Top Democrats Send Letter on Possible Foreign Meddling in November Election – The New York Times

Top congressional Democrats warned in a cryptic letter they released on Monday that a foreign power was using disinformation to try to interfere in the presidential election and the activities of Congress, and demanded a prompt briefing by the F.B.I. to warn every member of Congress.

While the letter writers, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did not specify the threat, officials familiar with a classified addendum attached to it said the Democrats’ concerns touched on intelligence related to a possible Russian-backed attempt to smear the presidential campaign of former Joseph R. Biden Jr.

They contend that the Russian-linked information is being funneled to a committee headed by Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who is investigating Mr. Biden and his son, who was once paid as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company. While neither Mr. Johnson’s inquiry nor much of the information in question is new, the Democrats’ letter is an attempt to call attention to their concern that the accusations are not only unfounded but may further Russia’s efforts to interfere again in the American presidential election.

Ms. Pelosi was joined by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the party’s leader in the Senate, as well as Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Democrats did not ask Republicans to sign on, according to a congressional official familiar with the letter who insisted on anonymity to discuss it.

Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Mr. Schiff’s committee, declined to comment on the content of the intelligence that led to the letter.

Top American intelligence officials have repeatedly warned that Russia’s attempts to manipulate American political discourse online have not abated since 2016, when the Kremlin tried to sway the election in favor of President Trump.

Mr. Biden later released a statement saying that he was “putting the Kremlin and other foreign governments on notice.”

“If elected president, I will treat foreign interference in our election as an adversarial act that significantly affects the relationship between the United States and the interfering nation’s government,” warned Mr. Biden, who indicated last week that he has started receiving intelligence briefings.

Earlier on Monday, a bipartisan group of 34 former national security officials urged Congress in a separate letter to provide more funding for states to shore up election security, arguing that the amount offered in the latest coronavirus aide package, the CARES act, “has not been enough” to help states cover the costs of expanding mail-in ballots and providing protective equipment for in-person voting.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University recently estimated that it will take $4 billion to properly secure the elections in November.

Georgia Democrats on Monday chose Nikema Williams, the state party chairwoman, to replace Representative John Lewis on the November ballot, less than 72 hours after the civil rights leader turned 17-term congressman died.

Since Georgia’s primary elections took place last month, top party officials needed to select a replacement nominee for the November general election. (The seat will likely remain vacant until the winner is sworn in in January.)

DuBose Porter, the former state lawmaker who led a committee to select the finalists, said party officials hastened the pace for choosing Mr. Lewis’s successor because of state law — a name needed to be submitted to the Georgia secretary of state by 4 p.m. Monday to “avoid any ambiguity” and ensure a Democratic candidate was on the ballot.

Being the Democratic candidate in Georgia’s Fifth District is tantamount to a ticket to Congress: Mr. Lewis won with at least 70 percent of the vote in all but one of his re-election bids.

After putting out a call for applicants Saturday, 131 people wrote the Democratic Party of Georgia to say that they wanted to represent the district, which covers parts of Atlanta and seeps into suburban DeKalb and Clayton Counties.

A nominating committee of seven local dignitaries — including the party’s last two gubernatorial nominees, Stacey Abrams and Jason Carter, along with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta — narrowed the list to five people and released it on Monday morning.

After hearing from each of the finalists earlier, the state party’s 44-member executive committee debated the appointment over Zoom before choosing the nominee.

Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote Sunday that Ms. Williams, who represents the Atlanta portion of the district in the State Senate, was the clubhouse leader to replace Mr. Lewis. But there had been a push from many Democrats, including Mr. Lewis’s longtime aide, Tharon Johnson, to appoint a place-holder nominee who would resign the seat upon being sworn in to allow for a special election to be decided by the district’s voters in 2021.

During their presentations Monday, the candidates acknowledged a measure of awkwardness in actively campaigning for Mr. Lewis’s job so soon after his death, but reminded party leaders of the significance of their decision.

“History has its eyes on you,” said Robert M. Franklin Jr., a former president of Morehouse College and one of the finalists, invoking a song from the musical “Hamilton.” “How do you follow the extraordinary legacy and the impact of Congressman John Robert Lewis?”

Still, he added, “You can’t make a bad decision today.”

Joe Biden on Monday sketched out his views on what should be included in the next coronavirus relief package, emphasizing the need to help families and small businesses as well as to provide funds to help schools reopen in a safe manner.

“With the president having turned his back on the problem, people are looking to Congress for the support they need to keep their heads above water,” Mr. Biden said in a lengthy statement, noting that “not one penny” should go toward tax cuts for the richest Americans.

He also said Congress should require that relief for businesses not be used to outsource jobs and that the next aid package should include funds to prevent layoffs of teachers and help schools with reopening safely, along with additional aid to help states and local governments. (On Friday, Mr. Biden released a plan for safely reopening schools.)

Also on Monday, in an interview on Joy Reid’s new MSNBC show, Mr. Biden criticized the president’s response in sharp and personal terms.

“I don’t understand it — he has absolutely zero sense of empathy,” he said. “Have you ever heard a word of him talking about how badly he feels about the losses? About the emptiness? Those folks who’ve lost somebody feel like they’ve been dragged into a dark, deep hole in the middle of their chest. They don’t know what to do, they’re scared to death, and what’s the president do? He talks about taking away health insurance.”

If elected, Mr. Biden said, he would face a crisis of unknown proportions, largely because of the deficiencies of Mr. Trump’s response. He added that he spoke with doctors three or four times a week about the pandemic, and that his response would be to focus on testing, contact tracing, and enforcing mask-wearing and social distancing.

Mr. Trump suggested on Monday that he will deploy federal law enforcement forces to cities like New York and Chicago to counter protests, expanding on the operation in Portland, Ore., that has provoked a heated confrontation with local and state authorities.

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said military-clad agents reporting to the Department of Homeland Security had “done a fantastic job” in Portland and assailed officials there for not welcoming the help. He said other cities were in similar need of federal intervention.

“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump said. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”

The deployment of federal troops to cities has become a new front for a president trailing badly in the polls in his bid for re-election. Eager to recast protests against racial injustice following the George Floyd killing into an us-versus-them battle for law and order, Mr. Trump in recent days has repeatedly described the nation’s cities as out of control and cast the issue in overtly partisan terms, blaming liberal Democrats for countenancing violence and failing to stand up to crime.

“How about Chicago?” he said on Monday. “We’re looking at New York. Look at what’s going on. All run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left.”

Mr. Trump then explicitly linked the issue to his Democratic challenger. “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country,” he said. “The whole country would go to hell.” (In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Trump falsely insisted that Mr. Biden had endorsed defunding the police.)

Clad in camouflage, the federal agents in Portland have snatched protesters off the streets and thrown them into unmarked vehicles without explanation, according to some of those who have been seized. The governor has called it “a blatant abuse of power” and the mayor called it “an attack on our democracy,” while the state attorney general has filed a lawsuit seeking a restraining order against the agents.

Mr. Trump defended his action, saying that Portland was “totally out of control” and blaming Oregon officials for caving into protesters.

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has reliably been among the Republican Party’s biggest donors, gave $25 million with his wife in June to the leading super PAC dedicating to supporting Senate Republicans this fall.

The sizable donation, disclosed in new campaign filings on Monday, comes amid intensifying talk among Republican donors and strategists about redirecting money to protect their narrow Senate Republican majority amid growing fear of complete Democratic control of Washington in 2021.

Three other donors made $1 million contributions in June to the Senate Leadership Fund. Mr. Adelson has been a major supporter of Mr. Trump, and his wife, Miriam, received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Mr. Trump in 2018.

Almost no one is talking openly about abandoning Mr. Trump at this point. A total collapse at the top of the ticket, Republican strategists and donors agree, would only make holding the Senate harder.

But maintaining the Senate is an urgent imperative for the G.O.P.: A Democratic Senate could offer a glide path for liberal Supreme Court nominees from a President Biden, or block Mr. Trump’s judges if he won a second term. And right now, Senate Republican incumbents and candidates are losing badly in the money chase not just in the top Senate battlegrounds — states like Maine, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina — but also in some deep red states, such as Montana, where seats are now increasingly up for grabs.

Five of the most endangered Republican senators up for re-election were out-raised by a combined $18.5 million in the second quarter by their Democratic challengers, recent campaign filings show.

The private discussions about whether to shift resources toward imperiled Republican Senate candidates reflect a mix of factors: a lack of confidence that Mr. Trump will beat Mr. Biden; fear that the president is already a drag on down-ballot candidates; desire to maintain a G.O.P. “firewall” on Capitol Hill if Mr. Biden prevails; and the belief that money is not among Mr. Trump’s myriad problems.

The sheriff of Jacksonville, Fla., on Monday cast doubts on the readiness of security plans for next month’s Republican National Convention, citing a lack of communication about logistics as well as funding constraints.

The sheriff, Mike Williams, said that with less than 40 days until the convention, time was running out for law enforcement officers to develop plans for the event in the city, Florida’s largest.

“I am compelled to express my significant concerns with the viability of this event,” Sheriff Williams said in a statement. “With a growing list of challenges — be it finances, communication and timeline, I cannot say with confidence that this event and our community will not be at risk.”

The convention, which is scheduled for Aug. 24 to Aug. 27, was moved from Charlotte, N.C., last month after Mr. Trump balked at social distancing restrictions instituted by Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat.

Since then, Florida has become a hot spot for the resurgent virus, leading to intense criticism of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, over his handling of the outbreak.

Sheriff Williams, a Republican, said that preparing for the event on such short notice was a “huge lift” and that the communication required to make critical steps come together had never seemed to jell.

The sheriff added, “We are simply past the point of no return to execute the event with safety and security that is our obligation.”

A Republican National Committee spokeswoman defended the party’s convention preparations on Monday.

“The R.N.C. continues to work closely with local leadership in Jacksonville on planning for the convention, including on health and security measures, and the Department of Justice is in the process of allocating millions of dollars in a safety grant,” said the spokeswoman, Mandi Merritt.

At a virtual event for the country’s largest Muslim-American PAC on Monday, Mr. Biden pledged to combat Islamophobia and include Muslim-Americans in his policymaking process if elected president. In return, a large group of Muslim-American leaders have thrown their support behind his campaign.

“I’m not just asking for your support because the alternative is unthinkable,” Mr. Biden said, addressing attendees at Emgage Action’s Million Muslim Voters Summit. “I want to earn your vote. I want to work in partnership with you to make sure your voices are included in the decisionmaking process.”

Muslim-American leaders who participated in the virtual summit — part of an effort by advocacy groups to turn out a million Muslim voters in November — urged Mr. Biden to support Palestinian rights and to abandon policies that have disproportionately affected Muslims under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Nihad Awad, chief executive of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, noted in particular the Obama administration’s expansion of the federal terrorist watchlist system, which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional last year on the basis that it violated due process rights.

Linda Sarsour, a prominent activist who was a national surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign and has been critical of Mr. Biden in the past, offered her endorsement but emphasized that she and other activists would continue to “hold him accountable to our communities” after Election Day.

Emgage Action endorsed Mr. Sanders in the Democratic primary but has since backed Mr. Biden. Other groups and individuals, including Representative Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota, endorsed Mr. Biden in a letter released shortly before the summit.

The election, Ms. Sarsour said, “is not about who you like and who you don’t like — it’s about whether you want to defeat fascism in America.”

Joe Biden’s commanding advantage in the race for the White House shows no sign of abating. He led by 15 percentage points in an ABC News/Washington Post survey of registered voters on Sunday, and he has held nearly a double-digit lead in an average of polls for more than a month.

The last time a candidate sustained such a large advantage for so long was nearly 25 years ago, when Bill Clinton led Bob Dole in 1996, writes Nate Cohn, polling analyst for The Upshot.

After a quarter-century of closely fought elections, it is easy to assume that wide leads are unsustainable in today’s deeply polarized country. Only Barack Obama in 2008 managed to win the national vote by more than 3.9 percentage points. The other big leads all proved short-lived.

With over three months to go, there’s time for the race to change in Mr. Trump’s favor. He could enjoy a turnout advantage or a relative advantage in the battleground states to make it a more competitive race.

But as Mr. Biden’s commanding lead endures well into its second month, it becomes harder to assume that it is just another fleeting shift in the polls. It’s possible the nation’s political stalemate has been broken, at least for now, by one issue: the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Much as the financial crisis caused a fundamental change in the dynamics of American politics in 2008, the coronavirus appears to be doing the same in 2020.

When Ashley Hinson introduced Mr. Trump during a 2017 rally, she said “I’m what you would call a recovering journalist.” Her recovery apparently did not include maintaining basic standards of offering credit when lifting passages of text from another source, including The New York Times.

Ms. Hinson, a Republican state representative in Iowa who is running against Representative Abby Finkenauer in what figures to be one of the nation’s most competitive House districts, has lifted verbatim sentences on her campaign website and in published op-eds more than a dozen times since her campaign began last year.

Last Wednesday Ms. Hinson published on her campaign website an essay titled “Creating America’s new normal: China must be held accountable.” The 642-word piece included 91 words, across three separate passages, that were identical to a March 11 New York Times story by Ana Swanson about the Trump administration’s efforts to encourage pharmaceutical companies to manufacture more of their products in the United States.

The Times wrote: “Chinese pharmaceutical companies have supplied more than 90 percent of U.S. antibiotics, vitamin C, ibuprofen and hydrocortisone, as well as 70 percent of acetaminophen and 40 to 45 percent of heparin in recent years, according to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.”

Ms. Hinson wrote: “Chinese pharmaceutical companies have supplied more than 90 percent of U.S. antibiotics, vitamin C, ibuprofen and hydrocortisone, as well as 70 percent of acetaminophen and 40 to 45 percent of heparin in recent years.”

The Times wrote: “The administration has been preparing an executive order, which could be released in the coming days, that would close loopholes allowing the government to purchase pharmaceuticals, face masks, ventilators and other medical products from foreign countries. The hope is that increasing government demand for American-made drugs and medical products will provide an incentive for companies to make their products in the United States.”

Ms. Hinson wrote: “We must close loopholes allowing the government to purchase pharmaceuticals, face masks, ventilators and other medical products from foreign countries. Increasing government demand for American-made drugs and medical products will provide an incentive for companies to make their products in the United States.”

Ms. Hinson’s website also borrowed exact passages from the Des Moines Register and from The Hill, an outlet that covers Washington; in op-eds, she has taken phrases from CNBC; and her platform on veterans issues uses near-identical language to Ms. Finkenauer, her Democratic opponent, among other instances.

Ms. Hinson’s campaign took down some of the pieces that copied passages from other outlets after a Times reporter informed her campaign about it.

“I was unaware of the plagiarism when I reviewed drafts presented to me by staff,” Ms. Hinson wrote on Twitter. “As a journalist I take this extremely seriously and am deeply sorry for the mistake. The staff responsible will be held accountable.”

A coalition of 27 scholars and voting-rights advocates says it knows a way to lift the nation’s flagging communal spirit, make elections more representative and close at least some of the yawning partisan divide: Make voting a civic duty, not an option to be exercised (or not) at one’s convenience.

In a study made public on Monday, the group argued that boosting participation in elections is “vital to the long-term legitimacy of the democratic system itself” at a time when democracy is facing historic challenges. The group was assembled by the Brookings Institution and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

“What does ‘the consent of the governed’ mean when only about half of the electorate shows up to choose our leaders?” the report asked. “Our elected leaders pass laws that affect every aspect of our daily lives. But they derive their powers from a minority of Americans — those who show up.”

The study takes its cue from Australia, where voting has been mandatory since 1924, turnout regularly pushes 90 percent and Election Day — Saturday there — has a party atmosphere, often featuring grilled “democracy sausages” for those who cast ballots. But civic duty voting, as if it sometimes called, is the rule in more than a score of nations, including in Mexico and most of South America.

The report urges Congress and the states to make voting mandatory, even if the ballot is blank, but also to make the penalty for not voting minimal and to offer a range of acceptable excuses for those who fail to cast ballots.

“It’s about showing up, rather than forcing people to make a choice,” Brenda Wright, senior legal strategist at the voting-rights group Demos and one of the study’s authors, said at a news conference on Monday.

The benefits to American democracy, the study says, would be manifold: Larger turnouts would force candidates to broaden their appeal, reducing partisanship; mandatory balloting would eliminate the incentive to suppress the votes of opponents’ supporters; and money that parties now spend on registering and turning out supporters could be devoted to educating them on the issues.

Advocates of the change allowed that a sales job awaits them: The group’s own polling concluded that two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea, although they know little about it. But they said that new awareness of the need for change, bolstered by events like the civil-rights movement spawned by the killing of George Floyd, provides an opening.

“The democracy movement is literally standing in the midst of a globalized movement for social justice,” said Cornell William Brooks, a Kennedy School professor and former N.A.A.C.P. president who also helped prepare the study. “What was seen as impossible to discuss five years ago is being discussed now.”

Teachers unions sued Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Monday over his emergency order pushing schools to fully reopen next month even as coronavirus cases in the state are surging, accusing Mr. DeSantis of violating a Florida law requiring that schools be “safe” and “secure.”

The suit, which appears to be the first of its kind across the country, sets up a confrontation between unions and politicians that could change the trajectory of school reopening over the coming weeks. In other parts of the country, including California and parts of Texas, many large school districts have concluded in recent days that it is not safe to hold in-person classes. But Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has been pushing for things to be different in Florida, which is home to five of the country’s 10 largest districts.

In Missouri, Gov. Mike Parson also condemned the closings of schools and local youth athletic complexes while arguing that there is little risk to children who contract the coronavirus.

Mr. Parson, a Republican who is up for re-election in November and will face Nicole Galloway, a Democrat who is Missouri’s state auditor, said during a Friday interview with a St. Louis conservative talk radio host that the priority should be restarting activities for children.

“These kids have got to get back to school,” he said in the interview, which was reported on by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get Covid-19, which they will, and they will when they go to school. They’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctors’ offices, they’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it and most of it all proves to be that way.”

While children are indeed less likely to become ill from the coronavirus, studies show, some older children spread the virus just as efficiently as do adults. There have been more than 35,000 cases of coronavirus in Missouri as of Monday morning, according to a New York Times database, with 1,158 deaths in the state.

Ms. Galloway, in a tweet, called Mr. Parson’s remark “stunning ignorance.”

“He admitted that he’s OK with your kids (and your families) getting the deadly disease when he sends them back to school,” she wrote. “Does he not realize multiple American kids have died after being infected?”

President Trump’s new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, announced a beefed-up campaign team on Twitter on Monday, made up of people who, as he put it, “are longtime #MAGA and will help DJT win in 105 days.”

Among those being promoted are Justin Clark, a lawyer and campaign veteran who is also Mr. Stepien’s business partner in a political consulting firm that has recently advised congressional candidates. Mr. Clark, 45, who had served as senior counsel to the president’s re-election, will become deputy campaign manager.

Mr. Clark has taken an aggressive posture against voting by mail, even during the pandemic. And in 2019, in a leaked tape, Mr. Clark seemed to suggest that Republicans cheat to get votes.

“Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Mr. Clark said at a meeting of Republican lawyers in Wisconsin last November. “Let’s start protecting our voters.”

He warned that in 2020, the Republicans will take it a step further, employing more aggressive monitoring of polling places on Election Day.

“Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program,” Mr. Clark said.

Mr. Clark, a veteran of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, served for a time as White House director of intergovernmental affairs. He subsequently became a partner in the Washington office of the Milwaukee-based firm Michael Best & Friedrich

Mr. Clark also joined with Mr. Stepien to form a political consulting firm called National Public Affairs, according to corporate filings. The firm has been paid more than $650,000 by a wide range of campaigns, campaign finance filings and other documents show, for activities that continued at least through the end of last month.

It is unusual for top aides to a presidential bid to simultaneously moonlight for other campaigns. Their clients, all Republicans, have included Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia and Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who were both coaxed by Mr. Trump to leave the Democratic Party; Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the former White House physician running for a northern Texas congressional seat; and Kathaleen Wall, who on Tuesday lost a runoff to represent the Houston area in Congress.

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Astor, Peter Baker, Julian E. Barnes, Alexander Burns, Nate Cohn, Nick Corasaniti, Reid J. Epstein, Nicholas Fandos, Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, Patrick Healy, Astead W. Herndon, Thomas Kaplan, Annie Karni, Jonathan Martin, Katie Rogers, Rick Rojas, Giovanni Russonello, David E. Sanger, Stephanie Saul, Eliza Shapiro, Kenneth P. Vogel, Neil Vigdor and Michael Wines.