The Morning: And the Trumps themselves?

The investigation shows no sign of winding down.

View in browser|nytimes.com July 2, 2021 By David Leonhardt and Claire Moses Good morning. The Trump Organization has been indicted. Donald Trump, Allen Weisselberg and Donald Trump Jr. in 2017.Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Cars, tips and tuition Donald Trump's company has long engaged in aggressive accounting maneuvers that involve classifying many of its executives' personal expenses as business expenses. Trump's residences are considered part of the business. So are his aircraft. More than $70,000 to pay for his haircuts has fallen into the same category, as has almost $100,000 paid to a hair and makeup artist of Ivanka Trump. The company even classified a suburban New York estate that Eric Trump once called "a retreat for the Trump family" as an investment property, as a Times investigation disclosed last year. These practices have allowed the Trumps to reduce their tax bills because business expenses are not subject to the same taxes that personal income is. Some experts say that the pattern amounts to tax evasion, while Trump has long insisted that the company has done nothing wrong. Yesterday, the Manhattan district attorney said that the company, known as the Trump Organization, had crossed the line into illegality on dozens of occasions and charged it with a fraud scheme stretching over 16 years. The charges do not involve the Trump family's expenses like the residences and haircuts; they are focused instead on the company's longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who was also personally charged. But the common theme — aggressively treating personal expenses as business expenses, sometimes legally and perhaps sometimes not — is clear. Trump 2024? It remains uncertain whether Trump or his children will ever face charges, but it seems possible. "These investigations work in stages, and there's no indication that the investigation is winding down," Ben Protess, who's been covering the investigation, told us. "Once you indict the C.F.O. and the company, that pretty much only leaves Donald Trump himself." Although many legal scholars believe that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, a former president clearly can be. A central question is whether Weisselberg — who's 73 and began working as a bookkeeper for Fred Trump, Donald's father, a half-century ago — will remain loyal to the family, as he has so far. If he instead chooses to cooperate with investigators, it could expose the Trump family to substantial legal risk. Politically, there is a big difference between the case ending with yesterday's charges and Trump himself facing charges. Evidence of Trump's questionable business practices — including using his presidency to help his company — has done little to change the views of his political supporters. Fighting criminal charges, however, could require much of Trump's time and attention and complicate any potential presidential campaign in 2024. "On the other hand," our colleague Maggie Haberman said, "Trump allies say he will be reluctant to say he is not seeking office again until the investigation is over. So he appears locked on his current course for the foreseeable future." The details In court yesterday, Carey Dunne, a senior member of the district attorney's office, described the Trump Organization's behavior as "a sweeping and audacious illegal payments scheme." The indictment argues that the company gave Weisselberg $1.7 million in perks that it recorded as compensation in an internal spreadsheet but kept off its books to avoid taxes. Weisselberg also failed to mention some of the payments in his own tax filings. (Here is a more detailed Times explainer of the charges.) Weisselberg pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said he would fight the charges. Lawyers for the Trump Organization released a statement calling the charges politically motivated: "This case signals that it is now open season for local prosecutors to target federal political opponents and adversaries." Among the charges in the indictment: The Trump Organization spent almost $1.2 million in untaxed income to allow Weisselberg and his wife to live in an apartment on the Hudson River. While living there, Weisselberg also concealed the fact that he was a New York City resident, allowing him to evade city taxes. The company paid for two of Weisselberg's relatives to attend Columbia Prep, a private school in Manhattan, at a cost of $359,000. Trump personally signed some of the checks. The company illegally paid for two Mercedes-Benzes for Weisselberg and his wife, as well as beds, TVs and carpeting installation for his and his children's homes. The company gave — and hid — cash to Weisselberg that he used as holiday tips. For more: The charges may hurt Trump's finances. Indictments can jeopardize relationships with banks, and Trump has large outstanding loans. THE LATEST NEWS Supreme Court Voters waiting to enter a polling station in Phoenix last year.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times In a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the Supreme Court upheld voting restrictions in Arizona, further weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling will make it easier for states to pass future restrictions, creating a high legal bar for challenges. In a separate ruling, the court said charities were not obligated to reveal the identities of their major donors. It was the last day of the court's term, the traditional day for justices' retirement announcements. Stephen Breyer, 82, did not retire, disappointing many Democrats. Here's a recap of the term's biggest cases. Politics Liz Cheney at the Capitol yesterday.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose Liz Cheney, a Republican and a Trump critic, for one of the eight spots on the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot. The Justice Department paused federal executions, a year after the Trump administration resumed them. The House passed a transportation and drinking water bill, effectively its opening offer on infrastructure talks. 130 countries signed onto Biden's proposal for a global minimum corporate tax. J.D. Vance, the author of "Hillbilly Elegy," will run for the Senate in Ohio as a Republican. Other Big Stories In 2018, an inspector said the collapsed tower near Miami was in "good shape," despite an engineer's concerns. The inspector is facing scrutiny. Johnson & Johnson's coronavirus vaccine protects against the Delta variant, the company said. The Arctic's "last ice area," a potential refuge for polar bears and other wildlife, appears less resilient against climate change than scientists thought. The star sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson, 21, tested positive for marijuana, a result that may bar her from the Olympics. Opinions Times Opinion has started a series exploring ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment. Here are the first three articles: The U.S. used to be a country of invention and change. Today, our politics are sclerotic and our dreams are small, writes Daniel Immerwahr. What happened? "Where the American dream used to be owning a home with a white picket fence, now it is getting out of debt," Astra Taylor argues. And Jonathan Holloway argues for a mandatory national service program. ARTS AND IDEAS Raheem Sterling scored against Germany, helping England advance to the Euro 2020 quarterfinals.Catherine Ivill/Getty Images Euro 2020, at last The quarterfinals of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament are today and tomorrow. (The event, like the Toyko Olympics, was postponed but kept its 2020 name.) Winning is a big deal in Europe: Only 10 countries have done so since the first tournament, in 1960, with Germany, Spain and France having won more than once. This year, the monthlong event is scattered across the continent with different cities hosting games. Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Ukraine and England are still in the running. Predicting a winner is tough. Belgium has a golden generation, but its defense is aging. Spain passes the ball well, although sometimes, maybe, too much. England, seeking its first title, seems to be gathering strength, beating Germany in the knockout stages of a major tournament for the first time in 55 years. And many of the initial favorites — including Portugal, France and the Netherlands — are already eliminated. Lastly, there's a mascot. His name … is Skillzy. PLAY, WATCH, EAT What to Cook Johnny Miller for The New York Times Layered with whipped cream, raspberry purée and saltines, this easy cake is great for July 4. Art In the 1950s, this Fire Island hamlet was a refuge for gay men and lesbians. See photos from the era in a new exhibition. What to Play Is "cloud gaming" — which would allow people to play modern video games without an expensive console or computer — the future? What to Watch Here are the best movies and TV shows to stream this month. Take the News Quiz See how you do compared with other Times readers in this week's News Quiz. Now Time to Play The New York Times The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was uninvited. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online. Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: Actress Washington of "Scandal" (five letters). If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here. MORNING READS Nigel Buchanan Profile: Joe Rogan has one of the biggest platforms in media. His fans see him as an outsider. Devil wears Prada: Fashion magazine editors once had their own "fiefdoms." That's over. Modern Love: Some people flip houses. She flips men. A Times classic: How to take the perfect fireworks photo. Lives Lived: As a teenager in Bulgaria, Boryana Straubel was a self-described math nerd. After immigrating to the U.S., she became a star executive at Tesla and founded a jewelry company that uses recycled metals. Straubel died at 38. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. We are off on Monday for the holiday. See you Tuesday. — David P.S. If you're in New York, The Times has a newsletter, Summer in the City, filled with activities for both kids and adults. Read it, or sign up. You can see today's print front page here. "The Daily" is about the fight over critical race theory in schools. On the latest episode of "The Argument," a debate over who has power in American society. Tom Wright-Piersanti and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. I want to thank you for spending time with The Morning today. Subscribers to The New York Times make this newsletter possible, and I hope you'll consider becoming one of them. You can do so here. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. The Morning Briefing newsletter is now The Morning newsletter. You received this email because you signed up for the newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

The Morning: The mess in New York

Plus an Instagram whodunit

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story July 1, 2021 By David Leonhardt Good morning. We make sense of the mess in New York's mayoral election. Board of Elections volunteers counted absentee ballots in Queens yesterday.Dave Sanders for The New York Times 'The most botched election results' New York City released another round of results in the Democratic mayoral primary — and city officials insist that they're accurate this time. They say they have resolved the "discrepancy" that caused them to report inaccurate results on Tuesday from their new ranked-choice voting system. Today's newsletter tries to sort through the mess. Does ranked choice have to be so complicated? No. In a ranked-choice system, voters don't select only one candidate. They can rank several, in order. The goal is to let people both note their first choices and also state a preference among the others. It's become increasingly popular in recent years. Several cities — including Minneapolis; Portland, Maine; and Santa Fe, N.M. — manage to conduct ranked-choice voting and announce results on election night. The cities scan the ballots, and computers quickly tabulate the results, as Rob Richie, the president of FairVote, a group that advocates ranked-choice voting, told me. Tabulating the results of a ranked-choice election is not a difficult process for modern computers. What's New York's problem? The slow and flawed counting of ballots is part of the city's broader problems with election administration. The New York City Board of Elections has suffered from "decades of nepotism and bungling," a Times investigation by Brian M. Rosenthal and Michael Rothfeld found last year. As their story explained: As the workings of American democracy have become more complex — with sophisticated technology, early voting and the threat of foreign interference — New York has clung to a century-old system of local election administration that is one of the last vestiges of pure patronage in government, a relic from the era of powerful political clubhouses and Tammany Hall. … Some staffers read or watch Netflix at the office, the employees said. Others regularly fail to show up for work, with no fear of discipline. Several employees said some staffers punch in and then leave to go shopping or to the gym. (Here's a new Times story about recent chaos at the elections board.) How is this allowed? Part of the issue is New York State. Unlike most states, New York lets party leaders fill local election boards, rather than staffing them with nonpartisan experts. New York State has also decided not to prioritize a quick reporting of election results. Absentee ballots can arrive up to a week after Election Day so long as they are postmarked by Election Day, and voters can later fix errors in their ballots, as Jerry Goldfeder, an elections lawyer, told my colleague Dana Rubinstein. State officials don't start counting absentee ballots until at least a week after Election Day. That's why officials took weeks to release results in some congressional races last year. The mayor's race was another example of New York's slowness. On primary night, the city announced only the first choices of in-person voters. A week later (this past Tuesday) came the full ranked-choice results from those voters. Not until sometime in July will the city release the absentee results. It's true that there are some unavoidable tensions between efficiency and voting access. But New York's slowness also stems from a lack of competence. States with higher voter turnout report results much faster than New York does. What about the 'discrepancy'? The Election Board committed a stunning error in its announcement of results on Tuesday. In its count, it included 135,000 votes that did not actually exist — made-up votes that the board had created to test its ranked-choice software. It described the mistake as a "discrepancy" in a tweet on Tuesday. Yesterday, the board released a new count, with the made-up votes removed. But the damage to the election's credibility is significant. "This is the most botched election results reporting by an official agency I've ever seen in the U.S.," Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report wrote. What are the latest results? The new results are similar to the earlier ones, with Eric Adams having a small lead over Kathryn Garcia — of 15,000 votes, or 2.2 percentage points — in the final round. But the unreleased absentee ballots seem likely to favor Garcia, given the neighborhoods they come from, Wasserman and other election analysts noted. (It is still possible that Maya Wiley could vault over Garcia into the final two, with either Wiley or Adams then winning.) The key reason the race has narrowed, compared with Adams's sizable lead after the first round, is that far more of Wiley's supporters preferred Garcia than him. Adams ran the most conservative campaign of the three candidates and did best among working-class voters across racial groups. Wiley, the most liberal of the three, fared better among college graduates, especially those who were Black or Hispanic. Garcia was strongest among white college graduates, The Times's Thomas Edsall noted. I see two main takeaways: One is that working-class voters across races — even in a Democratic primary in New York City — are fairly moderate, as I described in Tuesday's newsletter. Two is that New York suffers from some of the worst-run elections in the United States. Related: Democrats lost ground among Hispanic and Black voters in the 2020 national elections, a detailed polling analysis shows. Many have tried to overhaul New York's Board of Elections. None have succeeded. I want to thank you for spending time with The Morning today. Subscribers to The New York Times make this newsletter possible, and I hope you'll consider becoming one of them. You can do so here. THE LATEST NEWS The Virus The director of the C.D.C. reiterated that vaccinated people usually did not need masks, but she said that areas with low inoculation rates might choose to enact mask mandates. "If you are among the vaccinated, most experts say you don't need to be fearful," The Times's Tara Parker-Pope writes in an explainer on the Delta variant. Delta is fueling a rise in cases — and in countries with low vaccination rates, in deaths — around the world. Politics Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the vote yesterday to establish a committee to investigate the Capitol riot.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times The House voted — largely along party lines — to create a special committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Times's Visual Investigations team has created a comprehensive picture of the Capitol riot. President Biden said that he would raise the pay of federal firefighters, calling the current wage — around $13 an hour — "ridiculously low." Other Big Stories Donald Rumsfeld in 2006.Doug Mills/The New York Times Donald Rumsfeld died at 88. He served as defense secretary for two Republican presidents and was an architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A grand jury indicted the Trump Organization and Alan Weisselberg, a top executive, in a tax investigation over "fringe benefits" handed out at the company. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction, releasing him from prison and barring a retrial. (Here's an explainer.) Commemorating 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping cast it as China's savior and warned foreign powers not to interfere. Floor by floor, these are the lives lost in the building collapse near Miami. Biden will visit the families of the victims today. An international tribunal convicted two former Serbian officials of war crimes from the 1990s, closing the final case from the Balkan wars. Opinions Those in the West who are banking on the Chinese Communist Party's demise are mistaken, the journalist Yi-Zheng Lian argues. "The party may well outlive us all." On "Sway," Kara Swisher interviews Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT ARTS AND IDEAS Mario Meneses Why many tennis pros barely scrape by In pro tennis, the biggest stars earn fortunes in prize money and endorsements. But for the rank-and-file, the sport is far less lucrative: After travel, coaching and other expenses, most players barely scrape by. "If you are not in the top 100, you are basically not making any money," Vasek Pospisil, a player who has been ranked as high as 25th in the world, said. Contrast that with the N.H.L., Pospisil noted, which has roughly 700 players and a guaranteed minimum salary of $700,000. The inequality also means many players lack the resources to improve. "The players ranked 150 to 250 are on the cusp of breaking through, but they need to be able to invest in themselves," Gaby Dabrowski, another player, said. "You need a coach to guide you, to have a vision for your tennis, to see your blind spots, and you need money for that." One thing that separates tennis from many other sports is that its players are not in a union. Last year, Pospisil and Novak Djokovic announced the formation of the Professional Tennis Players Association, which would negotiate on behalf of players. The fledgling organization has yet to win the support of other top players on both the men's and women's sides. And it faces opposition from the game's most powerful institutions. For more, read Michael Steinberger's article in The Times Magazine. — Sanam Yar, a Morning writer PLAY, WATCH, EAT What to Cook Andrew Purcell for The New York Times These turkey pitas with tahini have the flavors of falafel, without the frying. Here are more no-cook recipes for a heat wave. What to Read Meet T.J. Newman, who wrote her debut thriller, "Falling," while working as a flight attendant. Hollywood Revisited Mae West vamped and winked. She was also a trailblazing screenwriter in the 1930s, with an interest in lives on the margins. Music The art of whistling almost died. Can a 31-year-old who has whistled in the studio for Dr. Dre keep it alive? Now Time to Play The pangrams from yesterday's Spelling Bee were habitual and halibut. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online. Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: History (four letters). If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here. MORNING READS Dan Schneider says he is ready to make a return to television.Philip Cheung for The New York Times Nickelodeon's hitmaker: Dan Schneider once reigned over children's TV. What happened? An Instagram whodunit: Who is rg_bunny1? Peek inside: Betsey Johnson's Malibu dream house. A Times classic: The Food desk taste-tested 10 hot dogs. Here are the best. Lives Lived: Greg Noll, a fearless surfer known as "Da Bull," tackled stunningly big waves in Hawaii in the 1960s. With his bodybuilder's physique and black-and-white prison-stripe trunks he was difficult to miss in the water. Noll died at 84. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David P.S. The word "dudealicious" appeared for the first time in The Times yesterday. Here's today's print front page. "The Daily" is about a new era in college sports. On the Modern Love Podcast, the collision of two marriages. Claire Moses, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. The Morning Briefing newsletter is now The Morning newsletter. You received this email because you signed up for the newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018