Catie Edmondson

House Democrats had been privately calling for the ouster of Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s embattled chief of staff. He and Corbin Trent, her communications director, had gone to Capitol Hill determined to wage their confrontational brand of progressive politics forged as leaders of Justice Democrats, a group dedicated to unseating entrenched Democratic lawmakers through primary campaigns. Justice Democrats helped Ocasio-Cortez sweep to power with the defeat of a veteran House Democrat, Joseph Crowley.

But less than a year later, after a bruising skirmish this summer with Democratic leadership, both are calling it quits, they told The Intercept on Friday. Their departures will be seen as Ocasio-Cortez’s most tangible peace offering since her private meeting last week with Pelosi.

Chakrabarti “has decided to leave the office of Representative Ocasio-Cortez to work with New Consensus to further develop plans for a Green New Deal,” Trent told The Intercept, referring to the congresswoman’s ambitious climate change program. “We are extraordinarily grateful for his service to advance a bold agenda and improve the lives of the people in” New York’s 14th District.

The New Consensus is a liberal nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting the Green New Deal. Trent will return to working on Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign.

Chakrabarti, intent on continuing his anti-establishment movement from inside the halls of power, had rankled lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill after he posted on Twitter his support for liberal candidates trying to topple sitting Democrats and his disdain for Pelosi’s legislative prowess. His challenges to elected leaders were considered in Congress to be remarkable breaches of protocol from an unelected aide.

His position became untenable last month after he compared moderate Democrats who sank a liberal emergency border aid package to “new Southern Democrats.” They “certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s,” he tweeted.

He later deleted the post, but the damage was done. In an extraordinary effort to crack down on the chief of staff, Democratic leaders leveraged the House Democratic Caucus’ official Twitter account to resurrect a tweet by Chakrabarti that said that he believed Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas, one of the first two Native American women to serve in Congress, was enabling a “racist system” in voting for a weaker border aid package.

“Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color?” House Democratic leaders asked on Twitter. Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, privately implored Ocasio-Cortez to fire Chakrabarti to wipe the slate clean.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html" id="8644212b-1c4f-315d-a348-3b667d7a3179">The New York Times</a>.

Embattled Ocasio-Cortez Aides Are Leaving Capitol Hill

WASHINGTON — Two of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s top aides who were instrumental in forging her unexpected path to victory last year are leaving Capitol Hill, less than a month after one of them ignited a firestorm by challenging Speaker Nancy Pelosi and comparing moderate House Democrats to segregationists.

M.J. Hegar announced her Senate candidacy Tuesday in an upbeat, fast-paced video that featured her riding a motorcycle, describing the challenges she faced as a veteran and working mother, and referencing her most recent failed congressional campaign: “I didn’t get a pilot slot my first time trying, but we Texans don’t give up easily.”

Hegar, 43, who was awarded the Purple Heart after she was wounded on her third tour to Afghanistan, made waves when she ran against Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, in 2018 in a deeply conservative district and lost by 3 percentage points, in part fueled by viral videos highlighting her service that brought in waves of cash.

“When people tell M.J. no, she busts through the doors and fights for those left behind. Her entire adult life has been about service to her country, and she’s running for Senate to continue that sterling record of service,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a statement.

Cornyn, 67, a former Texas attorney general who served as the No. 2 Senate Republican last Congress, has held the seat since 2002. His campaign has more than $7.5 million in cash on hand, according to recent Federal Election Commission reports, and has already dismissed Hegar as “Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate,” referring to the Senate Democratic leader. Hegar’s House campaign had $37,000 on hand when it ended.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio, also is said to be mulling a challenge against Cornyn. A Castro-Hegar primary would force the state’s rising Democratic electorate to choose between a high-profile Latino who could energize the Hispanic vote and a combat veteran who could appeal to swing voters in the Texas suburbs.

Either Democratic candidate would be an underdog against Cornyn, but either could force Republicans to spend money and effort to defend an otherwise safe seat.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/politics/mj-hegar-cornyn-senate.html" id="c6482977-023c-38a4-a7f9-4a00af8bade7">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — A former Air Force helicopter pilot who nearly beat an incumbent Republican House member in the heart of Texas last year is launching another against-the-odds campaign — this time against Sen. John Cornyn, a fixture in Texas Republican politics.

M.J. Hegar, Veteran Armed With Viral Ads, Is Running for Senate in Texas

They are now vying for two seats next to each other once more — this time in Congress. And so on a rain-lashed afternoon, standing in a church room minutes away from the base, Scott Cooper, a lanky retired lieutenant colonel, reprised his role as wingman for his old cockpit mate and pilot, Richard Bew, two Democrats testing their military credentials in Republican swaths of North Carolina.

Though he had his own campaign a district over to worry about, Cooper threw an arm around his friend and compared choosing a candidate to sizing up someone who wants to marry your child: “You’re not asking them to agree with you on all the issues,” Cooper said. “You’re asking them if they’ve got the heart and the soul to take care of your child, if they’re someone you want to follow. He’s the kind of person I want to follow.”

Bew, a wiry retired colonel with eight combat deployments, is running in a special election this summer to fill the 3rd Congressional District seat held for 13 terms by Walter Jones, a Republican who recently died. Cooper is running next year in the 2nd District just to the west, against Rep. George Holding, considered a top 2020 target by the House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Their friendship was cemented during a mission in Kosovo in 1999, when they led a squadron of jets into what turned into a hard-fought, multiday campaign that culminated with the Serbian army shooting down an American stealth aircraft with a surface-to-air missile. As the senior officers in the squadron, they had to lead.

“None of them had ever been shot at before, so they were kind of looking at us to see if they would be OK,” Bew said over lunch at Captain Ratty’s, a seafood restaurant and old haunt of the two friends.

In recent years, conflict has marred the U.S.§ political scene, but both men saw reason to believe the nation might be emerging from a dark moment.

“This is America developing the antibodies to the most negative things we’ve seen,” Bew said.

They are hoping they can both be part of the healing. After 20 years of friendship, they speak in coded shorthand, while wordlessly pulling fries off each other’s plates. When Cooper drove his daughter to college, he borrowed Bew’s truck; when a photographer started snapping pictures, Cooper leaned over and fixed Bew’s askew collar.

Bew faces his first test at the end of April when Democratic primary voters choose their candidate from a crowded field. So, on a recent weekend, Cooper took the day off from his campaign to join his friend as he crisscrossed the sprawling 2nd District on the North Carolina coast, where the Marine Corps looms large. It is home to the East Coast’s two largest Marine bases, Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point. Lining the narrow two-lane highways, billboards feature stone-faced war fighters, emblazoned with the message: MARINES FIGHT TO WIN.

If twin Democratic triumphs in this part of North Carolina seem improbable, both men have a blueprint for political success. Freshman Democrats like Conor Lamb, Max Rose, Mikie Sherrill and Elaine Luria beat Republicans last year in conservative districts by leaning hard on their military backgrounds and focusing on kitchen-table issues like health care. Bew and Cooper are in frequent contact with Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a former Marine captain who recruits and supports veterans running for Congress.

The theory, Cooper said, is “that, as someone that is service-oriented in their career, you have the common good first and foremost in your mind.”

“You saw the way Conor Lamb ran,” he added. “It resonates.”

November’s sweeping Democratic victories in the House were a start, Bew told voters here, but the Democratic takeover was only “covering the sucking chest wound.”

“We still have to heal this patient, and it’s going to take time,” he said.

Such talk might not resonate for Bew in a district that skews Republican by 12 points and voted for President Donald Trump by 23 percentage points in 2016.

“The unaffiliateds have to be able to be comfortable with someone who is not far left and not far right,” he told voters. “They’re looking for somebody who can be a lot of the things they want, all at once — who can understand and advance national security issues on a national level, but will also be able to do so without sacrificing Democratic values.”

They also have an unabashedly insider pitch. Bew uses personal stories to emphasize his understanding of Congress from his time as chief legislative aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He recalled John McCain, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, berating Defense Department officials once for not being prepared to answer his question, contorting his features into an uncanny impersonation of the famously peevish late senator.

Cooper, for his part, served as national security director for Human Rights First, a nonprofit with offices in Washington.

North Carolina Democrats hope the two will be able to successfully leverage their backgrounds. Charles Dudley, a vice chairman of a local county Democratic Party and a retired Marine himself, credited a wave of veterans with infusing new hope into the party.

“This past year in this county, there is fire in the belly of the Democratic Party,” Dudley said. “Now we have this new group, these retired military veterans, and we’re asking voters questions, ‘Why did you turn away from the party? What can we do to get you back?’ ”

Wendy Boss, a local Democratic official from Atlantic Beach, added, “The challenge is communicating to the Republicans who only see Trump.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/politics/democrats-marine-airmen-house.html" id="cfe4357f-9829-3fe6-af27-204a327b3c17">The New York Times</a>.

From Cockpit to Campaign, Two Marine Airmen Gun for the House

HAVELOCK, N.C. — They met here at the Cherry Point Marine airfield two decades ago, the start of a friendship that would be forged over hundreds of hours in the cockpit of an EA-6B Prowler warplane over the Middle East, jamming enemy radar systems. One was in the pilot’s seat and the other navigated beside him.

“I don’t think we have to choose between bold ideas and pragmatic leadership,” he said after emphasizing the importance of working across the aisle.

Bloomberg, a billionaire media executive and former Republican mayor of New York, has said he would run as a Democrat if he pursues the White House in 2020. But in the face of concerns that he is too far to the right on a number of issues, including big business and stop-and-frisk policing tactics, he has shown few signs of seeking to assuage those critics.

In a keynote speech at a sold-out breakfast hosted by the Democratic Business Council of Northern Virginia, Bloomberg underscored the importance of working with Republicans and seemed to brush off attacks that his brand of politics would be unable to unite the party. He also delivered a sharp attack on President Donald Trump as a failed businessman.

His remarks concluded a week in which the former mayor carved an independent path on a series of issues. Days ago, he blasted a push to legalize recreational marijuana, calling the move “perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done.” On Monday, in an appearance in Washington for Martin Luther King’s Birthday, he did not mention his stance on policing tactics even as another speaker at the event, former Vice President Joe Biden, expressed regret for past support of tough 1990s crime legislation.

Bloomberg continued that streak Friday, doubling down on a defense of big business.

“I know it’s very popular among lots of people to say, ‘Oh I don’t like capitalism, I don’t like business,’ ” he said. “But we all need jobs; we all need an economic base.”

Bloomberg again declined to answer whether he would run for president in 2020, telling the audience in a brief question-and-answer session that he was still weighing whether he could best help people from the private sector or the White House.

But he also leaned into a pointed rebuke of the president, questioning Trump’s self-proclaimed expertise as a businessman and dealmaker. He noted that the president inherited the family business and struck deals that “left his customers and contractors holding the bag.”

“To Donald, the art of the deal is simply cheating people and not caring how badly they get hurt, and now he’s doing it to the American people,” Bloomberg said.

The attack allowed the former mayor to underscore his own mayoral experience — an asset, he noted, that other prospective candidates would be well-served to possess.

“We’ve got to make sure we offer real alternatives for 2020, candidates that can do the work, have training, have experience in delivering services, people that know how to manage,” he said, adding that a candidate should not be chosen for his or her rhetorical capabilities. “These jobs, whether it’s president or governor or mayor, they’re executive jobs.

“If the person doing the job doesn’t do the job well, you try to help him or her, and if you can’t help them, you move them out, you fire them,” he continued. “And that’s what we’ve got to do.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-trump.html" id="3a659a9e-2bec-37c6-a3e4-d7b75d6f7635">The New York Times</a>.

Bloomberg Rebukes Trump While Deflecting Criticism of His Own Centrist Views

TYSONS, Va. — Under scrutiny for his embrace of centrist politics at a time when an insurgent Democratic wing is demanding more leftist policies, Michael Bloomberg, actively weighing a presidential run in 2020, on Friday rejected the idea that he could not represent a broad coalition in the party.

Issa is expected to announce his challenge at a news conference Thursday morning in the San Diego County district, according to two sources familiar with his decision. He had been publicly mulling for months whether to make a bid to return to Congress, and started an exploratory committee in August.

“I have received such a tremendous outpouring of encouragement from supporters inside the district, and around the state and across the nation,” Issa said in August in a statement posted to the committee’s website.

Issa will likely bill himself to Republicans as a safer alternative than the incumbent. Hunter was indicted last August. He and his wife, Margaret, are accused of spending more than $250,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses — including a vacation to Italy, fast food runs and plane tickets for a pet rabbit — and then lying to the Federal Election Commission. Hunter has remained defiant and has called the indictment a politically motivated attack. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Issa’s looming challenge.

Hunter, a Trump ally, managed to win reelection last year despite the release of the indictment, a 48-page document that detailed how the Hunters lived beyond their means and in at least two instances used the U.S. military to justify their spending. He defeated his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, by 3 points in a district that went for Trump by 15 points in 2016. Campa-Najjar has pledged to challenge Hunter again and win.

Issa is just the latest Republican planning to challenge Hunter as California conservatives fear that the incumbent lawmaker will be convicted. Five other candidates, including Carl DeMaio, who hosts a conservative radio talk show and is openly gay, have thrown their hats in the ring, though three of those candidates are expected to appear in support of Issa on Thursday.

Issa is perhaps best known in Washington as the hard-charging former chairman of the House Oversight Committee who used his position to investigate the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks in Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups and the “Fast and Furious” gun-trafficking scandal. In 2018, Issa announced he would not run for reelection in the 49th Congressional District, after narrowly winning against his Democratic challenger in 2016.

Trump tapped Issa last September to head the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, but Issa’s confirmation stalled this month in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the top Democrat on the panel raised concerns about an incident the FBI included in Issa’s classified background check. That delay, paired with polling released last month showing DeMaio leading other Republicans, propelled Issa’s decision to run, according to Republicans familiar with his thinking.

This article originally appeared in

Former Congressman Darrell Issa Will Challenge Indicted Congressman Duncan Hunter

WASHINGTON — Darrell Issa, the former nine-term congressman from California, will try to return to Congress by challenging Rep. Duncan Hunter, who was indicted last year, setting up a clash among two allies of President Donald Trump for one of the Republicans’ most endangered seats.

<h1>WASHINGTON — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have mined state driver’s license databases using facial recognition technology, analyzing millions of motorists’ photos without their knowledge.</h1>

In at least three states that offer driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants, ICE officials have requested to comb through state repositories of license photos, according to newly released documents. At least two of those states, Utah and Vermont, complied, searching their photos for matches, those records show.

In the third state, Washington, agents authorized administrative subpoenas of the Department of Licensing to conduct a facial recognition scan of all photos of license applicants, though it was unclear whether the state carried out the searches. In Vermont, agents only had to file a paper request that was later approved by Department of Motor Vehicles employees.

The documents, obtained through public records requests by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology and first reported on by The Washington Post, mark the first known instance of ICE using facial recognition technology to scan state driver’s license databases, including photos of legal residents and citizens.

Privacy experts like Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the center, which released the documents to The New York Times, said the records painted a new picture of a practice that should be shut down.

“This is a scandal,” Rudolph said. “States have never passed laws authorizing ICE to dive into driver’s license databases using facial recognition to look for folks.”

He continued: “These states have never told undocumented people that when they apply for a driver’s license they are also turning over their face to ICE. That is a huge bait and switch.”

The use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement is far from new or rare. Over two dozen states allow law enforcement officials to request such searches against their databases of driver’s licenses, a practice that has drawn criticism from lawmakers and advocates who say that running facial recognition searches against millions of photos of unwitting, law-abiding citizens is a major privacy violation.

The FBI, for example, has tapped state law enforcement’s troves of photos — primarily those for driver’s licenses and visa applications — for nearly a decade, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The bureau has run more than 390,000 searches through databases that collectively hold over 640 million photos, FBI officials said.

The Georgetown researchers’ documents covered 2014 to 2017, and it was not immediately clear if those states still comply with the ICE requests. Representatives for the states’ motor vehicles departments could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday night.

Matt Bourke, an ICE spokesman, said the agency would not comment on “investigative techniques, tactics or tools” because of “law-enforcement sensitivities.”

But he added: “During the course of an investigation, ICE has the ability to collaborate with external local, federal and international agencies to obtain information that may assist in case completion and subsequent prosecution. This is an established procedure that is consistent with other law enforcement agencies.”

The researchers sent public records requests to each state, searching for documents related to law enforcement’s relationship with state motor vehicles departments. They received varying degrees of responsiveness but discovered the ICE requests in Utah, Washington and Vermont, which have come under fire before for sharing driver’s license information with the agency.

The Seattle Times reported last year that Washington state’s Department of Licensing turned over unauthorized immigrants’ driver’s license applications to ICE officials, a practice its governor, Jay Inslee, pledged to stop. And a lawsuit in Vermont filed by an activist group cited documents obtained under public records law that showed that the state Department of Motor Vehicles forwarded names, photos, car registrations and other information on migrant workers to ICE, Vermont Public Radio reported this year.

The relationship between Washington’s Department of Licensing and ICE officials may prove to be particularly interesting to privacy experts because of a law the state Legislature passed in 2012 stipulating that the department could use a facial recognition matching system for driver’s licenses only when authorized by a court order, something ICE did not provide.

Facial recognition technology has faced criticism from experts who point to studies that show that recognition algorithms are more likely to misidentify people of color — and in particular, women of color. At least 25 prominent artificial-intelligence researchers, including experts at Google, Facebook and Microsoft, signed a letter in April calling on Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies because it is biased against women and racial minorities.

The use of the technology has also come under fire from a bipartisan group of lawmakers. The House Homeland Security Committee, led by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., will hold a hearing on Wednesday grilling Department of Homeland Security officials about their use of facial recognition. The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., has pledged to investigate the use of the rapidly expanding technology in the public and private sectors.

“This technology is evolving extremely rapidly, without any really safeguards, whether we are talking about commercial use or government use,” Cummings said at a hearing on the issue last month. “There are real concerns about the risks that this technology poses to our civil rights and liberties and our right to privacy.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/us/politics/ice-drivers-licenses-facial-recognition.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

ICE used facial recognition to mine state driver's license databases

In at least three states that offer driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants, ICE officials have requested to comb through state repositories of license photos, according to newly released documents. At least two of those states, Utah and Vermont, complied, searching their photos for matches, those records show.

And whatever questions may linger about what he knew and what he could have done while a team doctor sexually abused Ohio State University wrestlers under his supervision, they are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“He may have had an inkling, but certainly not for the time an actionable one,” said Don Saunders, a retired medical professional eating at the counter of the Rock’n Robin Diner. “You got to understand, especially at Ohio State, it’s gotten to be very progressive in its political views. Things that would not be an unusual occurrence then, now, they get into a huge uproar. Even though not appropriate, people dealt with it and moved on.”

Ohio State, less than an hour from here, is a religion in central Ohio, but Jordan, a pugilistic conservative and Trump attack dog in perpetual shirt sleeves, is an institution. Constituents here have watched with anguish as Jordan has become ensnared in the sexual abuse scandal, which gained new life last month when a 182-page report released by the university said dozens of coaches acknowledged that rumors of the doctor’s predatory behavior were rife.

Five wrestlers who worked with Jordan in the late 1980s and early 1990s came forward last summer to say that the congressman knew of Dr. Richard H. Strauss’ abuse, which included ogling athletes while they showered and fondling their genitals under the guise of medical treatment. One wrestler, Dunyasha Yetts, said that Jordan on one occasion confronted the doctor with the team’s head coach about being too “hands on” with the students, and on a second occasion disregarded a comment that he had made about the doctor’s inappropriate behavior. That second episode was corroborated by two other wrestlers who witnessed it.

But while Jordan’s legion of partisan enemies derisively adopt the new nickname “Gym,” his impassioned self-defense — a vehement and outright denial that he knew of any hint of misconduct — has stuck with the people who matter most: his voters.

His conservative constituents, by dint of the gerrymandered contours of his district, were all but predestined to support him. Ohio’s 4th Congressional District is 90% white and shaped roughly like a duck, with its bill on the western exurbs of Cleveland, a foot on the outskirts of Columbus and its head nudging Toledo, not close enough to absorb any urban voters. But in the rural western towns of the district, admiration for Jordan takes on a profound intensity, built on a foundation of personal experiences with him and an unshakable belief in his integrity.

Over breakfast at the Rock’n Robin, a 1950s-style diner outfitted with a jukebox, checkered floors and a plaque commemorating the 249-episode run of “The Andy Griffith Show” — a nod to the town’s self-described identity as a neo-Mayberry — voters regardless of political affiliation offered their defenses of their congressman.

“Even though we don’t vote for him, we believe him,” said Racille Smith, who identified herself as among the “few Democrats” in the city. “He’s never had any other kind of scandal or suspicion. He just worked there part time and got dragged into it.”

“It’s a conservative community, but it’s a family-oriented community,” her husband, James Smith, added by way of explanation. “Most folks that vote for Jim know his family, know his parents.”

If the residents of Urbana see themselves as a modern-day Mayberry, then many have built up Jordan as their morally unimpeachable sheriff.

“We love Jim; he’s a good, solid man,” said Laurie Schafer, a waitress behind the counter at the Rock’n Robin. “He raised good children. I couldn’t imagine him knowing something like that and not doing anything.”

Schafer shook her ponytailed head in disgust. Stories about Jordan’s involvement in the scandal, she said while pouring coffee, are “just trying to make people hate him.” He had helped her son when he was wrestling in high school, giving him pointers and advice, and so for her, the issue was personal.

“The opposition uses the media to destroy people with lies,” she said.

Perhaps unwittingly, Schafer was reciting an argument Jordan himself offered when he first stared down accusations that he turned a blind eye to the abuse, arguing that he was a victim of “deep state” liberal bureaucrats embedded in the government.

Her skepticism extended to the abuse scandal at the university itself. Investigators hired by Ohio State found that 177 men were abused by the doctor, who lured both athletes and infirmary patients into sexual situations by insisting he was medically examining them. Schafer simply replied, “I would have to talk to the 177 myself.”

Last summer, as accusations mounted in the middle of Jordan’s re-election campaign, his Democratic challenger, Janet Garrett, had weighed whether to attack him on his involvement in the scandal. But the university’s report had not yet come out, and the campaign’s internal polling reflected Schafer’s apprehension. Voters were “not very convinced by the scandal,” Garrett’s former campaign manager, Zach Stepp, said in an interview.

Now, Stepp, the executive director of a political action committee working to unseat Jordan, believes the report gives Democrats a new opening.

“This report that came out is incredibly damning. We want to make sure people know about it and are reading it,” he said. “Even if only 10% of people find it convincing, I want 100% of people to know what is in the report and that their congressman was affiliated with it.”

In Trumpian fashion, however, Jordan declared that the report exonerated him, just as he and the president declared the Mueller report had given President Donald Trump the all clear. And even in Urbana, the largest city in the district closest to the university, the findings of the report and the extent of the scandal, blasted on national cable channels, has yet to fully seep in.

Jackie Tullis, a nurse at Ohio State who stopped for coffee at The Depot Coffee House, a cafe in a restored 19th-century train depot, expressed sympathy for the victims but was shocked to learn from a reporter that they numbered over 100. Underscoring what is likely to be a bleak reality for any of Jordan’s political opponents, Tullis drew a bright line between the scandal and the congressman. She grew up with Jordan’s wife, she said, and the couple both came from good families. The scrutiny now on him struck her as bitterly unjust.

“The way they’re approaching these things now seems like you’re trying to blame someone, and they weren’t even involved in it,” Tullis said. “I don’t think that’s fair to him.”

“That’s like saying Urban Meyer was responsible for Zach Smith’s behavior,” she continued, referring to Ohio State’s former football coach who was suspended after an investigation revealed he had protected a longtime assistant with a history of domestic abuse. “I don’t agree with that.”

Alyssa Beaty, a waitress at the Rock’n Robin diner, said she had not been closely following the Ohio State abuse scandal and had no idea what to believe. But what she did know, she said, was that voters in Urbana “would turn their heads for him.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/us/politics/jim-jordan-sex-abuse-ohio-state.html" id="347f3d0d-3a19-3db6-acf2-36d150ec402f">The New York Times</a>.

'He's a Good Man': Jim Jordan Finds Support at Home in Ohio State Abuse Scandal

URBANA, Ohio — Voters in this small town, a camera-ready county seat cut from the mold of a 1960s-era television set, believe in their congressman. Rep. Jim Jordan calls this home, and his fellow Urbanans believe he is a man of integrity. They believe his family, a dynasty of wrestling icons, has served the community well.

'He's a good man': Jim Jordan finds support at home in Ohio state abuse scandal

The Senate Republican campaign arm took a swipe at those videos, which have attracted support from stars such as Lin-Manuel Miranda and Patton Oswalt, contending in a statement that Hegar’s policies “will play better with progressive Hollywood celebrities than with mainstream Texans.”

But Democratic officials were clearly supportive, in part because those videos have proven to be fundraising magnets.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c6482977-023c-38a4-a7f9-4a00af8bade7" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/politics/mj-hegar-cornyn-senate.html">The New York Times</a>.

M.J. Hegar, veteran armed with viral ads, is running for Senate in Texas

He spent little energy on fundraising, put few controls on his racist language and made little effort to hold town halls with constituents.

Then in November he was re-elected by just 10,000 votes in what he called “the nastiest, most dishonest political gauntlet that any Iowan has been put through”; two months later, he was stripped of his committee assignments and rebuked by the House for comments that seemed to endorse white supremacy. Now the nine-term Iowa Republican is under attack from both the left and the right.

Far from folding, though, King is returning to basics, reasserting an aggressive presence in his northwestern Iowa district, scheduling events in every county and holding as many as three town halls in a week, where constituents pack in, then linger to take photos and shake hands.

“This is a really important part of our civic activity,” King told constituents crowded into a room in a library here in Algona, a northern town of about 5,000. “We have always done so, we just haven’t always told you that.”

The winds have shifted, even Republicans concede.

“Things are different than they’ve been before,” said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa. “Steve King can only be so good for so long. A lot of eyes were opened when they saw just how close he came to losing that seat in the last election cycle.”

Hoping to win over prominent conservatives tired of putting out King’s fires, three Republicans — widely considered the most serious challengers King has faced in years — have already pledged to run in the 2020 primary race, including an assistant majority leader of the Iowa state Senate, Randy Feenstra, who represents one of the most conservative swaths of the district.

The campaign arm of the House Democrats has also put a target on his back, and the state Democratic Party has deployed an organizer to set up a ground game for next year, the earliest Democrats have ever begun such efforts in a district that backed President Donald Trump by nearly 30 percentage points.

“We see him being held accountable. We really put a spotlight on something that was overlooked for a very long time,” said J.D. Scholten, the Democrat who lost to King in November. “You’re seeing his reaction to things where he hasn’t been held in check for years.”

Regardless of scrutiny, Steve King will be Steve King. Last week, he declined to answer a question at a town hall here asking whether a “white society is superior to a nonwhite society” because the query was “so hypothetical.” At another town hall last week, he complained that Hurricane Katrina victims, who were mostly black, asked for help for only themselves, not their neighbors, while “Iowans take care of each other.”

The Cedar Rapids Gazette issued a scathing editorial accusing King of choosing to “embarrass Iowans with inflammatory rhetoric.”

For many western Iowans, that’s part of his appeal.

“He’s a straight talker,” said Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of King’s hometown newspaper, The Storm Lake Times. “He ain’t afraid of the man. He ain’t afraid of the system. That’s powerful.”

The system is clearly against him. House Republican leaders removed King from his committee assignments in January, after comments he made to The New York Times questioning why “white supremacist” was considered offensive. A number of powerful party leaders, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, suggested he should resign, and the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution disapproving of King’s statements.

Even before then, in October, the head of the House Republican campaign arm at the time, Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio, all but jettisoned King just a week before his election, declaring, “We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms.”

King has long made remarks denigrating immigrants, and they were long overlooked. Republican presidential candidates genuflected toward him as a kingmaker before the critical Iowa caucuses. Republican House leaders ducked and dodged rather than answer for King as he enmeshed himself in one scandal after another: retweeting a Nazi sympathizer, saying young unauthorized immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” displaying a Confederate flag and adopting white nationalist language such as “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

But his close race in November signaled to members of his own party that voters’ patience may be wearing thin. Feenstra announced his primary challenge a day before King’s incendiary comments on white supremacy were published, then raised $100,000 in the next 10 days, according to The Des Moines Register.

“Today, Iowa’s 4th District doesn’t have a voice in Washington because our current representative’s caustic nature has left us without a seat at the table,” Feenstra said in January.

King’s younger son and spokesman, Jeff King, was quick to fire back, telling The Register that Feenstra’s challenge amounted to “misguided political opportunism, fueled by establishment puppeteers” and “the lies of the left.”

Republican strategists say the conservative tilt of King’s district and his entrenched presence will make for an uphill battle even for conservative challengers like Feenstra. But in a presidential year, when a wide-open Democratic field and antipathy toward Trump will energize liberals, Republicans should be worried.

“There will be a lot of Republican activists who will defend him until the very end,” Robinson said.“But I think when we get closer to primary day, people’s opinion might change, because he barely held on last time, and I think it would be concerning, especially in a presidential year, that Republicans could lose this seat, which would be unfathomable.”

Before 2018, the last scare King faced was in 2012, when Democrats pumped resources behind their challenger, the former Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack. She mustered less than 45 percent of the vote.

This time Democrats face something of a conundrum.

Scholten, a 39-year-old former minor league baseball player, must decide whether to run again for the House or shoot higher. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, flew him to Washington to discuss challenging Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, according to Democrats familiar with the meeting.

“The dilemma I’m having right now is that Democrats won the House, and so in order for us to pass some of these things, we need to have at least one senator from the state of Iowa be a Democrat,” Scholten said. “It’s difficult because King is the most vulnerable he has ever been, but do we advance the things that I’m fighting for if I go back to the House seat?”

The decision may not be all Scholten’s to make. Schumer and his staff have also made overtures to state Sen. Liz Mathis and freshman Rep. Cindy Axne — and it is also unclear whether another breakout Democratic candidate exists in the 4th Congressional District.

King’s supporters say he has been unfairly treated by the national news media, and they praise him as a steadfast ally of agriculture and an anti-abortion crusader. Confronted with the question about white societies at the town hall meeting, King demurred. But his rambling anger ended with a proclamation of his belief that life begins at conception — and left his questioner agreeing with him.

“Ask anyone who talked to him: Didn’t you think he was kind of like your crazy uncle?” Cullen said. “Didn’t you kind of like the guy when he was talking about white supremacy?”

This article originally appeared in <a id="0be45faa-8d4e-4ef6-90d6-cf4aec971483" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/us/politics/steve-king-primary-white-supremacy.html">The New York Times</a>.

Steve King, Facing Backlash From Both Parties, Fights for Political Life

ALGONA, Iowa — For nearly two decades, Rep. Steve King pummeled Republican primary challengers, dispatched Democrats, even a former Iowa governor’s wife, and glided to victory in his conservative district.

Steve King, facing backlash from both parties, fights for political life

“Do you think a white society is superior to a nonwhite society?” Mary Lavelle, 63, asked, testing his reputation for white supremacist sympathies.

“I don’t have an answer for that. That’s so hypothetical,” King, R-Iowa, told her. “I’ll say this, America is not a white society — it has never been a completely white society. We came here and joined the Native Americans.”

He continued: “I’ve long said that a baby can be lifted out of a cradle anywhere in the world and brought into any home in America, whatever the color of the folks in that household, and they can be raised to be American as any other. And I believe that every one of us, every one of us, is created in God’s image.”

Lavelle said she asked the question in this northern Iowa town of 5,000 because she worried that anti-immigrant language used in a manifesto written by the suspect in the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, resembled King’s own talking points. His fumbling answer to a relatively simple query may have done little to allay those concerns, two months after King, a nine-term Republican with a long history of racist comments, was publicly rebuked by members of his own party.

House Republican leaders removed King from his committee assignments in January after comments he made to The New York Times questioned why the phrase “white supremacy” was considered offensive. A number of powerful party leaders, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, suggested he should resign, and the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution disapproving of King’s statements.

King remained defiant after losing his committee seats and released a statement insisting that his comments had been misunderstood. He said he had been referring only to “Western civilization” when he asked “how did that language become offensive,” not “white nationalist” or “white supremacist.”

King again faced scrutiny Monday after a post on his Facebook page speculated who would win a second civil war between red states and blue states.

“Folks keep talking about another civil war; one side has about 8 trillion bullets while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use,” read the post, which has since been deleted.

On Tuesday, pressed by a reporter from CNN, King told constituents that he “wasn’t aware” that the image had been published on his Facebook page the night before and said he does not personally manage that page.

“I wish it had never gone up,” he said.

But he also sought to deflect the question, telling the reporter, “it’s interesting that nobody here asked that question,” while gesturing to his constituents.

“The only people who care about that is national news media. Nobody has raised the issue around here,” he said, prompting a handful of attendees to protest. The exchange was quickly picked up by American Bridge, a liberal political action committee.

But Lavelle clearly did care about King’s incendiary language. After being asked about the manifesto, King responded at length. He said the author of the manifesto had expressed as much sympathy for Communist China as white supremacy. “The further it went, the more inconsistent it became, and he seems to have mixed and matched ideologies,” he said.

Pressed about the overlap between the manifesto’s language and his own, King responded, “He also likely used the same words that Mao used.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="52c4432d-1b61-4f9b-80ef-87a8fa2c397d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/us/politics/steve-king-white-society.html">The New York Times</a>.

Given Chance to Disavow White Supremacy, Iowa Congressman Demurs