Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTwitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. SaysDouglass Mackey, a right-wing provocateur, was accused of spreading memes that made Hillary Clinton supporters falsely believe they could cast ballots in 2016 via text message.Douglass Mackey was arrested on Wednesday in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.Credit…Andrew Seng for The New York TimesJan. 27, 2021Updated 4:46 p.m. ETA man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by phone instead of going to the polls.Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked Alaska,” who was arrested after participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.“With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” said Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office is prosecuting the case.Mrs. Clinton was not named in the complaint, but a person briefed on the investigation confirmed that she was the presidential candidate described in the charging documents.A lawyer for Mr. Mackey declined to comment.Mr. Mackey, who was released from custody on Wednesday on a $50,000 bond, faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.The case will test the novel use of federal civil rights laws as a tool to hold people accountable for misinformation campaigns intended to interfere with elections, a problem that has recently become an urgent priority for social media platforms and law enforcement officials to stop.It has become a game of whack-a-mole to police users like Mr. Mackey, who prosecutors said would simply open new Twitter accounts after his old ones were suspended. Mr. Mackey used four different Twitter accounts from 2014 to 2018, the complaint said, always seeking to hide his true identity from the public.The goal of Mr. Mackey’s campaign, according to prosecutors, was to influence people to vote in a “legally invalid manner.”In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda.Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it made the M.I.T. Media Lab’s list of the top 150 influencers in the 2016 election, ranking ahead of the Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge Report and CBS News.Twitter shut down the account in 2016, one month before the election, for violating the company’s rules by “participating in targeted abuse.” At that time, the account had about 58,000 followers. Three days later, an associate of Mr. Mackey’s opened a new account for him, prosecutors said, which was also quickly suspended.It was not clear how Mr. Mackey became connected to Mr. Gionet, or “Baked Alaska,” who was also a popular social media figure among white nationalists and far-right activists. A lawyer for Mr. Gionet declined to comment.Mr. Mackey is a Vermont native who graduated from Middlebury College. He worked for five years as an economist at a Brooklyn-based research firm, John Dunham & Associates, until his termination in the summer of 2016, a company representative said.The complaint showed a surgical precision in the disinformation campaign by Mr. Mackey and his four co-conspirators. In private group conversations on Twitter, they discussed how to insert their memes into trending conversations online, and dissected changes in wording and colors to make their messages more effective.Mr. Mackey was obsessed with his posts going viral, the complaint said, once telling his associates, “THE MEMES ARE SPREADING.” He and his co-conspirators joked about tricking “dopey” liberals.Their effort to misinform voters began after the group saw a similar campaign intended to deceive voters in the 2016 referendum in Britain on whether to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, according to the complaint.Mr. Mackey and his associates created their own version, sharing photos that urged Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to vote for her on Election Day using a hashtag on Twitter or Facebook. To make the images look more legitimate, they affixed the logo of her campaign and linked to her website.Some of their memes appeared to target Black and Latino voters. One image had a Black woman standing in front of a sign supporting Mrs. Clinton, telling people to vote for Mrs. Clinton by texting a specific number. Mr. Mackey shared a similar image written in Spanish, prosecutors said.Less than a week before Election Day, the complaint said, Mr. Mackey sent a message on Twitter: “Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”Around that time, Twitter began removing the images with false information and suspended Mr. Mackey’s account. But the memes had already taken on a life of their own, prosecutors said, as his associates continued to share them with a wider audience.Alan Feuer contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      MyPillow C.E.O.’s Trump Conspiracy Theories Put Company on the Spot

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMyPillow C.E.O.’s Trump Conspiracy Theories Put Company on the SpotRetailers have stopped carrying its products, though Mike Lindell, the founder and face of MyPillow, blamed “cancel culture” and said he didn’t think it would last.Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, has become closely identified with former President Donald J. Trump.Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesSapna Maheshwari and Jan. 27, 2021Updated 8:43 a.m. ETFor the past four years, most American corporations have tried to avoid the appearance of partisanship while also distancing themselves from the inflammatory rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters, walking a tightrope to keep customers and employees happy.It has been a different story for MyPillow. Mike Lindell, the company’s founder and chief executive, has remained one of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters. His sustained peddling of debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud got him barred from Twitter on Monday night. With retailers like Kohl’s and other major companies cutting ties with the privately held manufacturer, Mr. Lindell has managed to make his pillows partisan.“It goes to my money, you know where my money’s going,” Mr. Lindell said in an interview this month with a pro-Trump online channel called Right Side Broadcasting Network, offering a discount code for viewers to use on MyPillow’s website.Mr. Lindell’s baseless claims of election fraud have prompted a backlash against MyPillow in recent weeks, with several retailers deciding to stop carrying its products, an example of just how strongly his personality dominates the public perception of his company.Mr. Lindell, a former crack cocaine and gambling addict, founded the company after the idea for MyPillow came to him in a dream in 2004, according to his memoir. He is now a devout Christian and credits God with aiding his recovery.MyPillow is based in Chaska, Minn., and Mr. Lindell said in an interview this week that it employed nearly 2,500 people. Its products — it carries more than 100 — have been widely distributed in national chains, and Mr. Lindell’s face is prominently featured in infomercials and boxes carrying its patented pillows. Two former MyPillow employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said they were asked to display multiple cardboard cutouts of the executive in stores and to play his infomercials.Mr. Lindell with Mr. Trump at a White House event in 2017.Credit…Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesPolitics became a bigger part of Mr. Lindell and MyPillow’s identity in the past decade, following the success of its infomercials, which first aired in 2011 and were later a hit on Fox News, according to the memoir and interviews with former employees.The company has said in court filings that it spends an average of $5 million a month on advertising. While Mr. Lindell said he had advertised in The New York Times and on CNN, much of his spending has been with Fox News — 59 percent of the company’s total television spending last year, according to data from MediaRadar — which raised his profile with the former president, an avid viewer of the network.“Politics does not hurt your business,” he said in the interview this week. “I have not alienated anybody except for the bots and the trolls and the hit jobs of the media.”Mr. Lindell said MyPillow’s 2019 revenue exceeded $300 million. MyPillow sells through its website and is carried by retail behemoths like Walmart, Amazon and Costco.The company is tightknit, and its leadership leans conservative, with Mr. Lindell employing many members of his own family and even a sister of former Vice President Mike Pence, according to Aaron Morgan, a procurement planner at MyPillow between September 2019 and last March.“Most companies say don’t talk about politics,” Mr. Morgan said, noting that Mr. Lindell was pleasant. “But a lot of people there talked about politics. People there leaned obviously toward Mike’s beliefs because they were all family. It was not uncommon to see MAGA hats on desks.”Mr. Lindell had a deck of playing cards in the MyPillow office depicting Mr. Trump.Credit…Aaron MorganMr. Morgan shared photos of playing cards that Mr. Lindell offered to employees last year, which used a king card to display Mr. Trump as a proxy for Julius Caesar, Hillary Clinton in an orange prison jumpsuit on a queen card, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer as jokers. Mr. Lindell, whose likeness was also in the deck, said that the cards were given to him as a gift and kept in his office and that employees were able to take them if they wished.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 27, 2021, 10:13 a.m. ETAT&T now has 17.2 million HBO Max customers.John Kerry will talk about climate change at the World Economic Forum.The Fed downplays the chance that it will limit banks from oil and gas lending.Mr. Lindell’s politics entered his company in other ways. On Jan. 6, the day of the riot at the Capitol, MyPillow’s website was accepting a “FightForTrump” discount code that a conservative radio host had promoted on his show. Mr. Lindell, who retweeted the discount code that day, claimed without evidence that Twitter employees gained access to his account and retweeted the post in his name.“We have reviewed the rule violations and consequential enforcement activity and have found no evidence supporting Mr. Lindell’s allegations,” a Twitter representative said.The violence in Washington set in motion a social media campaign against MyPillow and Mr. Lindell, spearheaded by the group Sleeping Giants, which was created in 2016 to stop companies from advertising on Breitbart News. The pressure prompted retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s, H-E-B, Today’s Shopping Choice in Canada and Wayfair to drop MyPillow products, according to Mr. Lindell, who said without providing evidence that the protest was led by “bots and trolls.”Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s cited the brand’s poor performance for their exits, while Today’s Shopping Choice did not comment beyond confirming the removal. Wayfair declined to comment, and H-E-B did not respond to requests for comment. Zulily said it stopped carrying MyPillow in July. Affirm, the financing start-up, separately confirmed that it severed ties with MyPillow last week.Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi were shown as jokers in the deck.Credit…Aaron MorganMatt Rivitz, a co-founder of Sleeping Giants, said the claim about bots was “ridiculous.” Throughout the Trump presidency, he said, consumers grew more aware of their collective power, beginning with ads on Breitbart and boycotts of Ivanka Trump products at Nordstrom. This has been the culmination of those efforts.“There were a number of videos that came out with Lindell doing these rants about how the election was stolen and clearly that led to violence,” Mr. Rivitz said. “It was just a natural inclination to ask companies if they supported that because ultimately these companies have greatly benefited from democracy and they likely don’t want to see the country fall into chaos because of these lies.”Mr. Lindell said only one of the companies that had dropped his products cited false information about voting machines, but added, “It’s pretty coincidental when over nine companies do that the same day.” Still, he said he was not concerned about the impact on his business. He added that he did not view his comments to Right Side Broadcasting as “politically skewed” and blamed “cancel culture” for the retailers’ actions, though he anticipated they would return to selling his products.This month, Mr. Lindell was photographed at the White House carrying notes that mentioned the Insurrection Act, by which a president can deploy active military troops into the streets.Until around 2011, MyPillow was run out of a former bus garage in Minnesota, with roughly 40 employees, according to Tonja Waring, who worked there from 2009 to 2012 and appeared in its infomercials. Ms. Waring said Mr. Lindell was fiercely loyal and regularly pushed back against conventional wisdom on issues like maintaining manufacturing in the United States.Mr. Lindell was also included among the Trump presidential playing cards.Credit…Aaron Morgan“He doesn’t care what people think or what they say — he cares about doing the right thing,” she said. She added that Mr. Lindell had grown more comfortable in the spotlight than when she first met him, when he was “barely able to go on TV.”While the infomercials fueled MyPillow’s rise, they have also drawn complaints. In one settlement in 2016, MyPillow paid $995,000 in penalties after a group of district attorneys in California took issue with the company’s claims that its products could soothe insomnia, fibromyalgia and other medical conditions. Last year, Mr. Lindell also faced criticism after pitching an unproven Covid-19 “cure” to Mr. Trump.When customers asked about health claims made in MyPillow commercials, the two former store employees said, they would try to evade the subject without confirming or denying promises made in the ads. One former employee said Mr. Lindell also pushed stores to sell other products that workers were wary to endorse, such as a powder that claimed to stop wounds from bleeding within seconds.In his memoir, Mr. Lindell wrote of “a shady bankruptcy” he declared in 2003 to avoid a lawsuit involving a bar he owned, working with a lender he had met through his bookie’s stepson, who encouraged Mr. Lindell to concoct fake creditors.“It wouldn’t be the first time I’d colored outside the lines of the law,” he wrote of the episode.Even now, as retailers cut ties and he has been kicked off Twitter, Mr. Lindell is defiant, convinced that “real people” do not care about the claims he has been perpetuating.“The people on the left, the Democrats, they’re buying the same amount of product they always buy from me,” he said, “and the people supporting me standing up to cancel culture are buying more.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump and the Foiled Plot at the Justice Dept.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storylettersTrump and the Foiled Plot at the Justice Dept.Readers are shocked by what one calls “the most stunning episode” in the former president’s efforts to overturn the election.Jan. 26, 2021, 1:14 p.m. ETColleagues said they had seen Jeffrey Clark, who was the head of the Justice Department’s civil division, as an establishment lawyer who was not particularly Trumpist.Credit…Pool photo by Yuri GripasTo the Editor:Re “Mutiny Halted Trump Scheme in Justice Dept.” (front page, Jan. 23):The revelation of the plot hatched by Jeffrey Clark to use the Justice Department to bolster President Donald Trump’s false claims of the election being stolen shows how perilously close this country came to a true constitutional crisis.It was only the willingness of department officials to put their own careers on the line to halt this anti-democratic scheme that prevented the replacement of Jeffrey Rosen by this Trump loyalist, one with a penchant for conspiracy theories.Mr. Clark’s name can now be added to the list of politicians like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy and sadly many others for whom personal ambition and a cynical disregard for the truth supersede any commitment to their oaths of office and any genuine concern for the welfare of the United States.Michael EsterowitzBrooklynTo the Editor:Americans must draw the right lesson from this farce. The right lesson is not that democracy worked after all. Nor is it that Donald Trump is an anomaly that will never recur.If Donald Trump and his minions had been as disciplined and organized as they were contemptuous of democracy, or if the election had been closer, their last-ditch efforts to carry out a coup might have succeeded.The right lesson is that the president must have absolutely no power over judicial matters: the Justice Department and the federal courts. The Justice Department must operate independently from the White House. Federal judges and the attorney general must be named by a process that excludes the president from participation.If the fox is allowed to continue to guard the chicken coop, then next time — if he is shrewder and more determined, and has done a better job of installing loyal lackeys to do his bidding — he might really get away with eating the chickens.Ben SilvermanRosarito Beach, MexicoTo the Editor:Because the story on Donald Trump’s attempt to use the Justice Department to overturn election results in Georgia has such strong echoes of Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre, and because Katie Benner’s excellent reporting paints a portrait of just how desperate and seemingly delusional Donald Trump was, it struck me as the most stunning episode in his never-ending battle to overturn the election.Since the election we have learned of Mr. Trump’s court challenges to the results, his phone calls to pressure election and other officials in the swing states, and his media campaign that pushed a lie about voter fraud. But his machinations at the Justice Department somehow add a note of desperation that is deeply shocking, even taking into account all we knew of him.Kay OppenheimerAiken, S.C.The writer is a retired attorney.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Four falsehoods Giuliani spread about Dominion.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationFour falsehoods Giuliani spread about Dominion.Jan. 25, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETJan. 25, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETRudolph W. Giuliani worked for weeks after the November election in an attempt to subvert its outcome.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesDominion Voting Systems, one of the largest voting machine vendors in the United States, filed a defamation lawsuit against Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday, accusing him of spreading a litany of falsehoods about the company in his efforts on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the election.The lawsuit chronicles more than 50 inaccurate statements made by Mr. Giuliani in the weeks after the election, and issues a point-by-point rebuttal of each falsehood. Here are four of the most common false statements Mr. Giuliani made about Dominion Voting Systems.1. The Company’s OriginMr. Giuliani regularly stated, falsely, that Dominion “really is a Venezuelan company” and that it “depends completely on the software of Smartmatic,” a company “developed in about 2004, 2005 to help Chavez steal elections.”As Dominion writes in its lawsuit: “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez. It was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” The suit later adds that the headquarters for the company’s United States subsidiary are in Denver.2. Programming VotesAnother often-repeated claim was that Dominion had programmed its machines to flip votes: “In other words when you pressed down Biden, you got Trump, and when you pressed down Trump you got Biden.”This has been proved false by numerous government and law enforcement officials, including former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said in December: “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 25, 2021, 6:32 p.m. ETJanet Yellen is confirmed as Treasury secretary.Grindr is fined $11.7 million under European privacy law.Biden’s Treasury will seek to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, an effort the Trump administration halted.Similarly, a joint statement by numerous government and elections officials and agencies, including the National Association of State Election Directors, the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”The hand recount in Georgia also affirmed that the machine recounts were accurate in that state.3. Antrim County, Mich.Mr. Giuliani zeroed in on Antrim County, Mich., falsely claiming that a “Dominion machine flipped 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden” there, and that machines in the county were “62 percent inaccurate,” had a “68 percent error rate” and had an “81.9 percent rejection rate.”Mr. Giuliani’s focus on Antrim County stems from human errors made by the county clerk on election night. According to the lawsuit, the clerk “mistakenly failed to update all of the voting machines’ tabulator memory cards.” But the suit says that “her mistakes were promptly caught as part of the normal canvass process before the election result was made official.” The Michigan secretary of state’s office also conducted a hand audit of all presidential votes in Antrim County that found the machines were accurate.4. A Problematic ExpertMr. Giuliani claimed that his accusations, particularly in Antrim County, were backed up by experts. But he largely relied on one man, Russell Ramsland Jr., a former Republican congressional candidate from Texas, who, according to the lawsuit filed by Dominion, had also publicly favored false conspiracy theories.Dominion spent more than five pages on Mr. Ramsland’s lack of credentials to properly examine equipment, noting that he had a “fundamental misunderstanding of election software.” The suit also quotes the former acting director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Voting System Testing and Certification program, saying the report produced by Mr. Ramsland “showed a ‘grave misunderstanding’ of Antrim County’s voting system and ‘a lack of knowledge of election technology and process.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Watchdog to Examine Whether Justice Dept. Helped Trump Effort to Overturn Election

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWatchdog to Examine Whether Justice Dept. Helped Trump Effort to Overturn ElectionThe inquiry was announced after revelations about a plot between Donald Trump and a top former department official to promote false claims of voter fraud by replacing the acting attorney general.Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said he would investigate whether officials aided President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesJan. 25, 2021, 7:28 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department watchdog announced Monday that he had opened an investigation into whether any of the department’s officials tried to undo the results of the presidential election, as scrutiny of former President Donald J. Trump and his associates builds ahead of his impeachment trial.The investigation by the department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, followed efforts by Mr. Trump and a top federal law enforcement official, Jeffrey Clark, to push other Justice Department leaders to falsely assert that continuing fraud investigations cast doubt on the election results. As detailed by The New York Times in recent days, Mr. Trump was said to have considered installing Mr. Clark as acting attorney general to carry out the scheme.“The inspector general is initiating an investigation into whether any former or current D.O.J. official engaged in an improper attempt to have D.O.J. seek to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Horowitz said in a statement, adding that he was announcing the inquiry to reassure the public that the matter was being examined.The inquiry adds to the increasing scrutiny on Mr. Trump’s attempts to wield the power of the Justice Department to advance his false claims about the election in the final weeks of his presidency. It follows another inspector general investigation into whether a federal prosecutor in Georgia was improperly pushed to help and a broader Democratic-led Senate inquiry into pressure on the department to aid Mr. Trump’s cause.Mr. Trump sought repeatedly to compel the Justice Department to back his baseless claims of election irregularities, ultimately prompting the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to publicly state early last month that the department had found no voting fraud on a scale that would affect the election results. Mr. Barr fell out of favor with Mr. Trump over the issue and left his post within weeks.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.The investigation underscores fears among Senate Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, that if they do not distance themselves from Mr. Trump and undo his grip on the party, a steady drip of negative revelations paired with his own erratic behavior could damage their political fortunes.“If Trump loses credibility because it appears he’s acted in a way that no one can justify, the leverage that he might have over the Republican Party could be diffused,” said William Marshall, a professor at the University of North Carolina who teaches and writes on presidential power. “The more that indicates he behaved improperly makes it less easy to defend him and less easy to stand by him.”Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, had urged Mr. Horowitz over the weekend to open an investigation, saying that it was “unconscionable that a Trump Justice Department leader would conspire to subvert the people’s will.”The inspector general also noted that his inquiry would be limited to the Justice Department because other agencies did not fall within his purview, a nod to the array of people who sought during Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office to find a way to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.This month, Mr. Horowitz opened an investigation into whether Trump administration officials pressured Byung J. Pak, at the time the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who abruptly resigned after it became clear to Mr. Trump that he would not take actions to cast doubt on or undo the results of the election, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.Separately, the Senate Judiciary Committee said this weekend that it had initiated its own oversight inquiry into officials including Mr. Clark, who was the head of the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division and the acting head of its civil division.Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to the Justice Department saying that he would investigate efforts by Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark to use the agency “to further Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.”Jeffrey Clark pushed Justice Department leaders to falsely assert that continuing voter fraud investigations cast doubt on the election results.Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressMr. Durbin asked the acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, to preserve documents, emails and messages related to meetings between top Justice Department officials under Mr. Trump, the White House and Mr. Trump, as well as any communications related to Mr. Pak’s resignation.Mr. Biden’s win was deemed valid after recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia declared him the victor and after the Trump campaign team was unable to prove widespread fraud in court cases in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Dozens of F.B.I. investigations uncovered no voter fraud on a scale that would have changed the results of the election, according to Justice Department officials briefed on the cases.Dozens of Republicans in Congress were among those who backed Mr. Trump’s false claims, including Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania. On Monday, he confirmed a Times report that he had introduced Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark, giving the president access to the sole top Justice Department official willing to entertain the idea that Mr. Biden had not won the election.Mr. Perry, a member of the pro-Trump, hard-line Freedom Caucus, said in a statement to a Pennsylvania public radio affiliate that he spoke with Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark about election fraud claims.“Throughout the past four years, I worked with Assistant Attorney General Clark on various legislative matters,” Mr. Perry said. “When President Trump asked if I would make an introduction, I obliged.”Allies of Mr. Clark have characterized the conversations as simply laying out the legal options available to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Clark’s former colleagues have said there were no more legal remedies that Mr. Trump could have pursued through the department.Still, their assessment did not stop Mr. Trump from pressuring the Justice Department to fight harder to find a way to help him. When Mr. Barr declined to appoint special counsels to examine voting irregularities or take other measures that would have helped to throw the election results into doubt, he and Mr. Trump agreed that he should leave the department, according to three people familiar with their conversation. Mr. Barr stipulated that the deputy attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, replace him, the people said.Mr. Trump began to push Mr. Rosen to promote baseless suspicions about voting fraud the day after announcing that Mr. Barr would leave and kept up the pressure through the last weeks of December, pushing him to open investigations and to challenge Mr. Biden’s win before the Supreme Court.But as the department’s top officials pushed back, Mr. Trump separately opened a line of communication with Mr. Clark, who seemed more amenable to his theory that he had won the election, according to five people familiar with the matter, asking him to publicize inquiries that could cast doubt on the election.Mr. Trump’s deliberations over whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark also set off a crisis among other senior Justice Department officials, who pledged to quit should Mr. Rosen be fired. The vow was said to have helped persuade Mr. Trump not to act.Mr. Clark has said that this account is inaccurate without specifying further and has said that all of his conduct was legal.While the machinations between Mr. Trump, Mr. Clark and Mr. Perry will not be the focus of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial — which accuses him of inciting the riot at the Capitol — Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, suggested the matter would be presented to senators.“This is powerful motive evidence,” Mr. Swalwell said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’Mr. Murdoch of News Corp, who spoke in a video, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He called conformity on social media “a straitjacket on sensibility.” Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp, said his long career “is still in motion.”Credit…Mike Segar/ReutersJan. 25, 2021Updated 3:06 p.m. ETThe media mogul Rupert Murdoch denounced an “awful woke orthodoxy” and declared, “I’m far from done,” while accepting a lifetime achievement award this weekend.Mr. Murdoch, 89, made the remarks in a prerecorded video shown on Saturday during a virtual event for the United Kingdom nonprofit that honored him, the Australia Day Foundation. The video was shared on the website of The Herald Sun, a newspaper in Melbourne owned by Mr. Murdoch.The video is noteworthy because Mr. Murdoch, despite exerting enormous influence over the global media landscape as the executive chairman of News Corp, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He has been weathering the pandemic in his home in the Cotswolds in England, and received a Covid-19 vaccination in December.In the video, Mr. Murdoch, standing next to a bottle of Australian red wine and wearing a medal, thanked the foundation for the award in the video but said his career “that began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom is still in motion.”He also took the opportunity to condemn “cancel culture.”“For those of us in media,” he said, “there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.”He continued: “This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”It seems Mr. Murdoch’s beliefs have been noted by the editors of his publications. On Monday, The New York Post published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on the front page of the paper with the headline “Time to take a stand against the muzzling of America.”Mr. Hawley, who has been widely condemned for his role in trying to overturn the result of the presidential election even after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, echoed Mr. Murdoch in denouncing “woke orthodoxy.”Credit…New York PostMr. Hawley also used his front-page column in one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country to bemoan the revoking of his book deal and the canceling of events he had scheduled. Mr. Hawley’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped his book after the Jan. 6 siege, though it was quickly picked up by the conservative publishing house Regnery Publishing.The New York Post declined to comment.Mr. Murdoch’s media empire, which includes The Post and Fox News, is trying to navigate a tense political moment. It is attempting to maintain conservative viewers who, unhappy with some of the straight news reporting on Fox, tuned in to Newsmax and One America News, which embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims about election fraud. Fox News executives this month fired the politics editor Chris Stirewalt, who was an on-screen face of the network’s election night projections, and introduced more right-wing opinion programming.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rudy Giuliani Sued by Dominion Voting Systems Over False Election Claims

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRudy Giuliani Sued by Dominion Voting Systems Over False Election ClaimsThe suit against Mr. Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump who pushed to overturn the election results, accuses him of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign.”Rudy Giuliani helped marshal the campaign to overturn the election results in favor of Donald J. Trump.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesJan. 25, 2021Updated 8:23 a.m. ETDominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit on Monday against Rudolph W. Giuliani, the lawyer for Donald J. Trump and former mayor of New York City who played a key role in the former president’s monthslong effort to subvert the 2020 election.The 107-page lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, accuses Mr. Giuliani of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” made up of “demonstrably false” allegations, in part to enrich himself through legal fees and his podcast.The suit seeks damages of more than $1.3 billion and is based on more than 50 statements Mr. Giuliani made at legislative hearings, on Twitter, on his podcast and in the conservative news media, where he spun a fictitious narrative of a plot by one of the biggest voting machine manufacturers in the country to flip votes to President Biden.Mr. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers and confidants, has faced continuing fallout for his highly visible efforts to reverse the election outcome. This month, the chairman of the New York State Senate’s judiciary committee formally requested that the state court system strip Mr. Giuliani of his law license.Mr. Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Taken together with a lawsuit the company filed this month against Sidney Powell, another lawyer who was allied with Mr. Trump, the suit represents a point-by-point rebuke of one of the more outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding last year’s election. The president’s allies had contended that the voting machine company — which was also used in states during Mr. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, has been tested by government agencies, and was used in states Mr. Trump carried in 2020 — was somehow involved in a rigged election, partly as a result of ties to a long-deceased Venezuelan dictator. “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez,” the suit says. “It was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” The suit later adds that the headquarters for the company’s United States subsidiary is in Denver.Laying out a timeline of Mr. Giuliani’s comments about Dominion on Twitter, his podcast and Fox News, the company notes that Mr. Giuliani avoided mentioning Dominion in court, where he could have faced legal ramifications for falsehoods. “Notably, not a single one of the three complaints signed and filed by Giuliani and other attorneys for the Trump Campaign in the Pennsylvania action contained any allegations about Dominion,” the lawsuit says.The lawsuit also links Mr. Giuliani’s false statements about Dominion to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, noting that he mentioned the company in his speech at a rally for Mr. Trump before the attack, as well as numerous times on social media as the Capitol was breached.“Having been deceived by Giuliani and his allies into thinking that they were not criminals — but patriots ‘Defend[ing] the Republic’ from Dominion and its co-conspirators — they then bragged about their involvement in the crime on social media,” the suit states.Thomas A. Clare, a lawyer representing Dominion, said that the riot had not factored into the decision to sue Mr. Giuliani, but that it did show just how seriously Mr. Trump’s followers had taken the falsehoods told about the election.A Dominion Voting Systems ballot scanner was used at a polling location in Gwinnett County, Ga. The company is one of the largest voting machine manufacturers in the country. Credit…Ben Gray/Associated Press“From a defamation law perspective, it just demonstrates the depth to which these statements sink in to people,” Mr. Clare said in an interview. “That people don’t just read them and tune them out. It goes to the core of their belief system, which puts them in a position to take action in the real world.”John Poulos, the chief executive officer of Dominion, said that his company took legal action against Mr. Giuliani both to correct the record about Dominion and restore trust in the American electoral systems. “Not only have these lies damaged the good name of my company,” Mr. Poulos said of Mr. Giuliani’s false claims, “but they also undermined trust in American democratic institutions, drowning out the remarkable work of elections officials and workers, who ensured a transparent and secure election. The thousands of hand recounts and audits that proved machines counted accurately continue to be overshadowed by disinformation.”Dominion is a major manufacturer of voting machine equipment in the United States, second only to Election Systems & Software. Different models of Dominion machines were used in more than two dozen states — red, blue and battleground — during the 2020 election.The company had previously warned Mr. Giuliani, sending a letter in late December that told him to preserve all records of his claims and stop making false statements, and warned that legal action was imminent. But Mr. Giuliani continued with his false claims of fraud, even arguing on Twitter days after receiving the letter that “phony Dominion voting machines” needed to be investigated.As recently as last week, Mr. Giuliani was on his New York City-based radio show saying that “so long as you have Dominion, there is clear and present danger” that election results could be rigged. He added that he had “boxes of evidence to support his claims.”Dominion has indicated that it plans to file more lawsuits. The suit against Mr. Giuliani says he acted with other prominent conservatives and news networks, including Mike Lindell, Lou Dobbs, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax and One America News Network.Mr. Clare, Dominion’s lawyer, left open the possibility of litigation against Mr. Trump.“We’re not ruling anybody out,” he said. “Obviously, this lawsuit against the president’s lawyer moves one step closer to the former president and understanding what his role was and wasn’t.”The threats from Dominion have prompted some conciliatory responses from conservative news outlets hoping to avoid a legal battle. This month, the American Thinker, a conservative website, posted an apologetic note saying that its reports about Dominion “are completely false and have no basis in fact” and that “it was wrong for us to publish these false statements.”Mr. Giuliani was one of the main public faces of the effort to reverse the election results, with Mr. Trump rarely appearing in public and preferring to send out broadsides on Twitter against the democratic process.Dominion argues that Mr. Giuliani profited significantly from his false claims, noting that he “reportedly demanded $20,000 per day” for his legal services to Mr. Trump and “cashed in by hosting a podcast where he exploited election falsehoods to market gold coins, supplements, cigars and protection from ‘cyberthieves.’”The lawsuit notes just how quickly and widely the lies and false narratives had spread leading up to the riot at the Capitol. “Over a three-hour period on December 21, 2020, the terms ‘dominion’ and ‘fraud’ were tweeted out together by more than 2,200 users with over 8.75 million total followers,” the suit says.The reach of the disinformation about the company brought countless threats of violence against employees, the suit claims. One employee received text messages stating: “We are already watching you. Come clean and you will live.” A voice mail message to customer support said, “We’re bringing back the firing squad.”Because of these threats, Dominion has spent $565,000 on personal security, according to the lawsuit. The company claimed to have incurred $1.17 million in total expenses relating to the disinformation campaign after the election.“Giuliani’s statements,” the suit states, “were calculated to — and did in fact — provoke outrage and cause Dominion enormous harm.”Alan Feuer More

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      Jeffrey Clark Was Considered Unassuming. Then He Plotted With Trump.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJeffrey Clark Was Considered Unassuming. Then He Plotted With Trump.Justice Department colleagues said they were shocked by Mr. Clark’s embrace of the president’s falsehoods and plan to oust the acting attorney general in an effort to overturn Georgia’s election results.Colleagues said they had seen Jeffrey Clark, who was the head of the Justice Department’s civil division, as an establishment lawyer who was not particularly Trumpist.Credit…Pool photo by Yuri GripasKatie Benner and Jan. 24, 2021, 9:58 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s top leaders had little to celebrate as they admonished Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, for repeatedly pushing them to help President Donald J. Trump undo his electoral loss.Huddled in the department’s headquarters, they rebuked him for secretly meeting with Mr. Trump, even as the department had rebuffed the president’s outlandish requests for court filings and special counsels, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting. No official would host a news conference to say that federal fraud investigations cast the results in doubt, they told him. No one would send a letter making such claims to Georgia lawmakers.When the meeting ended not long before midnight, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen thought the matter had been settled, never suspecting that his subordinate would secretly discuss the plan for the letter with Mr. Trump, and very nearly take Mr. Rosen’s job, as part of a plot with the president to wield the department’s power to try to alter the Georgia election outcome.It was clear that night, though, that Mr. Clark — with his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about voting booth hacks and election fraud — was not the establishment lawyer they thought him to be. Some senior department leaders had considered him quiet, hard-working and detail-oriented. Others said they knew nothing about him, so low was his profile. He struck neither his fans in the department nor his detractors as being part of the Trumpist faction of the party, according to interviews.The department’s senior leaders were shocked when Mr. Clark’s machinations came to light. They have spent recent weeks debating how he came to betray Mr. Rosen, his biggest champion at the department, and what blend of ambition and conviction led him to reject the results of the election and embrace Mr. Trump’s claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, including inside the department itself.The plot devised by Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump would have ousted Mr. Rosen and used the Justice Department to pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn the state’s election results. But Mr. Trump ultimately decided against firing Mr. Rosen after top department leaders pledged to resign en masse.Mr. Clark declined to comment for this report, but he reiterated his assertion that The New York Times’s account of his conversations with Mr. Trump, first reported on Friday, and his colleagues was inaccurate. He said he could not detail those inaccuracies because of legal privilege issues. And he said all of his official communications “were consistent with law.”“The story kind of shocked me because this is not the Jeff that I know,” said Theodore H. Frank, a friend and former colleague. Credit…Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesSome of his friends said that those who told the press about his final days at the Justice Department painted a picture of a man they do not recognize. “The story kind of shocked me because this is not the Jeff that I know,” said Theodore H. Frank, a friend and former colleague. “I know Jeff as a guy who really cares about the rule of law and, you know, just a rumpled, thoughtful lawyer who is an intellectual — not a Machiavellian backstabber.”Mr. Clark had spent two years leading the Justice Department’s environmental division, where he was seen as a standard Republican lawyer political appointee — a member of the conservative Federalist Society with a skepticism of rules that cut into corporate profits.But now, Mr. Clark, 53, has become notorious. A person who has worked closely with Kirkland & Ellis, where Mr. Clark spent most of his career outside two stints in the George W. Bush and Trump Justice Departments, said there appeared to be scant chance that the law firm would rehire him.Friends and critics alike reject the notion that Mr. Clark is an operator, describing him as “nerdy” and “thoughtful.”Mr. Frank, who met Mr. Clark when both worked at Kirkland & Ellis in the 1990s and described himself as a Federalist Society member who voted for President Biden, said he was reserving judgment about the incident. Others were more direct.“This is the first wave of character assassination, of people going after the most effective lawyers in the Trump administration,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who worked with Mr. Clark when she worked at the Environmental Protection Agency in the clean air division and as chief of staff to Andrew R. Wheeler when he was the agency’s administrator. She was struck by the fact that Mr. Clark’s colleagues were so upset and fixated on an event that ultimately did not happen. Mr. Trump, after all, did not replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark or have the Justice Department contact Georgia lawmakers.She said Mr. Clark was most likely discussing with his colleagues and the president “a range of options,” just as he was known for doing in his work advising her agency.Some of Mr. Clark’s associates said he could be pedantic. As a manager, he made no effort to hide when he had little respect for his career subordinates’ opinions.He is not known for being understated on the topic of himself. Where the typical biography on the Justice Department website runs a few paragraphs, Mr. Clark’s includes the elementary school he attended in Philadelphia, a topic he debated in college and that he worked for his college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.After graduating from Harvard in 1989, Mr. Clark earned a master’s degree in urban affairs and public policy from the Biden School of Public Policy at the University of Delaware in 1993 and a law degree from Georgetown University in 1995. He clerked for an appeals court judge, Danny Boggs, who was known for giving prospective clerks quizzes that tested not just their knowledge of the law, but also a range of esoteric trivia.Mr. Clark then worked for Kirkland & Ellis from 1996 to 2001, followed by a stint in the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division during the Bush administration, before returning to Kirkland in 2005 as a partner, but not one with an equity stake in the firm, according to a person who worked closely with him at the law firm.He held the title of “non-equity partner,” which meant that he did not share in the firm’s profits or make leadership decisions.When Mr. Clark returned to the Justice Department as the head of the environmental division in 2018, he flew under the radar. Like other Republican officials, he narrowly interpreted the division’s legal authority and had a typically tense relationship with career lawyers when it came to enforcing anti-pollution laws.In one instance, Mr. Clark held up Clean Water Act enforcement cases because of a pending matter before the Supreme Court that career lawyers felt did not directly relate to their work, according to a lawyer with knowledge of those cases. The Supreme Court was hearing a matter that involved discharges that flowed through groundwater before reaching waters regulated by the federal government, and the department was working on a case that involved flows over land.His employees believed that Mr. Clark hoped the court would curtail the law’s reach in a way that would apply to overland spills, too, but by a 6-to-3 ruling, it did not.In a different case, he disagreed with a recommendation that the civil division made to the Office of the Solicitor General, and ultimately got his way after asking the general counsels of other agencies to also push back on the recommendation. Civil division employees said he did not tell them that he would do this, and felt that had circumvented the proper process.Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen had admonished Mr. Clark over his push to help President Donald J. Trump overturn the election.Credit…Ting Shen for The New York TimesWhile Mr. Clark oversaw environmental cases, sometimes working late into the night and personally reviewing briefs, the department’s civil division was in turmoil. Its leader, Jody Hunt, sometimes clashed with the White House Counsel’s Office and, later on, with Attorney General William P. Barr, over how best to defend the administration.Mr. Hunt resigned with no warning in July, leaving his deputy to run the division while Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosen searched for an acting leader among the department’s thinned-out ranks. Mr. Clark wanted the job, which was a considerable step up in stature, and Mr. Rosen supported the idea even though he was already a division head, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.After he took the helm of the civil division in September, colleagues began seeing flashes of unusual behavior. Mr. Clark’s name appeared on eyebrow-raising briefs, including what would turn out to be an unsuccessful effort to inject the government into a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Trump by a woman who has said he raped her more than two decades ago. He also signed onto an attempt to use the Justice Department to sue a former friend of the first lady at the time, Melania Trump, for writing a tell-all memoir.He made clear to lawyers who produced draft briefs that they must spell out his name in full, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, according to a former official.Others said he mounted an idiosyncratic push to remove the word “acting” from his official title — acting assistant attorney general of the civil division — citing an old department legal opinion from the 1980s. Officials denied his request.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More