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Russia Continues to Meddle in Election to Aid Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says

Vice President Mike Pence made plans to visit Wisconsin after Joe Biden opted out of traveling there for the convention. Democrats called for an audit of the Postal Service’s new policies, citing concerns about potential mail-in voting issues.

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U.S. intelligence officials say Russia has continued to meddle in the election, seeking to help the Trump campaign.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.

At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.

Those conclusions were included in a statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.

But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike Mr. Trump, the officials said.

The assessment by Mr. Evanina suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings: The White House has objected to conclusions that Moscow is working to help Mr. Trump, and Democrats on Capitol Hill have expressed concern that the intelligence agencies are not being forthright enough about Russia’s preference for him and that the agencies are introducing China’s anti-Trump stance to balance the scales.

Democrats see the interference campaign run by Russia as a far more direct and urgent threat.

“The fact that adversaries like China or Iran don’t like an American president’s policies is normal fare. What’s abnormal, disturbing and dangerous is that an adversary like Russia is actively trying to get a Trump re-elected,” said Jeremy Bash, a former Obama administration official.

Russia tried to use influence campaigns during the 2018 midterm voting to try and sway public opinion, but did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure.

Mr. Evanina said it would be difficult for adversarial countries to try to manipulate voting results on a large scale. But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting process or take steps aimed at “calling into question the validity of the election results.”

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Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s choice of running mate carries more significance than a vice-presidential pick usually would.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

For all the attention it gets, the vice-presidential choice has usually proved of little significance to the outcome of an election. But as Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, draws closer to naming his running mate, some party leaders think his selection could prove particularly meaningful this time.

Mr. Trump has struggled to find a line of attack that works against Mr. Biden. But depending on whom Mr. Biden chooses, Mr. Trump might be able to make this contest not about his Democratic challenger but about the No. 2 person on the ticket.

That is why questions about the history of one of the front-runners for the position, Representative Karen Bass of California, have such resonance. The Trump campaign has already seized on her trips to Cuba as a young activist and her 2010 appearance at the opening of the Church of Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles.

“Biden has been a frustratingly elusive target for Trump because Biden does not sound, look or feel like the ‘radical left,’” David Axelrod, who was President Barack Obama’s senior strategist, said in an email. “So Trump is hoping to depict Biden as a Trojan Horse and the running mate as the radical-in-waiting.”

Many Democrats assume much of this anti-Bass research was unearthed and distributed by one of her rivals; that would hardly be unusual in American politics. Where it came from may not be relevant: The Trump campaign would probably have uncovered it soon enough.

First, Mr. Biden was going to name a running mate around Aug. 1. Then he publicly floated another timeline, the end of the first week of August, but an aide confirmed that an announcement would not happen this week.

Even as the political world awaits his decision and donors are readying finance events featuring the still-unnamed running mate — “date and time to be announced” — Mr. Biden himself has not appeared to be in a big rush.

This comes as no surprise to those who know him well. Throughout his career, on issues large and small, Mr. Biden has shown himself to be openly meditative, with a penchant for missing his own deadlines as he mulls his options.

Ahead of the 2004 and 2016 presidential races, he deliberated extensively about whether to run before deciding against it. Last year, as Mr. Biden grappled again with the question, he missed one self-imposed deadline before finally joining the race. On a different scale, he is often late to his own events, lingers on rope lines and phone calls, and has been slow to formulate responses during several pivotal moments of the 2020 contest.

Mr. Biden’s habit of pushing deadlines leaves some Democrats anxious and annoyed, while others say it brings him to a well-considered decision, eventually.

Mr. Biden is now expected to name his vice-presidential choice shortly before the Democratic convention, which begins Aug. 17. While that is in keeping with the timeline of the two previous Democratic nominees, it is at odds with Mr. Biden’s own words.

“The deadline for a V.P. nomination is the convention,” said Representative Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign. “He’s very deliberative with his decision-making. It works.”

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Vice President Mike Pence with his daughter in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday. He is planning a trip to Wisconsin during the Democratic National Convention.Credit...Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times, via Associated Press

When Vice President Mike Pence heard that Mr. Biden had scrapped his trip to Milwaukee to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, he saw an opportunity.

Mr. Pence and the Trump campaign had already scheduled a political event for the vice president in Wisconsin on Aug. 19, according to two administration officials, an attempt to fill a void they thought Mr. Biden was leaving in the battleground state.

The decision to fly Mr. Pence to Wisconsin during the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, simply because Mr. Biden decided he should not go, underscored the different political wagers the two campaigns are making.

Trailing by a wide margin in the polls in Wisconsin, the Trump campaign is assuming there is more to be gained politically by showing up, speaking in front of a small crowd and getting coverage from local television stations and newspapers. Mr. Biden, by contrast, has chosen to stay away and portray it as the responsible choice in the face of a public health crisis and the recommendations of health officials discouraging travel in the state.

A spokesman for Mr. Biden, T.J. Ducklo, called Mr. Pence’s planned trip to Wisconsin “disgraceful,” adding: “It’s the perfect analogy for how under his and President Trump’s leadership, this White House consistently puts their own political interests above the health and safety of the American people.”

In Wisconsin, aides to Mr. Pence also saw an opportunity to troll their opponent for the past mistakes of his party. “You would think that for a party that didn’t show up four years ago, they’d learn from their lessons and just show up,” Devin O’Malley, press secretary for Mr. Pence, said of Mr. Biden’s decision to call off his trip to Milwaukee.

Mr. Biden has led Mr. Trump in most polls of the state. And Democrats in Wisconsin said they saw no evidence on the ground that voters wanted the convention to go on, or Mr. Biden to visit, with the number of positive cases still rising.

The Postal Service on Friday announced a substantial reorganization designed to increase efficiency as Democratic lawmakers demanded an inquiry into whether changes by Mr. Trump’s appointees could threaten the effective use of mail-in ballots just before the November election.

Louis DeJoy, a major donor to Mr. Trump’s campaigns, was named to oversee the nation’s post offices in May. On Friday, he shifted top personnel, including some decades-long veterans of the Postal Service, and reorganized the organizational structure of the Postal Service.

“The new organization will align functions based on core business operations and will provide more clarity and focus on what the Postal Service does best; collect, process, move and deliver mail and packages,” the Postal Service said in a statement. The changes come at a time of heightened scrutiny for Mr. DeJoy, as critics charge that changes to overtime policies and other previous actions threaten to slow delivery of ballots just as millions of people are expected to vote by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic.

There are anecdotal reports around the country of slow mail delivery and in New York City, thousands of ballots in a Democratic primary were invalidated in part because some of them were not delivered by the post office in time. In comments to the Postal Service Board of Governors on Friday, Mr. DeJoy insisted that the changes he has made — including limitations on overtime — will not keep the Postal Service from delivering ballots on time in November’s election.

“Despite any assertions to the contrary, we are not slowing down Election Mail or any other mail,” Mr. DeJoy told the board members. “Instead, we continue to employ a robust and proven process to ensure proper handling of all Election Mail.”

That has not satisfied Mr. Trump’s Democratic adversaries on Capitol Hill, who have been critical of the changes at the Postal Service and frustrated by Republican refusal to provide billions of dollars in additional funding for the agency.

Seven Democratic members of Congress urged the inspector general for the Postal Service to audit the new policies imposed by the postmaster general, saying they are concerned the changes “pose a potential threat to mail-in ballots and the 2020 general election.”

In a letter to Tammy L. Whitcomb, the inspector general, the lawmakers referenced reports that Louis DeJoy, the recently appointed postmaster general, has limited overtime pay and made other changes that critics say have slowed mail delivery across the country and made it less reliable.

The lawmakers urged Ms. Whitcomb to investigate the impact of the changes on the delivery of critical mail, including medication, paychecks and bills.

“These delays also pose a threat to the November election, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic when millions of Americans are expected to choose to vote by mail rather than wait in long lines on Election Day,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Democratic lawmakers who signed the letter were: Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Gary C. Peters of Michigan and Thomas R. Carper of Delaware; and Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia and Brenda Lawrence of Michigan.

Democrats, including those who signed the letter, have charged that Mr. DeJoy is doing the bidding of the president, who has long attacked the Postal Service on Twitter. In his remarks on Friday, Mr. DeJoy rejected that accusation.

“While I certainly have a good relationship with the President of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the President, or anyone else in the Administration, is wholly off-base,” he said. “I serve at the pleasure of the Governors of the Postal Service, a group that is bipartisan by statute and that will evaluate my performance in a nonpartisan fashion.”

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Kanye West in July.Credit...Randall Hill/Reuters

The Democratic Party filed a formal challenge on Friday to keep Kanye West off the Wisconsin presidential ballot in November, citing numerous irregularities in the qualifying petitions his campaign had submitted.

The challenge includes affidavits from seven Wisconsin voters who said they were misled into signing the petitions supporting Mr. West’s presidential aspirations.

Sharon J. Brown of Milwaukee said she was approached outside a pharmacy and asked to sign a petition in support of more polling places. “I would not have signed the petition had I known it was to put Kanye West on the ballot,” Ms. Brown wrote in an affidavit.

Another voter said he signed after being told the petition was to keep Mr. West off the ballot.

“If what these affidavits say is true, the Kanye West campaign broke the law,” said Michael S. Maistelman, a lawyer representing the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

Among other potential grounds for a challenge is the fact that some of the 2,400 signatures submitted to the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Tuesday are not actual Wisconsin voters: A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist, Daniel Bice, found the supposed signatures of well-known personalities on the petitions — Mickey Mouse, Senator Bernie Sanders and Mr. West, himself.

Republican operatives in at least half a dozen states are involved in placing Mr. West’s name on November ballots as a third-party candidate, a plan some have argued is an effort to depress Black votes for Mr. Biden.

In an interview with Forbes magazine on Thursday, Mr. West, when asked if he was trying to hurt Mr. Biden’s campaign, said, “I’m not denying it; I just told you.”

In a separate development Friday, a watchdog group filed a complaint against a lawyer representing both Mr. Trump and Mr. West, questioning whether she breached legal ethics by representing competing candidates.

The complaint was filed to the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation by the Washington-based Campaign for Accountability.

Lane Ruhland, the lawyer, submitted the petitions on Mr. West’s behalf in a last-minute attempt to have him placed on the Wisconsin ballot. She is known for her extensive legal work for the Republican Party, including for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.

Ms. Ruhland could not be reached for comment.

The House Judiciary Committee can sue to force the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II to testify before Congress, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a 7-to-2 decision that enforcement of congressional subpoenas was crucial to its oversight duties over the executive branch and remanded to a panel of judges other issues Mr. McGahn raised in the case. Mr. McGahn is unlikely to appear before Congress ahead of the election, but the decision endorsed strong congressional oversight powers and Congress’s ability to take the White House to court if an administration fails to comply with its subpoenas.

The two judges on the court appointed by President Trump recused themselves from the case.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Mr. McGahn in April 2019 as part of its investigation into possible obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump. He was a key witness for the inquiry conducted by the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into the possible obstruction of justice and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. McGahn told the special counsel that the president ordered him to have the Justice Department dismiss Mr. Mueller, and when he refused and threatened to quit, Mr. Trump backed off. Later, the president ordered him to deny that he had ever asked and issue a memo saying as such. He threatened to fire Mr. McGahn if he failed to comply.

The committee sued Mr. McGahn, who left the White House in 2018, when the administration directed him not to appear, asking the court to quash the claims that Mr. Trump’s aides are “absolutely immune” from its subpoenas.

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Bill Hagerty, who was endorsed by President Trump, won the primary to succeed the retiring Senator Lamar Alexander on Thursday.Credit...Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

The Tennessee Senate Republican primary may have taken a competitive turn in its final weeks, but Bill Hagerty proved that for red-state candidates in the Trump era, there are still few things more valuable than the endorsement of Donald J. Trump himself.

On Thursday, Mr. Hagerty, 60, who served as the president’s first ambassador to Japan, trounced 14 other candidates in the primary to succeed the retiring Senator Lamar Alexander.

The race had tightened in its homestretch, with an upstart candidate, Manny Sethi, riding a wave of grass-roots enthusiasm as he positioned himself as the field’s true conservative and most committed ally of the president, earning the support of prominent conservatives like Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Mr. Sethi, 42, an orthopedic surgeon, attacked Mr. Hagerty for his background in private equity, longtime friendship with Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and support from the Tennessee Republican establishment.

In the end, it wasn’t enough. Mr. Trump had endorsed Mr. Hagerty before he even entered the race. When skepticism arose about Mr. Hagerty’s commitment to the tenets of Trumpism, Mr. Hagerty squelched it simply by promoting that endorsement even more.

Mr. Hagerty will face off against Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice advocate who became the first Black woman to win a major-party Senate nomination in Tennessee.

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Marquita Bradshaw is the first Black woman to be nominated for the Senate by a major party in Tennessee.Credit...Max Gersh/The Commercial Appeal, via Associated Press

Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice advocate who has run her Senate campaign on a shoestring budget, won an upset victory in the state’s Democratic primary on Thursday, brushing aside a party-backed candidate who had significantly out-raised her.

Ms. Bradshaw won by roughly nine percentage points to become the first Black woman to gain a major party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee.

She faces an uphill climb against the Republican nominee, Bill Hagerty, to claim the seat held by the retiring senator, Lamar Alexander. Tennessee has not elected a Democratic senator since Al Gore, 30 years ago.

In an interview on Friday, Ms. Bradshaw embraced her status as an underdog.

“Working people showed that my viability was different,” she said. “I knew it was going to happen — I could see the momentum.”

Ms. Bradshaw finished ahead of four opponents, including James Mackler, an Army veteran backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, had raised more than $2 million. The most recent filings available showed that Ms. Bradshaw’s campaign had raised only $8,400 by the end of March.

On the campaign trail, Ms. Bradshaw wrote and spoke frequently about environmental racism, drawing on her experience growing up near a Superfund site.

“People here know how important it is for an environmental-justice voice to be in the U.S. Senate,” she said. “It’s about the importance of shaping a just transition away from pollution. People’s health and lives are on the line.”

A Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia is facing a call to exit the race, after a report on Friday revealed that he had written a book containing racist themes.

According to an article published by HuffPost, Matt Lieberman, the son of former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, self-published a novel in 2018, called “Lucius,” whose main character is an old white southern man who uses racial slurs throughout the book and imagines he owns a Black slave who can communicate with plants and animals.

“He definitely needs to drop out,” James Woodall, the president of the Georgia chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said in an interview, adding that the novel uses tropes that “reinforce the very functions of white supremacy.”

“This is a very unique time in the history of our state and in our nation, and we do not need any distractions,” Mr. Woodall said. Mr. Woodall is supporting Raphael Warnock, a pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and one of Mr. Lieberman’s Democratic opponents.

In a statement, Mr. Lieberman said he had written the book in response to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 “as a clear-eyed and honest look at racism in America” and that its resurfacing now was a “testament to the strength of my candidacy today.”

Mr. Lieberman separately told HuffPost that he recognized his “approach to this delicate subject is not palatable for every reader.”

Mr. Lieberman is running in a special election for the seat formerly held by Johnny Isakson, a Republican, who resigned at the end of last year, citing health reasons. The seat is currently held by Senator Kelly Loeffler, a financial services executive with no previous government experience, who was appointed last year by Gov. Brian Kemp.

Mr. Warnock, Mr. Lieberman’s opponent, has the backing of prominent Democrats in the state including Stacey Abrams and Representative James E. Clyburn.

Georgia officials do not expect any candidate to receive a majority of the vote in the all-party election, which will be held Nov. 3. Such a scenario would force a runoff between the top two candidates.

A New York State court judge rejected President Trump’s bid to temporarily halt proceedings in a lawsuit filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of rape. The ruling allows the case to move forward as the election looms.

Ms. Carroll had published a memoir last year that accused Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s. After he responded to the book by calling her a liar and saying he had never met her, she sued him for defamation.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump had sought to put the suit on hold while an appeals court decides whether to dismiss a similar lawsuit filed by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice.” The lawyers argued that the Constitution gave a sitting president immunity against civil lawsuits in state court.

But on Thursday, Justice Verna L. Saunders in New York rejected their arguments, pointing to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that concluded Mr. Trump could not block a subpoena for his tax returns by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

The ruling allows the lawsuit to enter the discovery phase. Lawyers for Ms. Carroll had requested that Mr. Trump provide a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material was on a dress that Ms. Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the incident.

The ruling also means that both Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump could sit for depositions under oath in the coming months.

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Nick Freitas is challenging Representative Abigail Spanberger, a first-term Democrat, in central Virginia.Credit...Steve Helber/Associated Press

The Republican lawmaker challenging Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, for her House seat in central Virginia is drawing sharp criticism for selling face masks that describe the coronavirus as “MADE IN CHINA,” the type of language that has stoked xenophobia and racism toward Asian-Americans during the pandemic.

The candidate, Nick Freitas, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, was chosen by state Republicans to face Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer who narrowly ousted a Republican incumbent in 2018.

Mr. Freitas’s campaign store features a $15 set of three face masks, one of which displays “COVID-19” in large type, with smaller type below that reads “*MADE IN CHINA.*”

The phrase echoes rhetoric favored by Mr. Trump, who has sought for months to tie the virus to China and blame the country for spreading what he sometimes calls the “Chinese Virus.”

Asian-American civic and political leaders have accused Mr. Trump of seeking a scapegoat to distract from his failed response to the public health crisis. They say the language used by him and his supporters has contributed to the thousands of episodes of harassment and discrimination that Asian-Americans have reported during the pandemic. One group counted roughly 2,500 such incidents between March 19 and July 22.

“We are highly disturbed that delegate Nick Freitas has decided to bankroll his campaign using a narrative that identifies Covid-19 with China,” the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium Action Fund said in a statement that was signed by multiple other political groups and community leaders, adding that Mr. Freitas’s campaign “exacerbates anti-Asian racism and endangers our lives.”

In a statement, Mr. Freitas’s campaign manager, Joe Desilets, said that the masks were intended to target the “communist regime in China” that “lied to the world” about the virus and enabled its spread. “Nick will not hesitate to hold such a regime accountable,” he said.

Bettina Weiss, Ms. Spanberger’s campaign manager, said she was focused on “solving the very real problems” facing the nation and that she had “no comment on her opponent’s choice to sell divisive novelty merchandise trivializing a global pandemic.”

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Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke at a news conference last month about extending eviction protections.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

America is in the middle of a child care meltdown.

Millions of children are out of school and unlikely to return anytime soon. Day care centers are being pushed to the brink of collapse. And parents are trying, and often failing, to balance care with working.

None of this surprises Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts senator — still under consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate — made child care a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, proposing one of the most ambitious plans in the primary field.

Now, the problems Ms. Warren described during her campaign have hit a crisis point. And it doesn’t seem as if help is coming anytime soon — at least not from Congress or the White House.

The Times’s Lisa Lerer and Jennifer Medina recently spoke to Ms. Warren about what had changed since she ran for president, how she saw Mr. Biden’s policy plans and why strengthening child care is like building a transit system.

“We build roads and bridges so that people can get to work. We have communications systems so people can communicate and learn about jobs, right? All of those things build an infrastructure that keeps this economy going,” she said.

“Child care is a core part of our infrastructure. But when someone has a baby, in effect, our country says, ‘Hey, you’re on your own now. Good luck. Hope you can find something out there.’ That just makes it 10 times harder for every parent who’s trying to juggle raising a child and making a living.”

Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Emily Cochrane, Sydney Ember, Hailey Fuchs, Katie Glueck, Maggie Haberman, Nicole Hong, Thomas Kaplan, Annie Karni, Lisa Lerer, Adam Nagourney, Elaina Plott, Giovanni Russonello, Stephanie Saul, Michael D. Shear, Matt Stevens, Jim Tankersley and Michael Wines.

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