Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Trump Allies Are Still Feeding the False 2020 Election Narrative

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      Fifteen months after they tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election, the same group of lawyers and associates is continuing efforts to “decertify” the vote, feeding a false narrative.A group of President Donald J. Trump’s allies and associates spent months trying to overturn the 2020 election based on his lie that he was the true winner.Now, some of the same confidants who tried and failed to invalidate the results based on a set of bogus legal theories are pushing an even wilder sequel: that by “decertifying” the 2020 vote in key states, the outcome can still be reversed.In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.But just as Mr. Eastman’s original plan to use Congress’s final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the election was seen as far-fetched in the run-up to the deadly Capitol riot, the continued efforts are fueling a false narrative that has resonated with Mr. Trump’s supporters and stoked their grievances. They are keeping alive the same combustible stew of conspiracy theory and misinformation that threatens to undermine faith in democracy by nurturing the lie that the election was corrupt.The efforts have fed a cottage industry of podcasts and television appearances centered around not only false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, but the notion that the results can still be altered after the fact — and Mr. Trump returned to power, an idea that he continues to push privately as he looks toward a probable re-election run in 2024.Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the impact of the decertification efforts. They warn of unintended consequences, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters — convinced that he could still be declared the winner of the 2020 election — stormed the Capitol. Legal experts worry that the focus on decertifying the last election could pave the way for more aggressive — and earlier — legislative intervention the next time around.“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”Most of Mr. Trump’s aides would like him to stop talking about 2020 — or, if he must, to focus on changes to voting laws across the country rather than his own fate. But like he did in 2020, when many officials declined to help him upend the election results, Mr. Trump has found a group of outside allies willing to take up an outlandish argument they know he wants to see made.The efforts have been led or loudly championed by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser; Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist; and Boris Epshteyn, an aide and associate of Mr. Trump’s.Another key player has been Mr. Eastman, the right-wing lawyer who persuaded Mr. Trump shortly after the election that Vice President Mike Pence could reject certified electoral votes for Mr. Biden when he presided over the congressional count and declare Mr. Trump the victor instead.Mr. Eastman wrote a memo and Mr. Epshteyn sent an email late last year to the main legislator pushing a decertification bill in Wisconsin, laying out a legal theory to justify the action. Mr. Eastman met last month with Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, and activists working across the country, a meeting that was reported earlier by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Jefferson Davis, an activist from Wisconsin, said he had asked Mr. Eastman to join the meeting after hearing about his work on behalf of Mr. Trump following the election.“If it was good enough for the president of the United States,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, “then his expertise was good enough to meet with Speaker Vos in Wisconsin on election fraud and what do we do to fix it.”Mr. Vos has maintained that the Legislature has no pathway to decertification, in line with the guidance of its own lawyers.John Eastman, left, has made clear that he has no intention of dropping his fight to show that the election was stolen.Jim Bourg/Reuters“There is no mechanism in state or federal law for the Legislature to reverse certified votes cast by the Electoral College and counted by Congress,” the lawyers wrote, adding that impeachment was the only way to remove a sitting president other than in the case of incapacity.But Mr. Eastman has made clear that he has no intention of dropping his fight to prove that the election was stolen. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has said his legal efforts to invalidate the results most likely violated the law by trying to defraud the American people. A federal judge recently agreed, calling Mr. Eastman’s actions “a coup in search of a legal theory.”Legal experts say his continued efforts could increase his criminal exposure; but if Mr. Eastman were ever to be charged with fraud, he could also point to his recent work as evidence that he truly believed the election was stolen.“There are a lot of things still percolating,” Mr. Eastman said in an interview with The New York Times last fall. He claimed that states had illegally given people the ability to cast votes in ways that should have been forbidden, corrupting the results. And he pointed to a widely debunked video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta, which he claimed showed that tabulation ballots were run through counting machines multiple times during the election.Charles Burnham, Mr. Eastman’s lawyer, said in a statement that he “was recently invited to lend his expertise to legislators and citizens in Wisconsin confronting significant evidence of election fraud and illegality. He did so in his role as a constitutional scholar and not on behalf of any client.”The fringe legal theory that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Epshteyn are promoting — which has been widely dismissed — holds that state lawmakers have the power to choose how electors are selected, and they can change them long after the Electoral College has certified votes if they find fraud and illegality sufficiently altered the outcome. The theory has surfaced in multiple states, including several that are political battlegrounds.As in Wisconsin, state legislators in Arizona drafted resolutions calling for the decertification of the 2020 election. In Georgia, a lawsuit sought to decertify the victories of the Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. And Robert Regan, a Republican favored to win a seat in the Michigan House, has said he wants to decertify the 2020 election either through a ballot petition or the courts.Mr. Bannon, Mr. Lindell and Mr. Epshteyn have repeatedly promoted decertification at the state level on Mr. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” since last summer, pushing it as a steady drumbeat and at times claiming that it could lead to Mr. Trump being put back into office. They have described the so-called audit movement that began in Arizona and spread to other states as part of a larger effort to decertify electoral votes.“We are on a full, full freight train to decertify,” Mr. Epshteyn said on the program in January. “That’s what we’re going to get. Everyone knows. Everyone knows this election was stolen.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Trump as a Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding Cash and Doling Out Favors

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      Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, the former president is dominating the G.O.P., preparing for another race and helping loyalists oust officials who thwarted his attempted subversion of the 2020 election.PALM BEACH, Fla. — On any given night, Donald J. Trump will stroll onto the patio at Mar-a-Lago and say a few words from a translucent lectern, welcoming whatever favored candidate is paying him for the privilege of fund-raising there.“This is a special place,” Mr. Trump said on one such evening in February at his private club. “I used to say ‘ground zero’ but after the World Trade Center we don’t use that term anymore. This is the place where everybody wants to be.”For 15 months, a parade of supplicants — senators, governors, congressional leaders and Republican strivers of all stripes — have made the trek to pledge their loyalty and pitch their candidacies. Some have hired Mr. Trump’s advisers, hoping to gain an edge in seeking his endorsement. Some have bought ads that ran only on Fox News in South Florida. Some bear gifts; others dish dirt. Almost everyone parrots his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.Working from a large wooden desk reminiscent of the one he used in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has transformed Mar-a-Lago’s old bridal suite into a shadow G.O.P. headquarters, amassing more than $120 million — a war chest more than double that of the Republican National Committee itself. Federal records show that his PAC raised more online than the party on every day but two in the last six months of 2021, one of which was Christmas Eve.And while other past presidents have ceded the political stage, Mr. Trump has done the opposite, aggressively pursuing an agenda of vengeance against Republicans who have wronged him, endorsing more than 140 candidates nationwide and turning the 2022 primaries into a stress test of his continued sway.Inspiring fear, hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving not merely as a power broker but as something closer to the head of a 19th-century political machine.“Party leaders have never played the role that Trump is playing,” said Roger Stone, an on-and-off adviser to Mr. Trump since the 1980s who has been spotted at Mar-a-Lago of late. “Because he can — and he’s not bound by the conventional rules of politics.”This portrait of Mr. Trump as a modern-day party boss is drawn from more than 50 interviews with Trump advisers past and present, political rivals, Republicans who have sought his support and G.O.P. officials and strategists who are grappling with his influence.Mr. Trump plainly relishes the power. But as he hints repeatedly about a third White House bid, the looming question is whether he can remain a kingmaker if he doesn’t actually seek the crown.For now, he has delved into the minutiae of cleansing the Republican Party of his critics, even if, in typical fashion, the planning and execution can be haphazard. He has focused his efforts almost obsessively on installing unflinching loyalists in key battleground state posts — governors, senators, House members, secretaries of state and state attorneys general — often in place of the very officials who thwarted his attempts to subvert the 2020 results.He has pressured candidates to switch the races they enter, counseled Republicans on whom to hire, involved himself in party registration rules in Wyoming and the statehouse speaker’s race in Michigan. He conditioned his endorsement of Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska on Mr. Dunleavy not endorsing the state’s incumbent senator, Lisa Murkowski; Mr. Dunleavy quickly complied. Last week, he issued an anti-endorsement, urging Pennsylvanians not to vote for Bill McSwain in the primary for governor, on the grounds that Mr. McSwain had insufficiently embraced his allegations of 2020 election fraud.Mr. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article.Those close to Mr. Trump say he draws gratification from the raw exercise of his power. He will listen to the lobbying of senior Republicans, like Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House G.O.P. leader, and then turn on them with little warning. A day after Mr. McCarthy reprimanded Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina for saying that colleagues in Washington had held orgies and used cocaine, Mr. Trump awarded Mr. Cawthorn a coveted speaking slot at his next rally.For 15 months, a parade of supplicants — senators, governors, congressional leaders and Republican strivers of all stripes — have made the trek to Mar-a-Lago.Saul Martinez for The New York Times‘A developing Tammany situation’An entire political economy now surrounds Mr. Trump, with Trump properties reaping huge fees: Federal candidates and committees alone have paid nearly $1.3 million to hold events at Mar-a-Lago, records show. A phalanx of Trump whisperers has emerged with candidates paying them in hopes of lining up meetings, ensuring that he sees damaging research on their rivals or strategically slipping him a survey showing a surge in the polls, even as Trump alumni warn that it is always buyer-beware in the Trump influence game.“If someone is out there selling their ability to make endorsements happen, they’re selling a bridge they don’t own,” said Michael Caputo, a former adviser who still speaks to Mr. Trump. “What appears to be a developing Tammany situation is really the coalescence of many consultants who pretend they have an inside track toward the endorsement. No inside track exists.”Yet while Tammany Hall, a New York City political machine that endured for nearly two centuries, owed its longevity to its spreading around of patronage, Mr. Trump can be downright stingy. Though he holds rallies for some candidates, for many his support goes no further than an email and a $5,000 check. Mr. Trump has almost never deployed his huge list of supporters to help other politicians raise money (Representative Elise Stefanik of New York being a rare exception earlier this year). Facing the possibility of high-profile defeats, the Trump team is now planning to spend directly to assist some vulnerable Trump-backed candidates; a cash transfer to a Georgia super PAC was only the first step.Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said focusing only on direct spending does not fully account for the value of the Trump imprimatur for voters and the “free media coverage” it generates. “It was once said an endorsement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, but there’s now a caveat to that — the Trump endorsement,” Mr. Budowich said.Not unlike past political bosses, Mr. Trump has focused heavily on the mechanics of elections — who counts the votes, who certifies them — while ceaselessly sowing distrust in the system through false claims of vote rigging.As Tammany’s corrupt Boss Tweed was portrayed saying, as he leaned on a ballot box in a famous 1870s cartoon: “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”Or, as Mr. Trump told Breitbart News this month, “There’s an expression that the vote counters are more important than the candidate, and you could use that expression here.”Wielding power over the party and selling the fiction of a stolen election also serve to distract from Mr. Trump’s unhappy exit from the White House as a loser.Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, drew a parallel between this period and an earlier crisis in Mr. Trump’s career: his bankruptcy in the early 1990s. “These would have been ruinous events for someone else,” he said. “But for Trump it just marked a turn in his method and his pursuit of power. And he never accepted these were really losses.”Democrats are bracing for losses in 2022. But strategists in both parties say Mr. Trump’s big public profile presents a risk for Republicans, as private surveys and focus groups show he remains a potent turnoff for swing voters.It is a very different story in Republican primaries, where few serious candidates are openly breaking with Mr. Trump. “The takeover of the Republican Party by President Trump has been so complete,” said Boris Epshteyn, another former Trump adviser sometimes seen at Mar-a-Lago, “that even the RINOs are attempting to talk MAGA.”Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina was reprimanded for saying colleagues in Washington had held orgies and used cocaine, but Mr. Trump nevertheless awarded him a coveted speaking slot at his next rally.Veasey Conway for The New York Times“I need to see polling, I need to see funding, I need to see you make a name for yourself,” Mr. Trump instructed Joe Kent, who won Mr. Trump’s backing for his effort to unseat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State.Nathan Howard/Associated Press‘Like crabs in a bucket’Nothing reveals Mr. Trump’s hold on the party quite like the genuflections and contortions of those seeking his political approval.Some candidates pay to attend Mar-a-Lago fund-raisers for others — clamoring for a fleeting moment of Mr. Trump’s attention, or better yet, a photo. “Epic moment,” was how one House contender memorialized her few seconds with Mr. Trump on Instagram.When Mr. Trump invited candidates from Michigan to stand beside him at one event, a man’s voice rang out: “I’m running for governor, too, can I come up there?” It was Ryan Kelley. “You’re running for governor of what?” a confused Mr. Trump asked. “Michigan!” Mr. Kelley replied. Up he came, shaking hands with an opponent, Perry Johnson.Mr. Johnson, for his part, had been a repeated presence at Mar-a-Lago, proudly posting a grainy video of Mr. Trump hailing his “good poll numbers” at another fund-raiser. He had even bought a television ad welcoming Mr. Trump to Michigan before an April 2 rally.Yet Mr. Trump snubbed him at the rally and instead praised a rival candidate, Tudor Dixon, who had held her own Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser in February.In many ways, the endorsement chase is a real-life reprisal of Mr. Trump’s old reality-television role.“What was ‘The Apprentice’ but a sad scramble of people behaving like crabs in a bucket to be lifted out by him?” said Mr. D’Antonio, the biographer. “How are these people anything other than contestants vying for his approval?”In one oft-recounted scene, Mr. Trump pulled several Ohio Senate candidates into a room last year at Mar-a-Lago, where they began verbally attacking one another as he watched. “Things went off the rails,” said one candidate, Bernie Moreno, who blamed his rivals, not Mr. Trump, for the mayhem. Mr. Moreno has since dropped out, not wanting to divide the pro-Trump vote.Nearly all the Ohio contenders have run ads playing up their ties to Mr. Trump and lobbied him personally. Jane Timken calls herself “the real Trump conservative.” Josh Mandel calls himself “pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.” Mike Gibbons calls himself and Mr. Trump two “businessmen with a backbone.”Mr. Trump did not endorse any of them, instead backing the author J.D. Vance. At a debate before the endorsement, Matt Dolan, the only leading Republican contender not aggressively vying for a Trump endorsement, suggested his rivals were putting Ohio voters second. “There are people up on this stage who are literally fighting for one vote,” he said, “and that person doesn’t vote in Ohio.”Mr. Dolan is an exception. As a rule, an audience with Mr. Trump can make or break a candidacy. So candidates strategize heavily.Mr. Trump enjoys flattery and is not above rewarding sycophants. But insiders say bringing compelling visual material matters, too. Big fonts are crucial. With photos and graphics. In color.“He’s not a real big digital guy, so we had printouts,” said Joe Kent, who has since won Mr. Trump’s backing for his effort to unseat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, one of the 10 Republican impeachment votes.“I need to see polling, I need to see funding, I need to see you make a name for yourself,” Mr. Trump instructed him, as Mr. Kent recalled.When he likes what he sees, Mr. Trump will mail words of encouragement, scrawled on news clippings with a Sharpie. “You are doing great!” he wrote in January to Mr. Kent. “You are doing great!” he wrote last October to Harriet Hageman, who is challenging Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.When Representative Billy Long, a candidate for Senate in Missouri, first met with Mr. Trump last year, he brought along a favorable poll printout. But he sensed he’d been beaten to the punch when, he recalled, Mr. Trump “reached over and picked up another poll” that Mr. Long presumed came from a rival, though it could have been part of the packet Mr. Trump’s team prepares for candidate meetings.“Donald J. Trump is going to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it,” Mr. Long said. “There is no secret sauce here.”In March, a group urging Mr. Trump to rescind his endorsement of Matthew DePerno, a candidate for Michigan attorney general, bought an ad that ran in West Palm Beach.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesMr. Trump made clear his desire to take control of Michigan’s vote-counting posts, rallying support for Kristina Karamo, his choice for secretary of state.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesPrecision televisionTelevision is a popular way to lobby Mr. Trump, and some candidates try by running ads far away from their voters. When Mr. Trump was staying at his Bedminster, N.J., golf course last summer, Jim Lamon, a Senate candidate in Arizona, paid for an ad on Fox News in New Jersey.Michele Fiore, a Las Vegas city councilwoman, announced her bid for Nevada governor with a theatrically pro-Trump commercial that ran in West Palm Beach. She later switched to the state treasurer’s race, saying in another ad that the Trump team had counseled her to lower her sights.And in March, a group urging Mr. Trump to rescind his endorsement of Matthew DePerno, a Republican running for attorney general in Michigan, bought an ad attacking Mr. DePerno that ran in West Palm Beach.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Trial Alleging Voter Suppression in 2018 Abrams-Kemp Georgia Race Begins

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      A trial is underway to determine whether Georgia’s handling of the 2018 election for governor was discriminatory, in a case brought by Stacey Abrams’s voting rights group.The 2018 race for governor in Georgia ended in a bitter dispute between Brian Kemp, a Republican who was serving as secretary of state at the time, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic challenger who accused the state of voter suppression.The election, won by Kemp, was plagued by long lines, especially in communities of color where wait times occasionally exceeded two hours. And Kemp’s office put 53,000 voter registrations on hold under the state’s “exact match” rule, which requires that voters’ registration information exactly match what is on file with the state’s Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration. Many of those 53,000 were Black voters, according to an investigation by The Associated Press in 2018.After the election, Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Abrams, sued the state, claiming its election practices were illegal and discriminatory.Now, more than three years after the suit was filed, the trial began on Monday in Atlanta — the first federal voting rights trial in Georgia in over a decade. Abrams is now in the middle of a second campaign for governor, a rematch with Kemp.After Judge Steve C. Jones tossed parts of the original lawsuit last year, Fair Fight opened its case challenging three specific tenets of the Georgia election system. These tenets, the group says, make it harder for people to vote, especially Black voters.“Through the three practices at issue in this case — exact match, affirmative mismanagement of the voter rolls and failure to train on absentee ballot cancellations — these defendants have erected a series of roadblocks — roadblocks that propose unjustifiable burdens on eligible voters in violation of both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act,” Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a lawyer for Fair Fight and the other plaintiffs, said in her opening statement.The office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state and the defendant in the case, has said repeatedly that the state has already beaten back most of the claims in court, and accused Fair Fight of playing politics.“They ran this litigation like a campaign,” Joshua B. Belinfante, a lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. He continued: “What the evidence will show is what the plaintiffs allege is part of a campaign is not what is happening on the ground in Georgia elections.”Echoes from the pastFair Fight and other groups have challenged Georgia’s election laws on both constitutional grounds and under a provision of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2. The trial represents one of the first marquee challenges using this provision after the Supreme Court weakened its protections for voting rights last year.In her opening remarks, Lawrence-Hardy spoke of John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon who died in 2020. And she drew comparisons between the current legal battle and the state’s history of suppressing voters. Georgia was one of the states that were put under special federal oversight by the Voting Rights Act when it was signed in 1965 because of the history of discrimination at the polls in those states.“The methods may be different than in the past, but the state’s creation of barriers to voting in Georgia have the same impact, particularly for people of color and immigrants who meet all eligibility requirements to vote in Georgia’s elections,” Lawrence-Hardy said. She added that when the state first proposed the exact-match identification policy in 2009, Georgia was still under federal oversight and the Justice Department rejected the initial proposal.The trial, which is expected to last roughly a month, will feature dozens of voters who claim that their right to vote was foiled by the state’s rules and regulations, with anecdotes from both the 2018 and the 2020 elections. Election workers will also testify.“You’ll hear how these election workers, who come from all political persuasions and demographic roots, operate under extraordinarily trying circumstances,” Belinfante, the lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. “And you’ll hear how at the end of the day they just want to get it right.”But the trial will not focus on the state’s controversial new voting law that was passed last year and that added numerous new restrictions on voting. The lawsuit was filed before that law was introduced and passed.A window of opportunityThough Raffensperger is on the defense, the trial also presents a political opportunity for the sitting secretary of state, who is seeking re-election. After he rebuffed Donald Trump’s entreaties to “find” enough votes to subvert the election in Georgia, Raffensperger became a key target of Trump, who has endorsed a well-funded challenger in Representative Jody Hice, a Republican who has publicly claimed that Trump won the election in Georgia.Raffensperger has not backed down from saying Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election in Georgia, a stance that has put him at odds with a segment of the Republican base who will be deciding his fate in the May 24 primary.But the trial has allowed Raffensperger the opportunity to attack Abrams and embrace issues that help endear him to the Republican base, such as noncitizen voting. Republicans have focused on noncitizens voting in their hunt for widespread voter fraud (there is no evidence of swaths of noncitizens voting, nor of widespread fraud) and also to justify new policies. Lawyers for Fair Fight contend that part of the “exact match” process could result in citizens being prevented from voting, including newly naturalized citizens.“I want to make sure it is citizen-only voting here in the state of Georgia,” Raffensperger said in a brief news conference before the trial began on Monday. “We are defending this basic protection of the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, has accused Fair Fight of playing politics with the lawsuit. Dustin Chambers/ReutersWhat to read President Biden announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would lift summertime regulations on E15, an ethanol-gasoline blend, the latest sign that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the White House to embrace fossil fuels.U.S.-backed news outlets and Ukrainian activists’ efforts to deliver news to Russians are starting to show signs of working, sowing doubt in the Kremlin’s accounts of the invasion.North Carolina dropped Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, from its voter rolls, as officials investigate whether he fraudulently cast a ballot in the state in 2020.in the moment Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas used the migrant drop-off as a fund-raising opportunity. Joel Martinez/The Monitor, via Associated PressTexas sends a bus to … Fox News The arrival of a busload of migrants sent to Washington by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas made for quite the event.Not so much on the ground, but on cable news, on Twitter and in fund-raising emails.In response to the Biden administration’s plans to end a Trump-era pandemic policy that turned away most unauthorized migrants at the border, Abbott pledged to put immigrants on charter buses and send them to Washington. This morning, the first bus arrived near Union Station, with Fox News camera crews ready to record the moment.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      Two Trump White House Lawyers Meet With Jan. 6 Investigators

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      Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy, met separately with the panel after the former president authorized them to do so.Two of former President Donald J. Trump’s top White House lawyers met on Wednesday with the House committee investigating the Capitol attack, after Mr. Trump authorized them to engage with the panel, according to a person familiar with the matter.Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy, met separately with the panel, two people familiar with the sessions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the meetings.It was not immediately clear how much information Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin had provided to the committee or what they said, but they were present for key moments in the buildup to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including pivotal conversations and meetings in which Mr. Trump discussed using the powers of his office to try to overturn the election.Their cooperation, which was reported earlier by Politico, added to the more than two dozen White House officials who agreed to take the committee’s questions.The two were not under oath and their interviews were not transcribed, but the men could return for formal interviews or deposition later, one of the people said, describing it as a typical process as investigators determine who they want to question.The interviews came as the committee learned from the National Archives that lawmakers would receive additional documents from the Trump White House after President Biden declined to assert executive privilege over them.In a letter on Wednesday, David S. Ferriero, the national archivist, told Mr. Trump that he would turn over a new set of records to the committee within 15 days “unless prohibited by court order.” Mr. Trump wrote to the archives in February to say he asserted executive privilege over more than 1,000 documents in its possession.In recent days, the committee has questioned Mr. Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both former White House advisers. In transcribed interviews, they provided testimony that lawmakers described as “helpful.”Mr. Trump told The Washington Post that he had offered his daughter and son-in-law “privilege,” but they declined it. Courts have rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege, and the Biden White House has declined to invoke it for material and witnesses sought by the Jan. 6 inquiry, including for Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner’s testimony.The panel has also heard from John McEntee, who served as Mr. Trump’s chief of presidential personnel; Anthony M. Ornato, the former White House chief of operations; and Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer. Another top adviser, Stephen Miller, was slated to testify on Thursday, according to another person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.Mr. Miller was subpoenaed late last year and had lengthy negotiations to appear.Mr. Cipollone, who defended Mr. Trump during his first impeachment trial, pushed back against some of the most extreme plans the president considered for overturning the election. He participated in meetings with Trump allies who were pressing for the military to seize voting machines and in which Attorney General William P. Barr offered his resignation after making clear that the Justice Department had found no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.Patrick F. Philbin, who was Mr. Cipollone’s deputy, also met with the House committee investigating the Capitol attack.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Cipollone also tried to persuade Mr. Trump to stop pursuing baseless claims of fraud. He balked at pursuing a plan proposed by Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer, who had wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election might have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified results.“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murder-suicide pact,” Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump, according to testimony the panel has received. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”Mr. Philbin, who was a senior Justice Department lawyer under President George W. Bush, was also present for the meeting in which Mr. Barr offered his resignation.The Supreme Court has ordered the National Archives to turn over to the committee Mr. Philbin’s White House records, which include a memo about a potential lawsuit against several states that Mr. Biden won in the 2020 election. They also contain a series of emails from a state official regarding election-related issues and talking points on alleged election irregularities in a county in Michigan.And they include a plan pushed by Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, and the lawyer Sidney Powell to declare that there was foreign influence in the election, with the goal of allowing Mr. Trump to use the powers of the Defense Department to seize voting machines and have the votes recounted. More

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      Jan. 6 Suspect Blames Trump for Spurring Him to Capitol Riot

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      Dustin Thompson, an unemployed exterminator from Ohio, was the first defendant tried in the Capitol attack to offer a Trump-made-me-do-it defense before a jury.WASHINGTON — Dustin Thompson’s trip down what he called “the rabbit hole” of election misinformation began eight months before a single vote was cast in 2020. It ended inside the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he was part of the mob of Trump supporters that stormed inside during Congress’s counting of electoral votes in the worst attack on the building since the War of 1812.An exterminator from Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Thompson, 38, was laid off in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Alone at home with his new wife, he began spending long days on the internet, steeping himself in conspiracy theories about the upcoming vote.As the election approached, he said, he fully believed that if Donald J. Trump ended up losing, it would only be because the voting had been rigged, as the president had been warning publicly for months. Even after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Mr. Thompson could not accept that it was true.All of this, he told a jury at his criminal trial on Wednesday, led him to Washington on Jan. 6 for a Stop the Steal rally, where he and a friend listened to Mr. Trump give an incendiary speech near the White House.In an hour on the witness stand, Mr. Thompson blamed Mr. Trump for what eventually occurred, saying that he had been answering the president’s call to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” when he joined the throng swarming into the building and made off with a bottle of bourbon and a coat rack.“If the president’s giving you almost an order to do something,” he said, “I felt obligated to do that.”Mr. Thompson’s story is not unusual. At several points during the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, many people charged with crimes have sought to blame Mr. Trump in various ways for their actions, mostly at pretrial bail hearings or at sentencings after pleading guilty.But Mr. Thompson is the first defendant to attempt the argument at trial in front of a jury. In making his case, he offered a window into the toxic and relentless flood of conspiracy theories and lies, stoked by Mr. Trump, that helped give rise to the riot.The move comes with considerable risk, and its success or failure could determine not only Mr. Thompson’s fate, but that of other defendants accused of taking part in the violence of Jan. 6.Before the trial began, Mr. Thompson admitted to prosecutors that he had gone into the Capitol and stolen government property, agreeing in advance to nearly every element of the six charges he faces. His defense will rest almost entirely on the question of his state of mind during the riot.Mr. Thompson has claimed that he did not knowingly or corruptly break the law, but rather, as his lawyer said on Tuesday, was “so influenced — so used and abused” by Mr. Trump that he could not be held accountable for his behavior.The Trump-made-me-do-it defense has not fared well with judges. While it could work better on a jury, Mr. Thompson seemed to stumble on Wednesday during cross-examination, undercutting key elements of his argument.William Dreher, a prosecutor, got him to admit several times that Mr. Trump had not been at his side, offering him step-by-step instructions, when he walked into the Senate parliamentarian’s office and walked out with the whiskey and the coat rack. Mr. Thompson acknowledged that he was a married adult with a college degree who could make his own decisions.Mr. Thompson also conceded under questioning by Mr. Dreher that he had known it was unlawful to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 while lawmakers were finalizing the results of the election. That appeared to contradict a central pillar of his own defense.While Mr. Thompson’s claims that he was under Mr. Trump’s spell do not carry any legal weight as evidence, they echo similar allegations the government has made in other cases connected to Jan. 6. In those cases, prosecutors have gone to great lengths to describe how rioters at the Capitol were motivated by Mr. Trump’s statements, including his speech at the Ellipse and a tweet he posted on Dec. 19, 2020 calling on his followers to attend a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Mark Meadows Is Taken Off North Carolina Voter Roll Amid Fraud Inquiry

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      The state is investigating whether Mr. Meadows cast a legal vote in 2020, after reports questioned if he lived at the address listed on his voter registration.Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff in the Trump White House, has been removed from the voter rolls in North Carolina as officials investigate whether he fraudulently registered to vote and cast a ballot in the state during the 2020 presidential election, according to a local election official.Mr. Meadows, who helped amplify former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was “administratively removed” from the poll book by the Macon County Board of Elections on Monday “after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina Board of Elections, said in a statement.Mr. Meadows represented North Carolina in Congress until March 2020, when he went to work in the White House. Months later, Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote using the address of a modest, three-bedroom mobile home with a rusted roof in Scaly Mountain, N.C.On the voter registration application that Mr. Meadows submitted on Sept. 19, 2020, he stated that he intended to move into the home the following day.And in November, he voted absentee by mail from that address, according to state records.Last month, a report in The New Yorker cast doubt on whether Mr. Meadows had ever lived — or even spent the night — at the home.Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to telephone and text messages on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, declined to comment.In 2021, Mr. Meadows registered to vote in Virginia, where he and his wife own a condominium in the Washington suburbs, ahead of that state’s contentious election for governor. Property records show that Mr. and Ms. Meadows bought the unit in July 2017.The inquiry into Mr. Meadows’s voting activity in North Carolina remains open, according to Anjanette Grube, public information officer for the state’s Bureau of Investigation.Though documented cases of voter fraud are rare, Mr. Meadows and other Republicans have seized on the concept in order to claim, without evidence, that the results of last presidential election are illegitimate.During an August 2020 interview on CNN, Mr. Meadows warned of fraud in voting by mail. “Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with just people just moving around, let alone the people that die off?” he told the host, Jake Tapper.When Mr. Tapper said there was no evidence of widespread vote fraud, Mr. Meadows replied, “There’s no evidence that there’s not, either. That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”Reid J. Epstein More

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      Mark Zuckerberg Ends Election Grants

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      Mark Zuckerberg, who donated nearly half a billion dollars to election offices across the nation in 2020 and drew criticism from conservatives suspicious of his influence on the presidential election, won’t be making additional grants this year, a spokesman for the Facebook founder confirmed on Tuesday.The spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said the donations by Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were never intended to be a stream of funding for the administration of elections.The couple gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments, which were grappling with a shortfall of government funding as they adopted new procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.The infusion of private donations helped to pay for new ballot-counting equipment, efforts to expand mail-in voting, personal protective equipment and the training of poll workers.It also sowed seeds of mistrust among supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. Critics referred to the grants as “Zuckerbucks” and some frequently claimed, without evidence, that the money was used to help secure Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Several states controlled by Republicans banned private donations to election offices in response.“As Mark and Priscilla made clear previously, their election infrastructure donation to help ensure that Americans could vote during the height of the pandemic was a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis,” Mr. LaBolt said in an email on Tuesday. “They have no plans to repeat that donation.”The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group with liberal ties that became a vessel for $350 million of the contributions from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan in 2020, announced on Monday that it was shifting to a different model for supporting the work of local election administrators.During an appearance on Monday at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Tiana Epps-Johnson, the center’s executive director, said that the organization would begin a five-year, $80 million program to help meet the needs of election departments across the country.Called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, the program will draw funding through the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collective housed at the TED organization, the center said. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan are not involved in the new initiative, Mr. LaBolt said.At the event on Monday, Ms. Epps-Johnson said the grants distributed by the center in 2020 helped fill a substantial void of resources for those overseeing elections in the United States. One town in New England, she said without specifying, was able to replace voting equipment from the early 1900s that was held together with duct tape.“The United States election infrastructure is crumbling,” Ms. Epps-Johnson said.In addition to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan gave $69.6 million to the Center for Election Innovation & Research in 2020. At the time, that nonprofit group said that the top election officials in 23 states had applied for grants.Republicans have been unrelenting in their criticism of the social media mogul and his donations.While campaigning for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday in Perrysburg, Ohio, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has undergone a conversion to Trumpism, continued to accuse Mr. Zuckerberg of tipping the election in 2020 to Mr. Biden.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist, hasn’t exactly sworn off help from big tech. He counts Peter Thiel, a departing board member of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, and a major donor to Mr. Trump, as a top fund-raiser. Mr. Thiel has also supported Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona.In an opinion piece for The New York Post last October, Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters called for Facebook’s influence to be curbed, writing that Mr. Zuckerberg had spent half a billion dollars to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”In Colorado, Tina Peters, the top vote-getter for secretary of state at the state Republican Party’s assembly last weekend, has been a fierce critic of Mr. Zuckerberg, even after her arrest this year on charges stemming from an election security breach. Ms. Peters, the Mesa County clerk, is facing several felonies amid accusations that she allowed an unauthorized person to copy voting machine hard drive information. More

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      In Hungary, Viktor Orban Remakes an Election to His Liking

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      BUDAPEST — During the dark winter of the 2020 coronavirus wave, the Hungarian government set up a website so anxious residents could sign up for the news on the pandemic. For months, the system sent out updates about the virus, testing and where to get vaccinated.But last month, long after the vaccination drive had peaked, the system blasted out a very different type of alert: an email claiming, falsely, that opponents of Prime Minister Viktor Orban were agitating to drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine.“This is cheating,” said Klara Dobrev, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament and one of those accused in the email. “Using public money for obviously party propaganda? This is obviously election fraud.”In more than a decade in power, Mr. Orban has not hesitated to use the levers of government power to erode democratic norms and cement one-party rule. He has rewritten the Constitution, remade the courts and used state-run and privately owned television stations — even school textbooks — to advance his agenda or push misinformation about his rivals.He has always justified his brand of what he calls “illiberal democracy” by pointing out that, like other European leaders, he has won free and fair elections. Now, though, as he stands on Sunday for re-election against an unexpectedly organized opposition, Mr. Orban is using the power of his office to shape the contours of the election more to his liking.Supporters of Mr. Orban’s government at a so-called peace march in Budapest, as Hungarians marked this month the anniversary of the country’s civic revolution and war of independence of 1848-1849. Ferenc Isza/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe has unleashed a fresh round of election law changes that benefit his party. He put an inflammatory but ultimately symbolic L.G.B.T. referendum up for a vote, a move that is likely to rally his most strident supporters. And he legalized the registration of voters outside of their home districts — a common practice, until now criminal, that is known as “voter tourism.”All of that is playing out in a media echo chamber, since Mr. Orban has cemented control of public television to the point where stories, photos and guests are handpicked to align with his talking points. Many of the largest independent news outlets have been taken over by Mr. Orban’s supporters.The situation is considered so extraordinary that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an intergovernmental organization, is sending observers to monitor the elections. It is only the second time in the European Union’s history that the group has started a full-scale monitoring operation on an E.U. member.“We are very, very far away from a fair electoral environment,” said Robert Laszlo an election analyst with Political Capital, an independent Hungarian policy center.Mr. Orban, a canny political survivor who relishes a fight, has given no indication he is worried about the election monitors or the outcome. “I can’t remember the last time the stars aligned so well, 19 days before an election,” he declared at a rally this month.L.G.B.T.Q. activists in front of the Parliament building in Budapest, as they announced plans in January for a pride parade in July.Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen The New York Times asked Mr. Orban’s office for a comment on the election law changes, Rajmund Fekete, the chief of staff for the spokesman, replied in an email that they did not plan to comment and would respond “with other means.” He would not elaborate.Hungary’s elections come at a challenging moment for democracy worldwide, as governments chip away at bedrock principles like academic freedom, free speech and judicial independence. Mr. Orban, who is seeking his fourth consecutive term and fifth overall, has become a hero among many American conservatives, who are also locked in their own fights over voting laws and access to the polls.When it comes to election fairness, Hungary now more closely resembles the Soviet era than the free elections that followed the fall of Communism, according to the Swedish nonprofit group V-Dem, which rates countries on a host of democratic indicators.“Election fraud doesn’t start at 7 a.m., when the polls are open,” Ms. Dobrev said. “Election fraud has been going on in Hungary for years.”Signing the PapersIn the tiny village of Kispalad, at the northeastern tip of Hungary along the border with Ukraine, the mayor summoned a local woman to the town hall to sign some papers. It was mid-2014, and the mayor, a member of Mr. Orban’s party, was locked in a tight re-election race.The woman, Jozsefne Sanko, was a seasonal cucumber-picker and would soon be out of work. If Ms. Sanko signed the papers, the mayor said, she’d be guaranteed public-assistance jobs for her and her family.Volunteer ballot counters listening to a presentation in Budapest. A grass-roots civic initiative has recruited more than 20,000 volunteer ballot counters to ensure a fair tally in upcoming elections in Hungary.Anna Szilagyi/Associated Press“There is no work around here,” her son Adam Sanko said in an interview. “So my mom signed the papers.”In signing, Ms. Sanko attested that 135 Ukrainians lived in her tiny home. That made them eligible to vote in Hungarian elections.The mayor’s offer was part of a common tactic in Hungary called voter tourism, which allows nonresidents to register using addresses in Hungary. On Election Day, they cross the border by car, bike or bus, then vote and return home.Until recently, voter tourism was a type of fraud. Ms. Sanko and the mayor received fines in 2020 after what she had done became a local scandal.But Mr. Orban has legalized the practice for the upcoming election. He is popular in these rural villages, but since the government refuses to make historical voter data public, it is impossible to know whether voter tourism has changed the outcome in any of these small districts.Mr. Sanko believes it can. In every election, he said voters arrive from out of the country with lists of names they are expected to vote for. “Now, this is totally legal,” he said.“I can’t remember the last time the stars aligned so well, 19 days before an election,” Mr. Orban declared at a rally this month.Anna Szilagyi/Associated PressVoter tourism also has something of a mail-in equivalent.Hungarian citizens can mail in their ballots, but only if they do not have a residence in the country. That overwhelmingly applies to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries like Romania and Serbia, a constituency whose votes Mr. Orban has courted for years.By contrast, roughly 100,000 Hungarian citizens live in the United Kingdom, a more left-leaning voting bloc that includes students and foreign workers. But voters in Britain must travel in person to London or Manchester to cast ballots. Mr. Orban’s government has rejected calls to open more polling places.A Supermajority in Name OnlyTo understand one of the ways Mr. Orban has reshaped democracy, consider this: When his political party, Fidesz, won the last two national elections, it received less than half the votes, yet still secured a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. The supermajority has allowed Mr. Orban to ram through changes to the Constitution as part of his illiberal agenda.The explanation lies in Hungary’s complex electoral system: The country is divided into 106 districts, each of which elects a member to Parliament, much like members of Congress are seated in the United States. But then another 93 seats are awarded to political parties based on a unique formula.Mr. Orban changed that formula for handing out seats in dramatic fashion to benefit Fidesz. Parties that win big in the district elections can get extra seats — a move that is expected to pad Fidesz’s winning margin in Parliament if it realizes big wins in gerrymandered districts.Peter Marki-Zay celebrating his victory in October to become the opposition candidate in a long-shot bid against Mr. Orban.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesHe has also made it harder for small parties to get any seats at all under the formula. But to counter him, Socialists, Greens, centrists, fiscal hawks and Christian conservatives have united behind the economist Peter Marki-Zay in a long shot bid to beat Mr. Orban, or at least shatter his supermajority since Mr. Marki-Zay has a six-party coalition behind him.Mr. Laszlo, the independent election analyst, estimates that because of the gerrymandered districts and new election rules, the opposition will need to win by as much as six percentage points to unseat Mr. Orban.“There’s a debate among the opposition on whether you should even take part in the election, whether you legitimize it by taking part in it,” said Gergely Karacsony, the mayor of Budapest and a leading opposition politician.Gerrymandering is just one problem for the opposition. Television time is another.Early on a Wednesday morning, less than three weeks before the election, the leader of the opposition party, Mr. Marki-Zay, was given his first and only appearance on Hungary’s largest public television station.“Thanks for allowing the entire opposition five minutes in the past four years to speak,” Mr. Marki-Zay said during his appearance. “That I could not come here until now is likely for the same reason that Viktor Orban is unwilling to partake in a live debate. It’s much easier to lie, defame and to conduct a smear campaign.”Asylum seekers crossing the border between Hungary and Serbia in 2015. Photos of women and children refugees were prohibited on public television, as they might undermine Mr. Orban’s hard-line anti-immigration stance.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesBecause Mr. Orban controls public television, and his allies dominate private media, voters are inundated with coverage that favors him. Opposition parties can’t pay for political advertising on television because it is illegal — even though the public channels regularly put out “public service” announcements that critics say are thinly veiled ads for Mr. Orban or his agenda.Stories that criticize Mr. Orban’s favorite targets — the billionaire George Soros or the European Union, for example — are welcome. Photos of women and children who are refugees, for example, were prohibited, as they might garner sympathy and undermine Mr. Orban’s hard-line anti-immigration stance.“There was an explicit order against this,” said Andras Rostovanyi, who was an editor with the state broadcaster M1 until the end of 2019.In one news meeting, a recording of which was obtained by Radio Free Europe, an editor is heard telling reporters that the station does not support Mr. Orban’s opponents, and anyone who objects to that policy can leave.Mr. Orban with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow last month.Pool photo by Mikhael KlimentyevThis control over the media has helped Mr. Orban shield from public view what might have been a vulnerability: his political ties to Moscow and his fondness for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.With Russian troops laying siege to civilians in nearby Ukraine, Mr. Orban might have faced pointed questions about his past support of Mr. Putin; instead, he has simply rewritten the narrative.One example is a pro-Orban website and Facebook page “Numbers and Facts,” which links to it. Both post the same content. Every day, they churn out headlines that cheer Mr. Orban. Their content argues that the West is to blame for the war, that Russia has legitimate territorial claims to parts of Ukraine, that Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a murderous dictator and that the Russian invasion was defensive.Such views might have lived and died among the Facebook page’s community of 85,000, but the pro-Orban television station PestiTV started a weekly news show late last year that it said was produced in collaboration “with the highly successful Numbers and Facts.”So the message that Mr. Orban is the voice of reason and his opponents are warmongers echoes across all media: from the fringes of Facebook and pro-Orban news outlets to public broadcasters and even Hungary’s vaccine alert system.A billboard for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party cautioned voters not to choose the “dangerous” opposition over images of Mr. Marki-Zay and the former socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, in Kisvarda, a town in eastern Hungary.Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPatrick Kingsley More