathering, organizers wrote to high-profile Truth Social users, including Mr. Trump, claiming without evidence that “mules came to the site, saw the party and left without dropping ballots.” Comments on other social media posts about the event noted that the group could have frightened away voters wary of engaging, drawn people planning to report the group’s activities or simply witnessed lost passers-by.On Aug. 2, Ms. Lake and several other election deniers prevailed in their primary races in Arizona, where a GoFundMe campaign sought donations for “a statewide volunteer citizen presence on location 24 hours a day at each public voting drop box location.” Kelly Townsend, a Republican state senator, said during a legislative hearing in May that people would train “hidden trail cameras” on ballot boxes and follow suspected fraudsters to their cars and record their license plate numbers.“I have been so pleased to hear about all you vigilantes out there that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Ms. Townsend said.Surveillance plans are also forming in other states. Audit the Vote Hawaii posted that citizens there were “pulling together watch teams” to monitor the drop boxes. A similar group in Pennsylvania, Audit the Vote PA, posted on social media that they should do the same.In Michigan, a shaky video filmed from inside a car and posted on Truth Social showed what appeared to be a man collecting ballots from a drop box. It ended with a close-up shot of a truck’s license plate.In Washington, a right-wing group launched Drop Box Watch, a scheduling service helping people organize stakeouts, encouraging them to take photos or videos of any “anomalies.” The group’s website said all its volunteer slots for the state’s primary early this month were filled.The sheriff’s office in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, is investigating after election signs popped up at several drop box sites in the state warning voters they were “under surveillance.”One Gab user with more than 2,000 followers offered stakeout tips on the social network and on Rumble: “Get their face clearly on camera, we don’t want no fuzzy Bigfoot film,” he said in a video, with his own face covered by a helmet, goggles and cloth. “We need to put that in the Gab group, so there’s a constant log of what’s going on.”Calls for civilian surveillance have expanded beyond ballot boxes. One post on a conservative blog cheers on people who monitor “any suspect activities before, during and after elections” at ballot-printing companies, vote tabulation centers and candidates’ offices.Paul Gronke, the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College, suggested that activists hoping for improved election security should push for more data transparency measures and tracking programs that allow voters to monitor the status of their absentee ballot. He said he had never heard of a legitimate example of dropbox watchdogs successfully catching fraud.The prospect of confrontations involving self-appointed overseers largely untrained in state-specific election procedures, charged up by a steady diet of misinformation and militarized rhetoric, is “just a recipe for disaster” and “puts at risk the voters’ ability to cast their ballots,” Mr. Gronke said.“There are ways to secure the system, but having vigilantes standing around drop boxes is not the way to do it,” he said. “Drop boxes are not a concern — it’s just a misdirection of energy.”Cecilia Kang More

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    John Eastman Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud

    On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help in getting paid the $270,000 he had billed the Trump campaign.John Eastman, the conservative lawyer whose plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 election failed in spectacular fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, sent an email two weeks later arguing that pro-Trump forces should sue to keep searching for the supposed election fraud he acknowledged they had failed to find.On Jan. 20, 2021, hours after President Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Eastman emailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, proposing that they challenge the outcome of the runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats that had been won on Jan. 5 by Democrats.“A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” Mr. Eastman wrote in the previously undisclosed email, which also went to others, including a top Trump campaign adviser. “If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.”The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time, is the latest evidence that even some of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters knew they had not proven their baseless claims of widespread voting fraud — but wanted to continue their efforts to delegitimize the outcome even after Mr. Biden had taken office.Mr. Eastman’s message also underscored that he had not taken on the work of keeping Mr. Trump in office just out of conviction: He asked for Mr. Giuliani’s help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day for his legal services.The charges included $10,000 a day for eight days of work in January 2021, including the two days before Jan. 6 when Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump, during meetings in the Oval Office, sought unsuccessfully to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. (Mr. Eastman appears never to have been paid.)A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment.Disclosure of the email comes at a time when the Justice Department is intensifying its criminal investigation of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Patrick F. Philbin, who was a deputy White House counsel under Mr. Trump, has received a grand jury subpoena in the case, a person familiar with the situation said.Mr. Philbin is the latest high-ranking former White House official known to be called to testify before the grand jury. Others include his former boss, Pat A. Cipollone, who as White House counsel argued, along with other White House lawyers, against some of the more extreme steps proposed by Mr. Trump and his advisers as they sought to hold onto power.Earlier subpoenas to a number of people had sought information about outside lawyers, including Mr. Eastman and Mr. Giuliani, who were advising Mr. Trump and promoting his efforts to overturn the results.In June, federal agents armed with a search warrant seized Mr. Eastman’s phone, stopping him as he was leaving a restaurant in New Mexico.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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    On Election Day, G.O.P. Raise Doubts about Arizona Elections

    Republican candidates and conservative media organizations seized on reports of voting issues in Arizona on Tuesday to re-up their case that the state’s elections are broken and in need of reform, even as state and county officials said the complaints were exaggerated.“We’ve got irregularities all over the state,” Mark Finchem, who won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in Arizona, said before his victory was announced.Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona’s secretary of state, at a rally last month with Donald Trump in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesGateway Pundit, a conservative website that breathlessly covered the election rumors on Tuesday, wrote that Arizona’s largest counties were apparently “rife with serious irregularities that have been occurring all day long, sparking even more concern for election integrity.”There is no evidence of any widespread fraud in Tuesday’s election. But the concerns raised were bolstered by a number of problems in Pinal County, the state’s third-most populated county, located between Phoenix and Tucson. More than 63,000 ballots were mailed with the wrong local races on them, requiring new ballots to be issued. On election night, at least 20 of 95 precincts in Pinal County were running low on ballots or ran out entirely.Sophia Solis, the deputy communications director of Arizona’s secretary of state, said voters could still cast a ballot at those precincts using voting machines that are typically used by disabled voters.“We did not hear of any widespread problems,” Ms. Solis said, adding that “one of the main issues that we did see yesterday was the spread of mis- and disinformation.”Kent Volkmer, the attorney for Pinal County, said there were more in-person voters in the county than had been seen before, including far more independent voters. He added that many voters surrendered their mail-in ballot so they could vote in person, possibly motivated by the ballot-printing issues.“We don’t think that there’s nearly as many people who were negatively impacted as what’s being related to the community,” Mr. Volkmer said.One common talking point on Tuesday resurrected a false theory from 2020, known as Sharpiegate, which claimed that markers offered by poll workers were bleeding through and invalidating ballots. Election officials have said that machines can read ballots marked with pens, markers and other instruments, and any issues can be reviewed manually.“This is Sharpiegate 2.0,” Ben Berquam, a conservative commentator, said on a livestream. Mr. Finchem shared the conspiracy theory on his Twitter account. The campaign for Ron Watkins, a congressional candidate for Arizona’s Second District who came in last place in his race on Tuesday, also suggested that Mr. Watkins’s votes were being artificially slashed.Sorting mail-in ballots at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix, Ariz., on Tuesday.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMany election fraud theories focused on the governor’s primary race between Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed former news anchor, and Karrin Taylor Robson, who was endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence. Ms. Lake was badly trailing her competitor for most of the night, whipping up election fraud theories among her supporters. She eventually took the lead.Ms. Lake’s allies suggested during a livestream that the results were suspicious because many other Trump-aligned candidates were winning their races. In Arizona, mail-in ballots received before Election Day are counted first, and polling suggested those would slightly favor Ms. Taylor Robson. In-person votes were counted on election night, and Ms. Lake’s supporters preferred voting in person.As counting continued late into the night, Ms. Lake claimed victory while she was still trailing Ms. Taylor Robson.“When the legal votes are counted, we’re going to win,” Ms. Lake said at her election night party. The Associated Press has not yet called the race. More

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    Arizona Attorney General Debunks Trump Supporters’ Election Fraud Claims

    Accusations that hundreds of ballots were cast in Arizona in 2020 in the name of dead voters are unfounded, the state’s Republican attorney general said on Monday in a sharply worded letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, who has advanced false claims of voter fraud.The attorney general, Mark Brnovich, wrote in his letter to Senator Karen Fann that his office’s Election Integrity Unit had spent “hundreds of hours” investigating 282 allegations submitted by Ms. Fann, as well as more than 6,000 allegations from four other reports. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased, and others included dates of death after the election.”The claims in Ms. Fann’s complaint stemmed from a heavily criticized audit of the 2020 election that the company Cyber Ninjas conducted last year in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa. That audit found no evidence for former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen from him; in fact, it counted slightly fewer votes for Mr. Trump and more for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the official tally. A subsequent report from election experts accused Cyber Ninjas of making up its numbers altogether.Nonetheless, Ms. Fann sent the accusations of dead voters to Mr. Brnovich’s office in a September 2021 complaint.“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead, and many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His office concluded, he wrote, that “only one of the 282 individuals on the list was deceased at the time of the election.”Mr. Biden won Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes.In a statement on Monday evening, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tireless work” in “answering some tough questions from voters and lawmakers who had grave concerns over how the 2020 general election was conducted in Arizona.”“They asked us to do the hard work of fact finding, and we are delivering the facts,” she said, calling the investigation “critical to restoring the diminished confidence our constituents expressed following the last election” and praising “the increased voter integrity measures put in place after the audit revealed weaknesses in our election processes,” though the audit did not reveal weaknesses in Arizona’s election processes.Spencer Scharff, an election lawyer in Arizona and a former voter protection director for the Arizona Democratic Party, said that while there was value to a public statement from a Republican official that the allegations were unfounded, it would not undo the damage done by the original lies, and by the willingness of so many elected Republicans to entertain and promote them.“The thing that I think is most unfortunate is that it comes long after these allegations were made, and they weren’t clearly refuted by individuals who had the ability to refute them immediately,” Mr. Scharff said, noting that, by contrast, officials in Maricopa County debunked many of Cyber Ninjas’ claims months ago.Mr. Brnovich sent the letter one day before Arizonans go to the polls for another election — one in which he himself is running. He is a candidate in the Republican Senate primary, the winner of which will challenge Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in November. The front-runner in public polling is Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and has promoted the former president’s false claims of election fraud.Mr. Brnovich has sought to walk a fine line on Mr. Trump’s lies — refusing to call for overturning the 2020 election results, but rarely explicitly rejecting the claims. He publicly defended Arizona’s vote count shortly after the election, and Mr. Trump blasted him in June and endorsed Mr. Masters instead. But he has also suggested that 2020 revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system, and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.” More

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    Newsmax Renews Deal to Be Carried by Verizon’s Fios

    Newsmax, a news network that amplified the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against Donald J. Trump, reached a deal to continue to be distributed by Verizon’s Fios network just days after the telecom company said it was dropping another right-wing broadcaster.A spokeswoman for Verizon confirmed the renewal, which Newsmax described as a “multiyear” deal in a statement posted to its website on Wednesday.The deal comes shortly after Verizon said it was no longer going to carry One America News after this week. Both networks are known for their loyalty to Mr. Trump, the former president, and for serving as platforms for his debunked claims of rampant voter fraud in the 2020 election.Along with the much larger Fox News, they face defamation lawsuits over some of those claims. Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company that became a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, is seeking $1.6 billion from each network.Last year, facing a lawsuit from a Dominion employee, Newsmax issued a formal apology for spreading allegations that the worker had rigged voting machines against Mr. Trump. In a statement at the time, Newsmax acknowledged that it had “no evidence” for the claims.But the network has also argued with the merits of Dominion’s case, saying it was reporting on allegations made by Trump supporters.“Dominion is claiming because we had Trump and his supporters on air that we defamed them,” Bill Daddi, a representative for the company, wrote in an email on Thursday.Verizon said its decision to drop OAN was the result of their inability to agree on the terms of a new distribution deal. Verizon’s Fios service will stop carrying OAN starting on Saturday. More

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    He Ordered Celebrities’ Absentee Ballots. Now He’s Under Arrest.

    A criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court claimed that Louis Koch obtained the absentee ballots of public figures, calling the practice a “hobby.”Two years ago, a Manhattan resident, Louis Koch, asked the New York City Board of Elections to mail him absentee ballots for the primary and general elections for 2020, the authorities said.He didn’t stop there.Since then, Mr. Koch has obtained well over 100 absentee ballots in the names of other people, including politicians, journalists and lawyers, without their permission, according to a criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court.But despite ordering all of those ballots, Mr. Koch never cast them in an election. He told F.B.I. agents who interviewed him last month that he collected the ballots “as a hobby,” the complaint said.The hobby may become an expensive one: Mr. Koch, 39, was arrested on July 8 and charged with using false information in voting and identity theft. He was released on a $250,000 bond, pending further legal proceedings. The arrest comes as allegations of election fraud continue to polarize American politics, with false claims spread by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters. Studies show genuine election fraud is extremely rare in the United States.Even if Mr. Koch’s alleged aim was not to sway an election as opposed to feeding a somewhat unconventional quest for celebrity ballots, it suggests a flaw in the way absentee ballots are made available in New York.According to the complaint, Mr. Koch applied for the absentee ballots by entering his victims’ names, dates of birth, counties of residence and ZIP codes into the elections board’s website. He then directed that the ballots be mailed to his apartment in Manhattan and a family house in Tenafly, N.J., the complaint said.Under the board’s current system, the complaint said, a potential voter can have an absentee ballot sent to an address other than the requester’s as long as they provide the voter’s personal identifying information.In late May, the complaint said, absentee ballots for several current and former politicians from New York were requested from the board, and sent to Mr. Koch’s Manhattan and Tenafly addresses.The elections board, in reviewing its records, identified at least 95 additional absentee ballot requests in the last week of May, which had been submitted in the names of other people, including “recognizable politicians, media personalities and lawyers,” the complaint said.Vincent M. Ignizio, the deputy executive director of the elections board, said Mr. Koch’s activities were detected in early June. The campaign of a sitting state official who was running for re-election told the board that the candidate’s name had been found on a list of people who had requested absentee ballots.But the candidate had not requested one, Mr. Ignizio said. Authorities have not publicly identified the people in whose names prosecutors said Mr. Koch obtained the ballots.The board began investigating, he said, and turned over its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.“We take ballot security very seriously,” Mr. Ignizio said. “We’re proud we uncovered a potential vulnerability and we’ll continue to tighten up the process in order to ensure that security is paramount.”On June 30, the F.B.I. conducted searches of Mr. Koch’s addresses, the complaint said. In his Manhattan apartment, agents found more than 100 absentee ballots in the names of other people, which had been issued by New York, California and Washington, D.C., for various elections, including the June 28 New York primary.At the Tenafly residence, agents searched Mr. Koch’s childhood bedroom, and seized additional such ballots, the complaint said.The number of absentee ballots cast in New York City has varied in recent years, reaching nearly 684,000 in the November 2020 general election, in which President Biden defeated Mr. Trump; and dipping to 83,000 in the general election a year later, when Eric Adams was elected mayor.Mr. Ignizio said that the board’s investigation found that none of the absentee ballots Mr. Koch was said to have obtained in the names of other people were cast in any election. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment. Mr. Koch is registered as a Democrat, according to a public record of the elections board.Mr. Koch’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on his client’s behalf. Mr. Koch had no comment, a family member said.According to the complaint, Mr. Koch, after waiving his Miranda rights, told the F.B.I. agents that he had been ordering ballots in other people’s names since at least 2020, using personal identifying information he obtained from public sources.At one point last year, he said, a relative living in the Tenafly house who was aware he had been obtaining the ballots advised him to stop, according to the complaint.“Koch understood it was ‘foolish’ to continue ordering ballots, but he continued doing it anyway,” the complaint said.When U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Figueredo agreed to release Mr. Koch on bail, she imposed several conditions, including one tailored to the allegations in his case.He could not order absentee ballots for himself or anyone else — for any national, state or local election.Alain Delaquérière More