Category: News

In the latest legal blow to Donald J. Trump, a federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit the former president filed that sought to halt the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into his business practices.

The ruling, in federal court in Albany, was Mr. Trump’s second defeat related to the investigation in two days. On Thursday, an appellate court ordered Mr. Trump and two of his children to sit for questioning under oath from the office of the state attorney general, Letitia James.

Together, the rulings clear the way for Ms. James to complete her investigation in the coming weeks or months. While Ms. James, a Democrat seeking re-election, does not have the authority to bring criminal charges against Mr. Trump or his family’s real estate business, she can file a lawsuit if she concludes that they committed fraud.

Last month, one of her lawyers indicated that a suit could be coming soon, saying that the office was preparing an “enforcement action” in the near future.

It is unclear if Mr. Trump plans to appeal either of the rulings. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

“The courts have made clear that Donald J. Trump’s baseless legal challenges cannot stop our lawful investigation into his and the Trump Organization’s financial dealings,” Ms. James said in a statement. “No one in this country can pick and choose how the law applies to them, and Donald Trump is no exception. As we have said all along, we will continue this investigation undeterred.”

Lawyers for Mr. Trump filed the federal lawsuit in December, arguing that Ms. James’s public criticism of Mr. Trump, and the subpoenas she had issued him and his company, violated several of his constitutional rights, including those to free speech and due process.

In the ruling on Friday, Brenda K. Sannes, the federal judge, rejected Mr. Trump’s claim that Ms. James’s investigation was politically motivated and that she had violated his rights.

Mr. Trump’s suit had cited a litany of Ms. James’s public statements criticizing him, including a 2017 tweet declaring that she was “leading the resistance against Donald Trump in NYC.”

While Ms. James’s public statements could reflect political or personal animus toward Mr. Trump, the judge said, they were not enough to prove that the attorney general had infringed upon Mr. Trump’s rights.

Judge Sannes also found “no evidence that the subpoena enforcement proceeding has been conducted in such a way as to constitute harassment.”

Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and has blasted Ms. James, calling her investigation “a witch hunt.”

Her investigation is focused on his annual financial statements, which contain estimated values of his golf courses, hotels and other properties. Ms. James is scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump and his company falsely — and fraudulently — inflated those values to secure loans and other financial benefits.

In a court filing this year, Ms. James revealed that Mr. Trump’s longtime accounting firm had cut ties with him and essentially retracted nearly a decade’s worth of the financial statements.

She also argued, in a separate filing, that the Trump Organization had engaged in “fraudulent or misleading” practices. But her lawyers said that they needed to collect additional records and testimony, from Mr. Trump in particular, before they could decide whether to file a lawsuit.

Last month, a state judge in Manhattan, Arthur F. Engoron, held Mr. Trump in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with Ms. James’s subpoena seeking his personal records. (The judge recently released the contempt order, after Mr. Trump paid a $110,000 fine and filed additional documents detailing his effort to comply.)

Justice Engoron also ordered Mr. Trump — as well as two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump — to be interviewed under oath by Ms. James’s office. In its ruling on Thursday, a New York State appeals court upheld that order.

As Ms. James is escalating her civil inquiry, Mr. Trump also faces a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into some of the same business practices Ms. James is reviewing.

But while the criminal investigation is continuing, prosecutors stopped presenting evidence about Mr. Trump to a grand jury early this year.

Prominent Republicans defended gun rights at the National Rifle Association convention on Friday with some misleading claims about the efficacy of gun restrictions, gun ownership trends and school shootings.

Here’s a fact check.

What Was Said

“Gun bans do not work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole that it has been for far too long.” — Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas

This is misleading. Opponents of firearm restrictions frequently cite Chicago as a case study of why tough gun laws do little to prevent homicides. This argument, however, relies on faulty assumptions about the city’s gun laws and gun violence.

There were more gun murders in Chicago than in any other U.S. city in 2020, fueling the perception that it is the gun violence capital of the country. But Chicago is also the third-largest city in the country. Adjusted by population, the gun homicide rate was 25.2 per 100,000, the 26th highest in the country in 2020, according to data compiled by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

The three cities with the highest gun homicide rates — Jackson, Miss.; Gary, Ind.; and St. Louis — had rates double that of Chicago’s or more. All are in states with more permissive gun laws than Illinois.

Chicago’s reputation for having the strictest gun control measures in the country is outdated. Mr. Cruz cited the city’s handgun ban — without noting that the Supreme Court nullified the ban in 2010. An appeals court also struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois in 2012, and the state began allowing possession of concealed guns in 2013 as part of the court decision.

Today, Illinois has tougher restrictions than most states, but it does not lead the pack, ranking No. 6 in Everytown’s assessment of the strength of state gun control laws, and No. 8 in a report card released by the Giffords Law Center, another gun control group. Conversely, the state ranked No. 41 in an assessment on gun rights from the libertarian Cato Institute.

Gun control proponents have also argued that the patchwork nature of gun laws in the country makes it difficult for a state like Illinois with tough restrictions on the books to enforce them in practice. A 2017 study commissioned by the city of Chicago found, for example, that 60 percent of guns used in crimes and recovered in Chicago came from out of state, with neighboring Indiana as the primary source.

What Was Said

“As for so-called assault rifles, which the left and the media love to demonize, these guns were banned for 10 years from 1994 to 2004. And the Department of Justice examined the effect of the ban and concluded it had zero statistically significant effect on violent crime.” — Mr. Cruz

This is exaggerated. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 banned the possession, transfer or domestic manufacturing of some semiautomatic assault weapons for 10 years. The Justice Department commissioned a 2004 study on the effect of the 1994 assault weapons ban.

The study found that, if renewed, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement” as assault weapons were rarely used in the crimes.

But Christopher Koper, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Va., and the lead author of that study., has repeatedly said that the ban had mixed effects overall.

“My work is often cited in misleading ways that don’t give the full picture,” Mr. Koper previously told The New York Times. “These laws can modestly reduce shootings overall” and reduce the number and severity of mass shootings.

What Was Said

“We know that there are no more guns per capita in this nation today than there were 50 or 100 years ago. That’s worth underscoring. In 1972, the rate of per capita gun ownership in the United States was 43 percent. In 2021, the rate is 42 percent. The rate of gun ownership hasn’t changed. And yet acts of evil like we saw this week are on the rise.” — Mr. Cruz

This is misleading. In arguing that cultural issues, rather than the prevalence of guns, are to blame for mass shootings, Mr. Cruz conflated and distorted metrics of gun ownership.

The per capita number of guns in the United States roughly doubled from 1968 to 2012, according to the Congressional Research Service, from one gun for every two people to one gun per person. And it has continued to rise since, to about 1.2 guns for every person by 2018, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey.

Mr. Cruz was most likely referring to a Gallup survey of gun ownership. It is not a per capita measure but rather asked participants if they had a gun in their home, with 43 percent responding yes in 1972 and 42 percent in 2021. Historical surveys from the University of Chicago research center NORC show, however, that the percentage of American households that own guns has decreased from about half in the 1970s to about a third in recent years.

What Was Said

“Inner city schools rarely have these kinds of mass shootings. I didn’t know that until just recently. Think of that. They rarely have this problem despite being located in very tough neighborhoods, in many cases where there’s tremendous levels of high crime and violence. They’re much more dangerous outside the school than inside. The reason is that for decades inner city schools have had much stronger security measures in place in the school itself, including metal detectors and, yes, armed guards.” — former President Donald J. Trump

This is misleading. Mr. Trump has a point that high-fatality shootings perpetrated by a single person have mostly occurred in suburban and rural schools, but the notion that schools in cities have been spared from gun violence is inaccurate. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the presence of armed guards deters mass shootings is not borne out by the evidence.

A 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office examined 318 shootings from the 2009-10 school year to the 2018-19 school year. Almost half, 47 percent, of shootings occurred in urban areas, and the report noted that “urban, poorer and high minority schools had more shootings overall.”

There is little evidence that the presence of police or armed security prevents or deters shootings in schools. A 2019 review by the New York State School Boards Association found that research on the topic has been “inconclusive.” Researchers examined 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019 in a paper last year and found “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases.”

What Was Said

“It’s even reported that the Biden administration is considering putting U.N. bureaucrats in charge of your Second Amendment rights.” — Mr. Trump

False. This was a reference to reports that the Biden administration was considering re-entering an international arms treaty. But Mr. Trump is grossly exaggerating what that treaty would do.

The 2014 Arms Trade Treaty regulates international sales of conventional weapons (like tanks, combat vehicles, warships, missiles and firearms). It does not put officials at the United Nations in charge of gun laws in the United States.

The United States was a signatory to the treaty but did not ratify it as more than 100 other nations have. Mr. Trump announced he was withdrawing the United States’ signature during a speech to the N.R.A. in 2019.

The treaty aims to establish international norms for regulating arms sales between countries and addressing illegal arms sales. It prohibits selling weapons to nations that are under arms embargoes or will use them to commit genocide, terrorism, war crimes or attacks against civilians.

In the preamble, the treaty explicitly reaffirms “the sovereign right of any state to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system.” The Congressional Research Service noted that the treaty “does not affect sales or trade in weapons among private citizens within a country” and, even if ratified, “would likely require no significant changes to policy, regulations or law” since “the United States already has strong export control laws in place.”

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

Amanda Gorman is a poet and the author of “The Hill We Climb,” “Call Us What We Carry” and “Change Sings.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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During an active shooting situation, American law enforcement officers are taught that their response should focus on two principles: first “stop the killing,” and then “stop the dying,” according to a training program based in Texas that is considered the national standard. The response should center on neutralizing the gunman, the program says, and then on getting medical aid to anyone who has been injured.

As more questions emerged on Friday about the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, experts described those principles as the central tenets for handling such circumstances — a set of protocols that have evolved significantly over the last two decades but are widely accepted by law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Officers are taught to enter quickly in small formations — or even with only one or two officers — and act to contain and neutralize any gunman. “DO NOT waste valuable time searching areas where you know there is no violence occurring,” officers are told in a training bulletin from the Louisville Metro Police Department. “Go straight to the source of the violence.”

Rescues, the thinking goes, should begin after the gunman is stopped, or if there are additional officers to carry it out.

If the gunfire stops, the situation may change to a barricade or hostage situation, which calls for a different, slower approach, experts say. The priority becomes making contact with the aggressor and starting negotiations. Although hostage situations can require complex judgment calls — particularly if trapped victims are wounded and need treatment — law enforcement experts say negotiating has repeatedly saved lives.

Experts said that situations often are fluid and may transition repeatedly from an active shooting scenario to a hostage situation. Questions about that distinction appeared to be at issue in the questions emerging about the police handling of the shootings in Uvalde.

On Friday, Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in a news conference that the commander overseeing operations in Uvalde had judged the situation to be one of a “barricaded subject” — “with no more children at risk” — at the point at which police were present and ready to burst into the classroom.

“Of course it was not the right decision,” Mr. McCraw said. “It was a wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”

He continued, “When there’s an active shooter, the rules change.”

The best practices for such shootings have evolved considerably since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, when officers were trained to maintain a perimeter and wait for a tactical team.

“Columbine changed everything because they realized that although it was not a bad plan to wait, people will get killed while you’re waiting,” said Robert J. Louden, a professor emeritus of criminal justice and homeland security at Georgian Court University in New Jersey.

Some experts have suggested that officers in Uvalde did not act sooner because they were afraid of being shot themselves — and two officers suffered graze wounds on the scene. At the news conference, Mr. McCraw said, “The incident commander inside believed they needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point.”

Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain who now does officer trainings, said that departments vary widely on what they require of officers in dangerous situations. Some expect them to head toward gunfire, while others give more discretion. “Most agency policy likely does not require you to go on a suicide mission,” he said. “But I would think that most officers would feel a moral obligation — protecting lives is your highest duty.”

President Biden’s recent trip to Asia nearly went off without a hitch — until Taiwan came up. Mr. Biden was asked whether the United States would respond “militarily” if China sought to retake the self-ruled island by force.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the commitment we made.”

It was one of the most explicit U.S. defense guarantees for Taiwan in decades, appearing to depart from a longtime policy of “strategic ambiguity.” But it’s far from certain that the United States could hold off China.

I have been involved in dozens of war games and tabletop exercises to see how a conflict would turn out. Simply put, the United States is outgunned. At the very least, a confrontation with China would be a massive drain on the U.S. military without any assured outcome that America could repel all of China’s forces. Mr. Biden’s comments may be aimed at deterring a Chinese attack, and hopefully they will.

After a decades-long military modernization, China has the world’s largest navy and the United States could throw far fewer ships into a Taiwan conflict. China’s missile force is also thought to be capable of targeting ships at sea to neutralize the main U.S. tool of power projection, aircraft carriers.

The United States has the most advanced fighter jets in the world, but access to just two U.S. air bases within unrefueled combat radius of the Taiwan Strait, both in Japan, compared with China’s 39 air bases within 500 miles of Taipei.

If China’s leaders decide they need to recover Taiwan and are convinced that the United States would respond, they may see no other option but a pre-emptive strike on U.S. forces in the region. Chinese missiles could take out key American bases in Japan, and U.S. aircraft carriers could face Chinese “carrier killer” missiles. In this scenario, superior U.S. training and experience would matter little.

The need to project power across vast distances also makes U.S. forces vulnerable to China’s electronic and cyberwarfare capability. China could disrupt networks like the United States Transportation Command, which moves American assets around and is considered vulnerable to cyberattacks. China may also have the ability to damage satellites and disrupt communications, navigation, targeting, intelligence-gathering, or command and control. Operating from home turf, China could use more-secure systems like fiber-optic cables for its own networks.

Under a best-case battle scenario for the United States, China would attack only Taiwan and refrain from hitting American forces to avoid drawing in U.S. military might. This would allow the United States time to bring its forces into the region, move others to safety and pick where and when it engages with China.

If the United States did ever intervene, it would need regional allies to provide runways, ports, and supply depots. But those partners may be eager to stay out of the crossfire.

I’m not the only one who’s worried. A 2018 congressionally-mandated assessment warned that America could face a “decisive military defeat” in a war over Taiwan, citing China’s increasingly advanced capabilities and myriad U.S. logistical difficulties. Several top former U.S. defense officials have reached similar conclusions.

Mr. Biden’s remarks were made in the context of Ukraine, and America’s failure to prevent that war may be driving his thinking on Taiwan. Mr. Biden may be calculating that Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine will give China pause and that guaranteed U.S. intervention in a conflict over Taiwan would cost Beijing too much, even if it took the island.

But comparing Ukraine and Taiwan is problematic. Beijing views Taiwan — self-ruled since 1949 — as an integral part of Chinese territory since ancient times, a significantly deeper attachment than Vladimir Putin’s obsession with Ukraine. Reuniting the island with the mainland is one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most cherished goals, and China would see U.S. intervention as a bitter betrayal of the “one-China” principle — the recognition that China and Taiwan belong together, which Washington has endorsed since the 1970s.

China’s military is bigger and more formidable than Russia’s, and its economy far larger, more resilient and globally integrated. Rallying support for economic sanctions against Beijing during a conflict — China is the biggest trading partner of many countries — would be more challenging than isolating Russia.

The White House is once again walking back Mr. Biden’s comments, saying official policy has not changed.

If so, then Mr. Biden should stop rocking the boat and focus instead on strengthening America’s position in the Taiwan theater. This doesn’t just mean more weapons for Taiwan and a more robust U.S. military presence in the region, though the former would help the island hold out if China attacked, and both would boost deterrence.

It also means shrewd diplomacy. Mr. Biden needs to stand firm against Chinese intimidation of Taiwan, while working to ease Beijing’s anxieties by demonstrating a stronger U.S. commitment to a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dilemma. Mr. Biden should also persuade regional friends to provide more bases for the United States to use. This not only increases U.S. operational flexibility, but heightens deterrence.

Whatever Mr. Biden’s calculations, departing from the “strategic ambiguity” that has helped keep peace for decades misses the point. The main question for President Xi Jinping must be not whether the United States would join in, but whether China could beat the United States in a battle for Taiwan. Twenty years ago, China’s poorly trained army and largely obsolete naval and air forces had no chance. But that was then.

Many will applaud Mr. Biden for standing up for democratic Taiwan in the face of Chinese threats. But he could be putting the island in greater danger, and the United States may not be able to come to the rescue.

Oriana Skylar Mastro (@osmastro) is a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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