Dr. Joel Kovel, a Founder of Ecosocialism, Is Dead at 81

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Dr. Kovel metamorphosed from a conventional therapist into a Marxist who abandoned the medical profession as too corporate and commercial. He became a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, imperialists, Zionists and gas guzzlers, together with neoliberals and environmentalists who were insufficiently anticapitalist.

Dr. Kovel was an intellectual father of ecosocialism. A Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants, he also experienced in his later years what he called a Christian spiritual conversion.

When he published his autobiography last year, after so many metaphysical meanderings, he titled it “The Lost Traveller’s Dream,” a nod to the poet William Blake’s reference to wanderers in the wilderness seeking to distinguish between good and evil.

Dr. Kovel rarely defined his positions in shades of gray.

He renounced psychiatry because, he said, he was fed up with “the pernicious system of diagnosis” dictated by professional associations and their manuals, and by insurance companies driven by statistics and reflexive prescriptions.”

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Dr. Kovel speaking at an anti-nuclear rally in New York in 1982.

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Dith Pran/The New York Times

Whenever he launched an ideological crusade, he did so zealously — even if, as in the case of ecosocialism, its very definition and the collateral demand for an appealing alternative to capitalism were not self-evident.

Under ecosocialist theory, income would be guaranteed, most property and means of production would be commonly owned, and the abolition of capitalism, globalism and imperialism would unleash environmentalists to vastly curtail industrialization and development whose pollution would otherwise cause catastrophic global warming.

“Capitalist production, in its endless search for profit, seeks to turn everything into a commodity,” Dr. Kovel wrote in 2007 on the socialist website Climate and Capitalism. “It is plain that production will have to shift from being dominated by exchange — the path of the commodity — to that which is for use, that is for the direct meeting of human needs.”

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Joel Stephen Kovel was born on Aug. 27, 1936, in Brooklyn to Louis and Rose (Farber) Kovel. His father was an accountant and the namesake of the Kovel Rule, a legal doctrine that extended the lawyer-client confidentiality privilege to other professionals and experts. It arose when a federal appeals court voided the elder Mr. Kovel’s one-year sentence for contempt after he had refused to answer questions about a client in a case.

After graduating from Baldwin High School in Baldwin, N.Y., Joel received a bachelor’s from Yale in 1957 and a medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. While in medical school, he was first exposed to extreme poverty during field study in Suriname. He trained at Downstate Psychoanalytic Institute in Brooklyn.

In addition to his wife, a filmmaker, Mr. Kovel is survived by two children, Jonathan Kovel and Erin Fitzsimmons, from his marriage to Virginia Ryan, which ended in divorce; a daughter, Molly Kovel, from his marriage to Ms. Halleck; her sons, Ezra, Peter and Tovey Halleck, from an earlier marriage; his brother, Alex; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Kovel was director of resident training in psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx from 1977 to 1983. He was also a professor of psychiatry there until 1986, when he left to teach courses in Marx and Freud at the New School in Manhattan. He taught at Bard College from 1988 to 2009.

He was also editor emeritus of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; wrote for The New York Times Book Review; and, with Michel Lowy, drafted the Ecosocialist Manifesto in 2001, on which the movement was founded.

Among his other books is “A Complete Guide to Therapy” (1976), which, a Times reviewer wrote, “can be recommended to everyone — from people looking for help with emotional problems to those with serious questions about the entire business of emotional help.” Another is “Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine” (2007).

Dr. Kovel was the Green Party candidate for the United States Senate from New York in 1998. (He finished fourth, with about 15,000 votes; Chuck Schumer won, with about 2.4 million.)

He unsuccessfully challenged Ralph Nader for the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2000. Mr. Nader was nominated at a convention with 295 votes. Two other candidates were tied for second place with 10 each. Dr. Kovel came in last with three.

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Trump Exaggerates Mueller Team’s Ties to Obama and Democrats

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Fact Check of the Day

President Trump claimed “all these investigators” are Democrats — an overstatement — and incorrectly said that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, served under President Obama for eight years.

President Trump addressing the National Rifle Association Leadership Forum on Friday in Dallas.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

President Trump said

“So you have all these investigators; they’re Democrats. In all fairness, Bob Mueller worked for Obama for eight years.”

the facts

This is exaggerated.

At least nine of the 17 lawyers on the team led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, have donated to Democratic campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission records. One has previously identified as a Democrat in a blog post.

Three others are registered as Democrats, The Washington Post and PolitiFact have reported. But the political affiliations of the remaining four lawyers are unclear.

A spokesman for the special counsel’s office confirmed the names of the lawyers who are on the team.

Mr. Mueller is a registered Republican and Mr. Trump’s characterization of his work history is not entirely accurate.

A Republican president, George W. Bush, chose Mr. Mueller to lead the F.B.I. for a 10-year term that began in 2001. Mr. Mueller was asked to stay on by President Barack Obama in 2011. Two years later, Mr. Mueller retired from the F.B.I. after having served under Mr. Obama for around four and a half years.

And Mr. Mueller was appointed to lead the Russia investigation by the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, also a Republican.

Linda Qiu is a fact-check reporter, based in Washington. She came to the Times in 2017 from the fact-checking service PolitiFact.@ylindaqiu

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Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators

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And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website.

And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo.

“The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort.

Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession.

After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian history by forming a joint oil-pumping venture with the British company BP, called TNK-BP.

But soon, BP executives came to suspect the Russian partners had close ties to the F.S.B., the main successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B., and other Russian security services. The F.S.B. classified oil field maps and closely tailed British employees. Once, during a business dispute with the Russians, BP’s office in Moscow was raided by police officers armed with assault rifles.

Amid this conflict with BP, one of Mr. Vekselberg’s partners, German Khan, turned up for a dinner with a BP executive at a remote hunting lodge in Russia with a chrome-plated pistol, according to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. Mr. Khan confided to the executive that he considered the 1972 film “The Godfather” a “manual for life.”

Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.

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2 F.B.I. Officials, Once Key Advisers to Comey, Leave the Bureau

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WASHINGTON — Two top F.B.I. aides who worked alongside the former director James B. Comey as he navigated one of the most politically tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history resigned on Friday.

One of them, James A. Baker, was one of Mr. Comey’s closest confidants. He served as the F.B.I.’s top lawyer until December when he was reassigned as the new director, Christopher A. Wray, began installing his own advisers. Mr. Baker had been investigated by the Justice Department on suspicion of sharing classified information with reporters. He has not been charged.

The other aide, Lisa Page, advised Mr. Comey while serving directly under his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe. She was assailed by conservatives after texts that she had exchanged with the agent overseeing the investigation into links between President Trump’s campaign and Russia were made public. In the messages, they expressed anti-Trump views but took aim at Hillary Clinton and other political figures as well.

The decisions by Mr. Baker and Ms. Page to leave the bureau were unrelated. Mr. Baker said in a telephone interview that he would be joining the Brookings Institution to write for Lawfare, its blog focused on national security law.

“I love the F.B.I.,” he said. “I have tremendous respect for the bureau — the F.B.I. was great, is great and will be great.”

Mr. Comey relied heavily on Mr. Baker as he oversaw the politically charged investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server and Mr. Trump’s campaign. After the president pressed Mr. Comey to say publicly that he was not under investigation, Mr. Baker cautioned against it because he anticipated that the F.B.I. would eventually have to examine Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.

The president abruptly fired Mr. Comey a year ago and has cited a variety of rationales. His lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said this week that Mr. Comey was ousted because he declined to say publicly that Mr. Trump was not under scrutiny at the time in the Russia investigation.

Ms. Page advised F.B.I. leadership on one of Mr. Comey’s most consequential decisions in the investigation into Mrs. Clinton: his move to hold a news conference to announce that the bureau was recommending that she face no charges.

House Republicans have also accused Mr. Baker of being the source of the leaks about a salacious dossier of information about Mr. Trump compiled by a former British spy.

Mr. Comey said in a statement that Mr. Baker “represents the best of the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.”

“He has protected the country and the rule of law throughout his career and leaves an inspiring legacy of service,” Mr. Comey said. “He is what we should all hope our kids become, a person of integrity.”

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Trump Is Said to Know of Stormy Daniels Payment Months Before He Denied It

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WASHINGTON — President Trump knew about a six-figure payment that Michael D. Cohen, his personal lawyer, made to a pornographic film actress several months before he denied any knowledge of it to reporters aboard Air Force One in April, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.

How much Mr. Trump knew about the payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress, and who else was aware of it have been at the center of a swirling controversy for the past 48 hours touched off by a television interview with Rudolph W. Giuliani, a new addition to the president’s legal team. The interview was the first time a lawyer for the president had acknowledged that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payments to Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.

It was not immediately clear when Mr. Trump learned of the payment, which Mr. Cohen made in October 2016, at a time when news media outlets were poised to pay her for her story about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. But three people close to the matter said that Mr. Trump knew that Mr. Cohen had succeeded in keeping the allegations from becoming public at the time the president denied it.

Ms. Clifford signed a nondisclosure agreement, and accepted the payment just days before Mr. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump has denied he had an affair with Ms. Clifford and insisted that the nondisclosure agreement was created to prevent any embarrassment to his family.

Mr. Giuliani said this week that the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen totaled $460,000 or $470,000, leaving it unclear what else the payments were for beyond the $130,000 that went to Ms. Clifford. One of the people familiar with the arrangement said that it was a $420,000 total over 12 months.

Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has known since last year the details of how Mr. Cohen was being reimbursed, which was mainly through payments of $35,000 per month from the trust that contains the president’s personal fortune, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement.

One person close to the Trump Organization said people with the company were aware that Mr. Cohen was still doing “legal work” for the president in 2017, but declined to say more about what Mr. Weisselberg knew. Another person familiar with the situation said that Mr. Weisselberg did not know that Mr. Cohen had paid Ms. Clifford when the retainer payments went through.

If Mr. Weisselberg was involved in directing the use of the funds to silence Ms. Clifford, it could draw Mr. Trump’s company deeper into the federal investigation of Mr. Cohen’s activities, increasing the president’s legal exposure in a wide-ranging case involving the lawyer often described as the president’s “fixer” in New York City.

In interviews on Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Giuliani insisted that the president had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush payment — and then paid him another $330,000, if not more — which was in direct conflict with the longstanding assertion by Mr. Trump and the White House that he did not know about the hush money or where it came from.

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Giuliani sought to clarify his statements by saying that he did not know whether Mr. Trump had known that some of the payments to Mr. Cohen had gone to Ms. Clifford. “It’s not something I’m aware of, nor is it relevant to what I’m doing, the legal part,” Mr. Giuliani said.

A lawyer for the Trump Organization declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for the organization did not respond to an email about Mr. Weisselberg.

The president has said that he would view any investigation into his finances or those of his family as “a violation,” though he was referring to the investigation into Russia by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III; the investigation into Mr. Cohen is being run by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

The payment to Ms. Clifford is a part of that investigation. The circumstances surrounding it had become all the murkier this week after Mr. Giuliani gave an explanation of how the funds to Ms. Clifford were accounted for that contradicted all those that came before it.

After initially appearing to back Mr. Giuliani’s assertions in a series of Twitter messages on Thursday, Mr. Trump reversed course on Friday, after a series of headlines suggesting that the president had lied about knowing of the hush payment. In remarks to reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Giuliani and said he would eventually “get his facts straight.”

“Virtually everything said has been said incorrectly, and it’s been said wrong, or it’s been covered wrong by the press,” Mr. Trump told reporters, though he excused Mr. Giuliani by explaining he had “just started a day ago.”

In a written statement later in the day, Mr. Giuliani said that he had not been “describing my understanding of the president’s knowledge.” And he reversed a previous suggestion that the payment to Ms. Clifford was motivated by the election. Mr. Giuliani said on Friday that the payment was personal in nature and “would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”

While some White House officials had insisted that Mr. Trump was pleased with Mr. Giuliani’s performance on Fox News in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, two people close to the president painted a different picture. They said that Mr. Trump was displeased with how Mr. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, conducted himself, and that he was also unhappy with Mr. Hannity, a commentator whose advice the president often seeks, in terms of the language he used to describe the payments to Ms. Clifford.

The nature of the payments is significant because of campaign finance laws that regulate who may contribute to candidates and how much they can give.

If Mr. Cohen or others paid to silence Ms. Clifford primarily out of fear that a public airing of her story would have harmed Mr. Trump’s election prospects — rather than to keep it from his family for personal reasons — then the payment would most likely be viewed as an illegal campaign expenditure. Mr. Giuliani told The Times on Friday that the issue was “primarily” about keeping Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, from being embarrassed by the claim, which Mr. Trump has maintained was false.

But if investigators determine that the hush payment was in effect a campaign expenditure, then how the funds were distributed could take on added legal significance. Mr. Cohen had been careful to say that neither the campaign nor the Trump Organization was involved in the deal or any effort to reimburse him.

Under campaign finance law, Mr. Trump would have been within his rights to pay Ms. Clifford himself as a way to protect his presidential prospects — though he would have had to have formally made note of it in his public campaign filings, which had no accounting of the payment. If he directed Mr. Cohen to pay it on his behalf, then that could qualify as an illegal, coordinated campaign expenditure, even if Mr. Trump later paid him back.

Any involvement by the Trump Organization would further complicate the legal picture, given that American election law is strictest of all when it comes to corporate involvement with political campaigns. Businesses are not allowed to donate directly to campaigns or to coordinate with them.

Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael J. Avenatti, has been arguing for months that Mr. Trump’s company was more involved in the arrangement than Mr. Cohen had been letting on.

After filing a lawsuit on Ms. Clifford’s behalf seeking to get out of the deal — which he has called invalid — Mr. Avenatti showed that Mr. Cohen had used his Trump Organization email at one point in arranging the payment. He also pointed to a secret document in California that a Trump Organization lawyer filed to force Ms. Clifford into arbitration this year.

At the time, the Trump Organization said that the lawyer, Jill A. Martin, who works in California, had acted in a personal capacity to help Mr. Cohen, who needed assistance with the initial arbitration filing from someone licensed in the state. The Trump Organization had said that “the company has had no involvement in the matter.”

In an interview, Mr. Avenatti said that any indication that still more executives at the Trump Organization knew about the effort to reimburse Mr. Cohen for the payment to Ms. Clifford could lead to further investigation of the Trump family business.

“There’s no question it opens up another avenue of inquiry into the depths of the involvement of the Trump Organization,” he said.

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The Biggest Stories in American Politics This Week

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Be they reports on the questions the special counsel plans to ask President Trump or more revelations about a payment made to Stormy Daniels, here are six of the biggest stories driving American politics this week.

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President Trump confirmed that he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment to Stormy Daniels.

In an explosive contradiction on Thursday, President Trump confirmed that he had paid a monthly sum to his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, reimbursing a $130,000 payment made shortly before the 2016 presidential election to ensure a pornographic film actress did not come forward with allegations of an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump had previously told reporters that he had no knowledge of the payment made to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who performs as Stormy Daniels. But Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the latest additions to the president’s legal team, said on Fox News late Wednesday that he had documentation showing that Mr. Trump had personally repaid Mr. Cohen.

Mr. Giuliani indicated that he came forward with the allegations to prove that no campaign finance laws had been violated. But his remarks, which continued in a series of interviews and television appearances on Thursday, may have exposed the president to legal and political danger.

On Friday, the president undercut Mr. Giuliani’s statements, saying that Mr. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, was new to the legal team and would “get his facts straight.”

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As President Trump revamped his legal team, tensions continued to rise between the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress.

Mr. Trump hired on Wednesday Emmet T. Flood, the Washington lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, to join his legal team. He replaces Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who had pushed for Mr. Trump to cooperate with the special counsel’s inquiry.

Mr. Cobb had argued that cooperating with the investigations would bring them to a swift conclusion, but the shake-up indicates that the president is bracing for a longer and more contentious battle on multiple legal fronts.

Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, pushed back on Tuesday against revelations that articles of impeachment had been drafted for his potential removal, warning that “the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

But Mr. Trump chose on Wednesday to side with House Republicans over his own Justice Department in their push for department officials to turn over sensitive documents related to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, his investigation and other politically charged cases.

Mr. Mueller has at least four dozen questions that he wants to ask President Trump. The questions delve into Mr. Trump’s most combative Twitter posts and relationships with his staff and family. The open-ended questions are intended to help Mr. Mueller learn more about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia and whether the president obstructed the initial inquiry.

The questions chiefly ask about the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s decisions to fire his first national security adviser and the F.B.I. director, a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between his campaign officials and Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton and his relationship with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

But the questions also touch upon the president’s businesses, including what happened during his 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant and any discussions with his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, about a Moscow real estate deal.

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Amid nuclear diplomacy on two fronts, Mr. Trump asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for withdrawing American troops from South Korea.

Mr. Trump is said to have ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans to withdraw all American troops from the Korean Peninsula, just weeks before his landmark summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. The decision was unnerving for many in northeast Asia who are concerned about China’s growing military prowess and skeptical about Mr. Kim’s intentions.

President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, whose office denied reports that the White House was considering removing troops from his country, also endorsed Mr. Trump this week for a Nobel Peace Prize, citing his involvement in coordinating talks between the two Koreas. Mr. Trump fanned anticipation of his meeting with Mr. Kim by pushing for it to be held in the Demilitarized Zone, the strip of land that divides the North and South.

The Trump administration also embraced on Tuesday Israel’s claims that Iran had entered its nuclear deal under false pretenses. European allies said the disclosures that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu made in a dramatic presentation on Monday actually reinforced the case for the 2015 deal.

Mr. Trump has threatened to end the Iran nuclear deal as early as May 12, and the embrace of Mr. Netanhayu’s announcement seemed to set the stage for Mr. Trump’s decision. But, as the president often says, “We’ll see.”

The Trump administration said on Monday that it would delay a decision on imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on the European Union for 30 days as it sought more concessions from trading partners. Officials are wary of retaliation on American products, and the delay gives trade officials the ability to focus on China in a separate trade battle.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other trade officials visited China this week for trade negotiations, bringing with them new demands for Chinese concessions. But with internal divisions on the American negotiating team and bureaucratic reshuffling among the Chinese policymakers, the talks ended after two days without a deal or even a date to resume negotiations.

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One of the president’s former doctors said that Mr. Trump had drafted a letter on his health, and another won’t return to his old job. Other Trump appointees also faced headwinds.

Mr. Trump’s former personal doctor, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, said Trump aides took all of his medical files related to Mr. Trump in February 2017 soon after he told The New York Times that Mr. Trump took a drug to promote hair growth. Dr. Bornstein had also written a letter in December 2015 saying that Mr. Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” but told CNN that Mr. Trump had dictated the contents of that letter.

Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, Mr. Trump’s embattled and unsuccessful pick to lead the Veterans Affairs Department, is no longer his personal physician, but will remain in the White House Medical Office.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt continued to face allegations about his coziness with lobbyists, including reports that he shared a house with a lobbyist in Oklahoma. Mr. Pruitt also allowed a lobbyist friend to play an unusually influential role in orchestrating a December trip to Morocco. The country hired the lobbyist shortly after.

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N.S.A. Triples Collection of Data From U.S. Phone Companies

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Still, the large and growing volume of data gathered shows that the N.S.A. continues to collect significant amounts of information about Americans’ phone and text messages after changes made by Congress in a 2015 law, the USA Freedom Act, which overhauled how the N.S.A. can gain access to domestic telecom data.

That law ended a once-secret program by which the N.S.A. had systematically collected Americans’ domestic phone logs in bulk — billions of records per day. The program traced back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and was revealed in 2013 by leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, setting off a wide debate over surveillance and privacy.

Though Congress ended that program, lawmakers still wanted the N.S.A. to retain its function: the ability to analyze links between people in search of hidden associates of terrorism suspects. So it authorized a new system in which the bulk records stay with the phone companies but the N.S.A. can get copies of all records of a target and everyone with whom a target has been in contact.

The phone companies turn over both whatever historical records they have for targets and for their associates, as well as new logs from calls and texts after the order. The system requires the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to agree that there is “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the seed target is linked to terrorism.

In 2016, the first full year for which that replacement system was in operation, the government obtained orders to target 42 people and collected just over 151 million call detail records. In 2017, the government obtained orders for 40 targets. (The orders generate data for 180 days, so some of the 2016 orders kept generating additional data in 2017, and some of the 2017 orders may have been reauthorizations of expiring 2016 orders pegged to the same targets.)

After the N.S.A. put the record sets obtained from the telecoms into its databases, intelligence analysts queried that data using 31,196 search terms associated with Americans last year, up from 22,360 a year earlier.

The large volume of records generated from a relatively small number of targets is attributable to several factors. One is the exponential math associated with gathering the communications logs not just of targets, but of every person with whom a target has been in contact.

Another is that some conversations generate more than one record at phone companies. These apparently include back-and-forths via text messages, as well as calls involving cellphone users on the move, whose calls are handled by different cellphone towers.

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Officials have also cautioned that some records gathered by the N.S.A. are duplicates: A call between an AT&T customer and a Verizon customer, for example, generates records at both companies.

The report listed several other notable statistics about surveillance activities. For example, it showed that the number of people whom the surveillance court granted approval to target with wiretaps for national-security purposes dropped somewhat, from 1,687 in 2016 to 1,337 last year.

By contrast, the number of targets for the N.S.A.’s warrantless surveillance program — noncitizens abroad whose communications are collected from American companies like Google — grew significantly, from 106,469 in 2016 to 129,080 last year.

The warrantless surveillance program also grew out of the once-secret post-Sept. 11 programs, and is now conducted under a law called Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. It has attracted controversy because when foreign targets communicate with Americans, the government collects those Americans’ emails and other private messages without a warrant, too. Congress reauthorized that law without major changes this year.

The report contains several statistics about how the government has used Americans’ information that it gathered without a warrant under Section 702. Analysts queried metadata harvested from that program for information about an American 16,924 times in 2017. That was down from 30,355 times the previous year; the report did not explain the drop.

F.B.I. agents did not open any criminal investigations into an American that had no connection to national security in 2017 based on Section 702 data, the report said. Nor did they scrutinize any communications in the Section 702 database that came up in response to queries for an American’s information when agents were working on a criminal case that had no connection to foreign intelligence.

But the report did not disclose how many times the bureau did either of those things when agents did deem their work to have a foreign intelligence or security link.

It also did not disclose the volume of Americans’ communications or metadata gathered by the N.S.A.’s work abroad, where its activities are regulated by Executive Order 12333, not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it is permitted to engage in bulk collection.

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Pence’s Doctor Resigns as White House Medical Shake-Up Continues

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White House officials and others familiar with the situation said the circumstances surrounding Dr. Jackson’s fall from grace and Dr. Pena’s departure dated back many years, to longstanding divisions in the medical unit — which is part of the military — where there are two factions that do not get along.

Dr. Pena — known to patients simply as “Dr. Jen” — submitted her memos about Dr. Jackson last fall to Nick Ayers, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, who shared them with John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Both Mr. Ayers and Mr. Kelly directed Dr. Pena to go through her military chain of command to address the issue, the person said.

CNN, which obtained the memos, reported that Dr. Pena had accused Dr. Jackson of having intervened in a medical matter involving Karen Pence, Mr. Pence’s wife, and possibly violating her medical privacy rights. She also said Dr. Jackson had become irate and aggressive during a confrontation over the situation, and that he had fostered an unprofessional atmosphere in the medical unit.

Dr. Jackson, an Iraq war veteran, has insisted that all the allegations against him were untrue, an assertion backed up by Mr. Trump and numerous White House aides from the current and previous administration.

But some members of the medical unit, which houses a few dozen doctors and nurses, described Dr. Jackson as a bully and a sloppy record-keeper, who drank too much — sometimes becoming intoxicated during overseas trips with the president — and loosely dispensed strong drugs to curry favor with the powerful politicians and political aides he admired. Several of them detailed the alleged misconduct in interviews with the Democratic staff of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Despite Mr. Trump’s strong defense of him, Dr. Jackson has not resumed his job as the top physician in the medical unit since he announced his withdrawal from consideration as secretary of veterans affairs. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that another doctor, Sean Conley, who had been acting in Dr. Jackson’s role while he prepared for confirmation hearings, would stay in the post instead.

“Dr. Jackson continues to be an active-duty Navy doctor that’s assigned here at the White House,” Ms. Sanders said, “where there are a number of doctors that are part of the White House Medical Unit.”

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Jobless Rate Looks Like Old Times, but the Economy Doesn’t

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The last time the unemployment rate fell below the 4 percent threshold was in 2000, during a period of frenetic activity remembered as the dot-com boom.

Nine years into a sustained, if less feverish, economic recovery, that milestone has been achieved again.

The Labor Department said Friday that the jobless rate in April fell to 3.9 percent, raising anew the question of just how tight the labor market can get, and for how long.

In the past half-century, only the late 1960s brought an extended period when the rate stayed below 4 percent.

“We’ve continued to add jobs routinely every month for so long, and the unemployment rate we have reached is amazing,” said Catherine Barrera, chief economist of the online job site ZipRecruiter.

President Trump crowed about the landmark on Friday, tweeting, “4% is Broken!”

The steady-as-she-goes economy has produced a record 91 straight months of job growth. That may represent a healthier foundation than the dot-com era, when pride — or, as it was branded, “irrational exuberance” — went before a fall.

But the banner number announced Friday did not resolve any of the broader questions that economists have about this unparalleled run.

The most prominent is a mystery that has proved impervious to easy explanation: why wage increases haven’t been more robust, when the market continues to edge toward full employment.

Friday’s report showed that hourly earnings went up by 2.6 percent over the past year, not much faster than inflation. The subdued wage gains eased the prospect that the Federal Reserve would accelerate its plans to raise interest rates, helping to send stocks higher. But lagging pay also reflects how the economy of 2018 is fundamentally different from earlier eras.

“A 3.9 percent rate today doesn’t suggest as tight a labor market as 3.9 percent in 2000 or 3.9 percent in the late 1960s,” said Ellen Zentner, Morgan Stanley’s chief United States economist.

A lot has changed since the turn of the century. The share of working-age women in the labor force began to fall in 2000, after increasing for decades. Men have been dropping out for much longer. The upshot is that a smaller share of people are participating in the labor market, and it’s easier to get low levels of unemployment when fewer people are vying for jobs.

In fact, a shrinking labor force in April is part of why the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent from 4.1 percent even as payrolls grew by a fairly routine 164,000 jobs.

The population is also older than they used to be, on balance. The baby-boom generation has moved steadily toward retirement over the last two decades. And those still working have not helped push wages up. Generally, workers climb the economic ladder fastest when they are young, and so an older work force may weigh on average wages, economists say.

In 2000, wages for rank-and-file workers rose at an annual rate of around 4 percent. Part of the problem now is that some 60 percent of the jobs added since 2010 have been in low-wage, service-sector jobs, according to Morgan Stanley.

Fifty years ago, there were plenty of factory jobs paying a decent wage, and unions held much greater sway. Manufacturing accounted for one in four jobs; today it’s not even one in 10.

The tech explosion of the late 1990s gave rise to lucrative roles in companies based on new business models. The share of the economic pie going to workers rose steadily for the first time since the 1970s — a feat not repeated since.

“No one is creating an e-commerce group out of nothing anymore,” said Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago staffing firm. Instead, companies are bulking up their warehouses to compete with Amazon, slotting in tens of thousands of relatively low-paid pickers, packers and stockers over the past several years.

Mr. Gimbel said he had seen a particular hunger for new bodies in call centers, which offer candidates the minimum wage to deal with consumers’ complaints about the gadgets they ordered online.

More recently, Mr. Trump’s flirtation with a trade war has thrust uncertainty into the economic picture. The White House has provided little clarity about whether its newly imposed steel and aluminum tariffs will extend to allies like Mexico, Canada and the European Union, and it seems no closer to smoothing over economic tensions with China.

Economists say it is too soon to tell how employers may change their hiring or expansion plans in response to the tariffs on Chinese goods, or to Beijing’s retaliation. But there are signs that companies that buy metals are feeling the effects already. The Institute for Supply Management said this week that manufacturing activity grew in April at its slowest pace since July.

Uncertainty over the price of raw materials could prompt factories to cut back from their recent hiring spree. Manufacturers added 73,000 jobs in the first quarter, much more than in the same period last year.

“A faster pace of wage growth would be great for households, but in a way that would create even more difficulty for policymakers,” Ms. Zentner said. An acceleration could force Fed officials to raise rates more aggressively, which would raise the cost of car loans and credit card debt.

However mixed the blessing, Ms. Zentner said, the ever-tightening job market could soon force faster growth in paychecks. “We are getting closer and closer to that flash point, but we don’t know exactly when it is going to happen,” she said.

A wave of bigger raises has already reached Chandler Steffy’s roofing company in Clive, Iowa.

Three years ago, Mr. Steffy could pay laborers less than $15 an hour. No longer. In March, the latest month measured at the state level, the jobless rate in Iowa was 2.8 percent, one of the nation’s lowest. Mr. Steffy now pays roofers $25 an hour, including benefits.

His rate for subcontractors has been spiking. It went up 7 percent in March, and will rise another 7 percent in May. There will be bumps in June and August, too. It’s all Mr. Steffy can do to keep himself in the game.

“There’s a price war going on for labor,” he said. He has had crews leave job sites before finishing a roof because they got a better offer from another contractor. “The next 18 months are going to be crazy,” he said.

Ben Casselman contributed reporting.

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Caught in the Theranos Wreckage: Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch and Walmart’s Waltons

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Even some of the world’s richest people may get duped, according to newly unsealed documents in a lawsuit filed on behalf of investors in the failing blood-testing company Theranos.

High-profile investors who collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars included Walmart’s Walton family, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, as well as Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education and her relatives.

The list of investors, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, came to light as part of a class-action lawsuit brought in 2016 by Robert Colman, a retired Silicon Valley investment banker, who claims that Theranos misled investors about its business and technology.

Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes when she was a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout, promised to revolutionize the lab industry using a few drops of blood from a simple finger-prick to look for everything from diabetes to cancer, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional blood test.

The company became a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with investors awarding the privately held company a valuation of around $9 billion. But the story began to unravel in October 2015 after The Wall Street Journal, owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., began questioning whether the tests worked. Theranos became the subject of federal investigations into its testing and claims of proprietary technology, which were called “nanotainers.” Much of the time the company had to resort to using conventional blood testing methods, unable to get federal approval for any test but one for Herpes.

Theranos and its founder also became embroiled in a series of lawsuits, involving investors as well as one of its key partners, Walgreens, a large drugstore chain, where it offered its tests. The company reached a settlement with Walgreens last August.

In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ms. Holmes with fraud, accusing her of exaggerating and lying about her technology to attract investors. As part of the S.E.C. action, Ms. Holmes agreed to pay $500,000, give up control of her company, and is barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company for 10 years. She and Theranos did not admit nor deny the allegations.

Theranos still faces the class-action lawsuit, and may still be subject to a criminal investigation by the United States attorney in San Francisco. The company’s future is unclear. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Theranos had always boasted a star-studded list of investors and directors — its board included the former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, two former United States senators, and Gen. Jim Mattis, the current secretary of defense. But while some high-profile investors’ links to Theranos had been previously known, the new documents provide a detailed list of financial amounts.

The Walton family invested about $150 million in 2014 through two separate entities, according to the investor list. Mr. Murdoch put in about $125 million, and the extended family of Ms. DeVos invested about $100 million.

“It’s obvious that they are highly disappointed in them as a company and as an investment,” said Greg McNeilly, the chief operating officer of The Windquest Group, the holding company of Ms. DeVos and her husband. Mr. McNeilly said the $100 million was a joint investment across multiple generations and branches of her family, and described the share held by Ms. DeVos and her husband as “minor.”

Other prominent investors, according to the list, included the Cox family; the Atlanta billionaires who own the media conglomerate Cox Enterprises and who invested $100 million; and a company affiliated with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim that put in about $30 million. Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, invested $1 million.

Representatives for Mr. Kraft, the Walton family, Cox Enterprises and News Corp. declined to comment.

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The Iowa governor just signed the nation’s most extreme abortion ban into law – ThinkProgress

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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed the country’s most restrictive abortion bill into law Friday, outlawing the procedure once a “heartbeat” is detected, which is usually at about six weeks — a time when many people do not yet know they are pregnant.

The bill has been dubbed the “heartbeat” bill, a highly loaded term, as one doctor pointed out in a HuffPost piece in 2016, asking instead that they be referred to as “fetal pole cardiac activity.”

The law has exceptions for cases of rape and incest. It was passed in the middle of the night earlier this week. Iowa had already banned abortions after 20 weeks. The law is sure to draw challenges in court, something the bill’s advocates say is actually part of their goal.

“It is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue of life,” state Rep. Shannon Lundgren (R), the bill’s floor manager, said.

Reynolds, who has in the past referred to abortion as “murder,” echoed that sentiment in a statement Friday.

“I understand and anticipate that this will likely be challenged in court, and that courts may even put a hold on the law until it reaches the Supreme Court,” Reynolds said in a statement. “This is bigger than just a law. This is about life.”

Reynolds and her allies did indeed draw a court challenge Friday, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Planned Parenthood confirmed they would be suing.

“Iowans can rest assured: [We] won’t let politicians get away with trying to block access to abortion,” the ACLU tweeted Friday evening.

North Dakota and Arkansas have both tried to pass “heartbeat” legislation in the past, but both attempts were blocked by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court declined to review each the cases after they were blocked by lower courts.

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An Ohio Senate Candidate Cloaks Himself Uncomfortably in Trump Garb

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“The reason why the president endorsed me and asked me to run is he wants somebody who can help him get his agenda done, not somebody who’s going to vote against him,” Mr. Renacci said as he sat in a booth at a chicken-wing restaurant here.

Mr. Renacci, with an estimated net worth of at least $34 million, according to Roll Call, boasts of a long and varied business career, with involvement in nursing homes, Harley-Davidson dealerships, a Chevrolet dealership and partial ownership of an arena football team. A quiet, casual demeanor helped ingratiate him with working-class voters in his district south of Cleveland even as he held on to the traditional Chamber of Commerce Republican vote.

“Businessmen and businesswomen have different styles,” he conceded. “I’m more the quiet style.”

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In Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Renacci faces competition for Trump voters who might again be drawn to someone who presents himself as an insurgent.

Credit
Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

He has lent $4 million to his Senate campaign.

All of that makes his embrace of Mr. Trump an imperfect fit. For one thing, Mr. Trump pledged to drain the swamp, and Mr. Renacci, who was first elected to the House nearly eight years ago, is testing just how long someone can be in Washington before becoming part of what must be drained.

In fact, not too long ago, Mr. Renacci wanted out of Congress entirely. He had been running for governor, but he switched to the Senate race after Josh Mandel, the Republican state treasurer, dropped out of the contest.

“This is a guy that doesn’t work the room,” said David B. Cohen, a political-science professor at the University of Akron. “It’s unclear whether he really enjoys what he does for a living right now.”

In Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Renacci faces competition for Trump voters who might again be drawn to someone who presents himself as an insurgent. His main opponent is Mike Gibbons, a wealthy investment banker who speaks admiringly of Mr. Trump’s agenda and raised money for him when he was running for president.

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“I’m an outsider, and I’m blunt, and I tell the truth,” Mr. Gibbons said at a rally outside Cincinnati on Thursday, where he appeared with Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. (“The establishment is all behind the other guy,” Mr. Paul said of Mr. Renacci, not meaning it as a compliment.)

In an interview, Mr. Gibbons said Mr. Renacci simply did not connect with people and could not beat Mr. Brown. At the rally, he was unsparing. “One of the best things I have going for me is when Jim Renacci speaks to a group, I get more votes,” he said to laughs. “I’d like to increase his speaking engagements.”

Another complication is the issue of trade.

Mr. Brown voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement as a House member and even wrote a book called “Myths of Free Trade.” When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum this year, Mr. Brown cheered him on.

Mr. Renacci, by contrast, has voted for trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, as well as to give President Barack Obama enhanced trade-negotiating power.

“The trade issue has been difficult for Renacci because he is really your typical big-business Republican,” Professor Cohen said. “Trump’s more populist tone on issues like trade dovetails really well with Sherrod Brown’s position on trade and other populist issues that Brown has been advocating for decades.”

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If Mr. Renacci makes it past the primary, he will face another, more difficult test against Senator Sherrod Brown in the general election.

Credit
Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Asked about trade, Mr. Renacci struggled. He suggested that Mr. Brown was focused on protecting steelworkers at the expense of other industries, like farming and manufacturing — precisely the criticism leveled at Mr. Trump. He then suggested that the president is coming around to his views.

“What he’s doing is he’s listening, learning and then he’s going to lead, so in the end I think the tariff policies and programs will change,” Mr. Renacci said of Mr. Trump. “In the end, he’ll get closer to what Ohio needs.”

Mr. Renacci’s embrace of Mr. Trump carries an obvious risk: turning off voters who see a risk that he would simply be a rubber stamp.

“Our president’s great, but he’s not always right,” said Carolyn Robey-Warren, the president of Ohio Carry, a gun rights group that endorsed Mr. Gibbons. She brought up an episode this year when Mr. Trump met with lawmakers after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.

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“When President Trump came out and said, ‘Take the guns first; we’ll worry about due process later,’ we want the guy that’s going to say, ‘Hold on now,’” she said. “And we’re afraid Jim Renacci will say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

Mr. Brown is one of 10 Democratic senators who are running in November in states won by Mr. Trump, though the Ohio race is not generally seen as one of the Democrats’ most imperiled seats.

In a western Ohio county along the Indiana border that Mr. Trump won with 80 percent of the vote, Mr. Renacci previewed in an interview how he planned to turn voters against Mr. Brown. He described the senator as a career politician and someone far too liberal for the state that he represents.

“I’ve said all along Sherrod probably could represent Massachusetts very well,” he said. “Probably represent New York, maybe. Maybe even California. But his votes don’t represent Ohio.”

Preston Maddock, a spokesman for the Brown campaign, responded, “While Congressman Renacci finds new ways to help himself get ahead, Sherrod is fighting for Ohioans every day — including working with this administration and his Republican colleagues in the Senate when it’s best for Ohio workers.”

And then there is Mr. Renacci’s bearhug embrace of Mr. Trump, right down to his Twitter rants.

“The one thing I hear a lot is, ‘I love the president; I just wish he wouldn’t tweet as much,’” he said. “And my answer is, if you love the president, you got to love everything about him, including that.”

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Working for Trump, Giuliani Attacks His Law-Enforcement Roots

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Mr. Giuliani’s verbal strikes began on Wednesday night when he appeared with Sean Hannity on Fox News and declared that the F.B.I.’s office in New York — with which he worked closely during his time as United States attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like “storm-troopers” in conducting raids on the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. In the same interview, he called Mr. Comey “a disgraceful liar” and said he should be prosecuted. He also had strong words for the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which he dismissed as “tainted” and “totally garbage.”

On Thursday morning, after Mr. Comey shot back on his Twitter account, saying that the New York F.B.I. was “devoted to the rule of law and the truth,” Mr. Giuliani assailed Mr. Comey, his onetime colleague in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, as a “sensitive little baby.” By Thursday afternoon, he had tossed another bomb, calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “step in” on the Cohen case and put the people behind it “under investigation.”

In all of this, Mr. Giuliani was following the lead of Mr. Trump, who in both the Cohen and Russia matters has adopted a strategy of attacking agents, prosecutors and the larger institutions of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. While some former law-enforcement officials said that those attacks had eroded trust in the criminal-justice establishment, others said that the figures singled out by the president and his lawyer were deserving of their ire.

“Rudy is not anti-law enforcement, but he is upset, like me, at a small cadre of people who have lost their way,” said James K. Kallstrom, who once ran the New York office of the F.B.I. and has emerged more recently as a vigorous supporter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. “We’ve had long talks about it and what we can do to rebuild the bureau.”

Though Mr. Kallstrom acknowledged that Mr. Giuliani, in his television appearances, could have opted “for a better choice of words,” he also said there was ample reason to be wary of some recent decisions by law-enforcement officers. He criticized, for instance, the way that F.B.I. agents, acting on a search warrant last year, broke into the home of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager. Echoing comments by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, he also blasted the more recent raids on Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room, saying that they may have violated the attorney-client privilege.

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Trump returns to original racist attack on Mexican immigrants at NRA convention – ThinkProgress

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President Donald Trump harkened back to the racist attack he made on Mexican immigrants on the first day of his campaign in the summer of 2015 during a speech at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention Friday.

“These countries send up their worst,” Trump said, addressing the crowd assembled in Dallas, Texas. “Remember in my opening speech, I got criticized for it. Remember? Well, guess what. They’re not sending their finest. That I can tell you.” 

In his opening speech nearly three years ago, Trump said Mexico was “not sending their best,” a racist attack that drove his campaign and eventually catapulted him into the White House.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said at the time. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

He resorted to the same dishonest smear Friday.

“We’re getting some real beauties in here,” he said. “But we’re taking MS-13 horrible killer gang members. We’re getting them out because our guys are much tougher than there is not even a little bit of a contest. And that’s the only language they understand. That’s the only language they understand. These are savage killers.”

That immigrants are more violent or commit crimes at a higher rate than non-immigrants is a lie Trump has used repeatedly to back up his racist, anti-immigrant policies.

He defended his original comments in 2015 saying, “What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”

It’s simply not true.

As The Washington Post wrote at the time, “Data on immigrants and crime are incomplete, but a range of studies show there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, first-generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans.”

Immigration and crime have also had, as the Post noted, inverse trajectories since the 1990s: immigration has risen, while crime as fallen.

Trump’s address to the NRA convention comes just weeks after saying the powerful lobbying organization doesn’t have power over him.

“They [the NRA] have great power over you people,” he told a group of lawmakers gathered at the White House in February. “They have less power over me.”

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Tough Choices, and Criticism, for Emily’s List as Democratic Women Flood Primaries

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“It becomes a kind of Catch-22,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “One of their criteria is the issue of viability, but without their endorsement, viability becomes very tough, because so many people use them as their barometer of, ‘Oh, does this woman have a chance?’”

Emily’s List has also faced criticism that it does not do enough to lift up women of color. Nina Turner, an African-American former state senator from Ohio who was endorsed by Emily’s List when she ran for secretary of state in 2014, said minorities may face higher hurdles than white women in raising money, because they are less likely to come from wealthy circles.

“I got the money late when I needed it early because they were judging my ability to fund-raise more than where I stood on the issues,” Ms. Turner said, adding, “I don’t think they take into consideration the hurdles that black and Hispanic women have to jump when you judge viability.”

Ms. Schriock said Emily’s List does recognize “the obstacles that are particularly in front of women of color.”

“Do we have to do more?” she asked. “Absolutely, as does the party.”

In the Georgia governor’s primary, race — and a chance to make history — was “a big piece,” but not the only consideration, in Emily’s List’s decision to endorse Ms. Abrams, who is African-American, Ms. Schriock said. Ms. Abrams, a former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, has a national profile and a longstanding relationship with Emily’s List, which gave her its rising star award in 2014. If elected, she would become the nation’s first black female governor.

She has also outraised Ms. Evans, reporting nearly $3.3 million in campaign contributions, according to campaign filings in Georgia, compared with $2.6 million for Ms. Evans.

Some political analysts say that Ms. Evans might have broader appeal with white moderates and thus a better chance of winning a Georgia general election. Ms. Schriock disagrees. She says Emily’s List is counting on Ms. Abrams, who is favored to win the primary, to expand the Democratic electorate by pulling in black and Latino voters who might not otherwise go to the polls.

The Georgia WIN List, Georgia’s equivalent of Emily’s List, has remained neutral in the campaign.

“For us to have chosen between the two, it would have destroyed my organization,” said Melita Easters, the group’s chairwoman.

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