Category: New York Times

PROVO, Utah — Outside the state District Court where the preliminary hearing for a man charged with shooting Charlie Kirk was about to begin its first day, Houston-based podcaster Keli Rabon laughed sheepishly when asked if that man, Tyler Robinson, was guilty.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Rabon replied, “but I think Charlie’s still alive.”

Robinson, she went on, “was at most a spotter” at the scene of the crime at Utah Valley University last September. Rabon suggested that Kirk, a 31-year-old conservative activist, was currently at an undisclosed location and that he, along with his wife, President Donald Trump, and other government officials, were potentially involved in the “psy-op.”

Rabon is one of several conspiracy theorists at the Provo courthouse. Camping out overnight to be the first member of the public allowed into the courtroom, Selena Armitage, too, had questions. A true-crime enthusiast living 45 miles away in West Valley City, Armitage said of Kirk’s killing, “I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface.”

The proceeding this week to weigh evidence against Robinson will seek to impose judicial norms on a case that seems likely to test those standards to the breaking point. Kirk’s death, after all, is the first assassination of a prominent American political figure in the internet age. Any straightforward prosecution of Robinson will require navigating a parallel universe of conspiracy theories turbocharged by social media.

The cramped district courtroom has just 14 seats available to the public, and some will be occupied by people including Rabon and Armitage, who are of the view that the state’s case is far from the complete picture. They will be reinforced by untold watchers of the hearing’s livestream.

The shooting was, in effect, nationally televised. The moment a bullet pierced Kirk’s neck was captured on mobile phones and posted in real time.

As straightforward as the horrific footage was, internet sleuths were not taking it at face value: Where is the exit wound? Where is the blood? Who are the adults in the campus audience? Is one of them gesturing just before the shot? Why do some of the staff members of Turning Point USA, Kirk’s political organization, seem to react without alarm to his slumping body? Why are several men in the crowd wearing maroon shirts?

The first two days of testimony have offered additional fodder. The prosecution’s opening witness, a former Utah Valley special officer named Chris Bagley, testified Monday that his body camera’s battery died while he was investigating the rooftop where police say Robinson fired his lethal shot.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Kathryn Nester, Bagley also acknowledged that his report did not include any mention of a rifle case that surveillance video showed the shooter carrying. Nor had he identified a plainclothes officer with a badge who had accompanied Bagley to the rooftop. Nor had he secured an empty pistol holster that he saw lying abandoned on the grassy area near where Kirk was killed.

On Tuesday morning, Nester elicited from the lead investigator in the case, David Hull from the State Bureau of Investigation, the facts that no shell casings had been found on the rooftop, while at least two other firearms were discovered at the crime scene below. Hull also admitted that he had not interviewed two individuals who claimed that their own rooftop video featured an individual whose clothing and build did not match those of Robinson.

Such vagaries are common in criminal investigations. Evidence is rarely conclusive, eyewitness accounts seldom 100% reliable, confessions not always ironclad. But such nuance can be lost on the judges and juries of social media.

Right-wing social media influencers have foraged on Kirk’s assassination with particular zeal, chief among them Candace Owens, a former Turning Point USA star turned antagonist who has devoted dozens of podcast episodes to the subject.

“I feel confident stating that Tyler Robinson did not murder Charlie Kirk,” Owens said recently. In her view, Robinson was “a total patsy” who was not even on campus that day.

Owens has at various times implicated the victim’s widow, Erika Kirk, Turning Point USA staff, and even the Israeli government, but only with tantalizing questions and dots for her audience to connect, not a true alternative scenario.

Erika Kirk and other Turning Point officials have expressed outrage, but privately, they have acknowledged the far right’s susceptibility to such theories, owing to a suspicion of traditional news sources and hostility toward the left.

Kirk himself regularly argued that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that Democrats were purposely opening the border to reshape the electorate.

Such theories may lack evidence, but they have an audience. By far the biggest media presence at the Utah preliminary hearing is Fox News Channel, which has more than a dozen employees in Provo. And as Rabon acknowledged outside the courtroom, conspiracy theories are popular — some more than others. Her podcast was eight months old and already had 7,500 YouTube subscribers, a figure that she said would be higher if she were to embrace a more alluring conspiracy theory, such as the belief that Kirk was killed by an incendiary device in his microphone.

“I’m doing ‘fake death,’” Rabon said. “If I was doing ‘exploding microphone,’ the algorithms would like me better.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

LONDON — Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist right-wing Reform UK party, on Tuesday said he would resign his seat in Parliament and run for reelection in his Clacton seat to answer criticism of his financial affairs.

The unexpected move comes after recent revelations about gifts and financial support received by Farage, both from a cryptocurrency billionaire and from a political ally who was once convicted of fraud in the United States.

“I have decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions,” Farage said in a statement that was broadcast on his party’s YouTube channel. “This will be a ‘people versus the establishment’ by-election,” he added, referring to a special parliamentary election.

The success of Farage, whose anti-immigration party has led in opinion polls for more than a year, was instrumental in destabilizing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation last month.

But Farage has suffered several setbacks lately amid growing scrutiny of his financial affairs.

In May, it emerged that he had received an undisclosed gift of 5 million pounds (about $6.7 million) from a cryptocurrency billionaire, Christopher Harborne, a Briton who lives in Thailand.

Farage argues that the gift was unconditional, was made before he won a seat in Parliament in the general election in 2024, and there was no requirement to declare it. However, Daniel Greenberg, Parliament’s standards commissioner, has opened an investigation into whether the money should have been made public under rules that require new lawmakers to declare some financial benefits received in the 12 months before their election.

Over the weekend, the Sunday Times of London reported that Farage had separately failed to declare benefits provided by a political ally, George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster who served prison time in the United States.

According to the newspaper, Cottrell’s support included providing social media staff members who worked for Farage in the year before he was elected, as well as the use of a property rented by Cottrell near Buckingham Palace.

Farage has insisted he followed all of the rules and has accused journalists of “despicable behavior” and of hounding his family.

However, in his statement Tuesday, Farage suggested that the Sunday Times article had now triggered a second investigation, saying that, “Despite the fact that many of the things that were written in the article were inaccurate or irrelevant, yet another standards investigation is underway.”

If Greenberg finds that the gift from Harborne should have been declared, Farage might, under British parliamentary rules, have been suspended from Parliament and forced to fight for reelection in his parliamentary constituency of Clacton, in eastern England. So the announcement Tuesday effectively preempts that possible outcome, although it would not stop the findings being published.

Farage, a highly effective campaigner and a longtime disrupter of British politics, will likely be confident of winning the seat again, having achieved a majority of 8,405 votes in the 2024 general election. Polling suggests he remains popular in the area.

However, even a convincing victory there would not guarantee an end to the scrutiny of Farage and his finances as he attempts to convince the country he should become its next prime minister. The next general election must take place by 2029.

Reform UK has recently faced competition on its right flank from a far-right party called Restore Britain, which was founded by Rupert Lowe, once an ally of Farage, after a bitter public rift with him.

Despite Reform’s success in May in local elections in Wales, Scotland, and British municipalities in England, the party has also suffered some reverses. Last month it lost a crucial special parliamentary election in Makerfield, in northwest England, which was won by Andy Burnham, who is expected to succeed Starmer.

Earlier this year, it lost in another special election in nearby Gorton and Denton to an insurgent Green Party. And last year, it suffered a similar fate in Caerphilly in Wales, in a special election to the Welsh parliament, which was won by the center-left nationalist Plaid Cymru party.

In national polls, Reform’s support has fallen from about 30% last year to about 25% now, with Labour and the Conservatives around 20% each.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Hundreds of thousands of mourners amassed in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Monday to commemorate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, who ruled his country for decades with an iron fist before he was killed in the war with the United States and Israel.

The ayatollah’s body was carried through the city in a public procession, part of a period of ceremonies and mourning strictly choreographed by the Iranian government. Later this week, it will be taken to several cities in Iran and neighboring Iraq that are significant to Shiite Muslims, before the late ayatollah is buried in his hometown, Mashhad, in northeastern Iran.

Some of the top ranks of Iran’s current and former leadership were among the sea of mourners. In a video shared by Iranian state television, President Masoud Pezeshkian was seen walking down the street, shaking hands with members of the crowd.

Though he was exalted by many Iranians, Khamenei was also despised by others for presiding over an authoritarian state that crushed dissent. In January, Iranian security forces violently suppressed mass anti-government protests, killing thousands, according to Iranian officials and human rights groups.

For Iran’s leaders, the mass funeral has served in part as a show of national unity. But the late supreme leader’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been conspicuously absent from the ceremonies.

Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since succeeding his father, who was killed when Israeli forces bombarded Ali Khamenei’s compound on the first day of the war in late February. His absence from the funeral ceremonies has become a point of scrutiny for Iran’s leadership as they seek to project stability and continuity.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former Iranian president, was among the senior officials who attended the funeral ceremonies Monday. According to U.S. officials, Ahmadinejad was injured in an Israeli strike in February intended to free him from house arrest. The New York Times later reported on a failed Israeli plan to install Ahmadinejad at the helm of a postwar Iran.

The talks between Iran and the United States have been paused until after the funeral ceremonies. They have failed to prevent new bouts of fighting or to fully reopen shipping in the crucial Strait of Hormuz, let alone bring the two sides closer to resolving myriad thornier issues that were not covered by the countries’ ceasefire.

The New York Times was granted access to the funeral ceremonies by Iran’s government, which determined the ceremonies our reporters could attend, accompanied by a government-provided translator and a guide. The views expressed by people interviewed at these events may not be representative of many Iranians, while others may have felt unable to speak freely.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The ads were jarring: a man with a hole in his throat where his larynx, or voice box, had once been. A woman whose teeth and jaw had been removed after oral cancer. Another woman speaking in a robotic voice, which was altered when her larynx was removed: “I wish I’d never seen a cigarette in my entire life.” A black screen followed, saying she died two days later.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark.

There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign. But the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies.

The CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, which managed the campaign and worked with states on smoking cessation measures, has been shut down for more than a year, after its staff was laid off as part of the administration’s government downsizing efforts. While hundreds of other federal health employees were eventually rehired, the smoking office staff members have not been.

Even after Congress restored the office’s funding late last summer, its employees have remained on paid leave as litigation challenging the firings plays out.

In recent weeks, under pressure from Congress, the CDC has given states diminished funding to air ads from the campaign’s archive, but the federal government will not produce new ads or negotiate contracts for them to air nationwide. The ads had prompted millions of smokers to dial state quit lines for help on how to stop smoking. In interviews, people who ran quit lines in several states said that since the ads went off the air, calls have plummeted along with enrollment in programs that offered counseling and nicotine gum and patches.

The abandonment of an effort that was widely regarded as a public health triumph has puzzled antismoking activists who point out that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s platform was based on ending chronic diseases, which are a well-known consequence of smoking.

“We find it very ironic in an administration that wants to make America healthy again that we’re cutting all of these resources related to smoking and vaping,” said Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association.

Helping adults stop smoking is one of the most evidence-backed ways to improve the public’s health. Smoking rates in the United States have fallen significantly, to less than 10% of adults, compared with 42% of adults in the early 1960s. Still, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the country, causing about 490,000 premature deaths each year.

A national survey of adults who smoked from 2012 through 2018 found that the Tips from Former Smokers campaign was associated with more than 16 million people attempting to quit smoking and 1 million succeeding. During those years alone, the campaign was associated with saving an estimated $7.3 billion in healthcare costs.

“It’s crazy that they have cut this funding if they really want to save lives and save money,” said Sally Herndon, who ran North Carolina’s tobacco control program until her retirement last year.

Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that the CDC “remains committed to tobacco prevention and control and continues to support this priority through outreach, education, and surveillance.”

The cuts have come as tobacco companies have aggressively lobbied the administration for policy changes that would likely increase their market share of vaping and other nicotine products.

The New York Times recently reported that Reynolds American, which makes Newport and Camel cigarettes, saw a coveted new federal policy take shape that would allow an entire new class of flavored e-cigarettes onto the market. The initiative was announced just days after a $5 million donation and lunch with President Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida. Executives from Altria, which makes Marlboro cigarettes, were also present.

The new policy was crafted over the objections of Marty Makary, then the FDA commissioner, who cited it as the reason for his resignation in May. It stunned some public health experts, who say the FDA set aside one of its central authorities: to approve or reject individual products based on their merits.

“It’s very clear this guidance is a gift to the tobacco industry on a silver platter with a side of public health malpractice,” said Brian King, a former leader of the FDA’s tobacco division and executive vice president for U.S. programs of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Opponents of the policy say flavored vapes will introduce young people who have never smoked to nicotine products.

But Hilliard, the health department spokesperson, said the FDA was focused on protecting youth and a “science-based review process for tobacco products.”

She added: “Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. And the agency supports the development of products that may provide less harmful alternatives for adults who smoke.”

The federal cuts to antismoking programs and what some view as lenient new policies represent a reversal of decades of setbacks for tobacco companies under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The CDC’s shuttered Office on Smoking and Health employed experts on effective tobacco interventions who worked with state health officials to advance antismoking policies such as bans on indoor smoking, higher tobacco taxes, and education for parents about e-cigarettes.

The office sent most of its $240 million budget to states each year, but shortly after laying off the staff, in April 2025, the CDC notified states that their annual funding for tobacco control would not be coming.

Many state tobacco control offices cut their own staff as a result, including in New York, Texas, and North Carolina. Late last year, Congress reinstated some funding to states that had relied on the CDC office for expertise.

“We know that we really save lives and save money with tobacco prevention and control,” said Herndon, who until recently led North Carolina’s tobacco control efforts. “But without the training and technical assistance and support from the Office on Smoking and Health, a lot of the newer staff coming along are struggling to know what to do.”

The Tips From Former Smokers campaign went off the air around September of last year, though some larger states such as New York and California continued to run some antismoking ads.

Since then, calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW lines — which traditionally experience a 30% spike in the weeks after an ad campaign — have fallen off significantly.

National data on the quit line call volume was not compiled for the last year after the federal employee in charge was let go, said Thomas Ylioja, president of the North American Quitline Consortium.

But at Quit for Life, an organization that operates quit lines in 19 states, Guam, and Washington, D.C., calls fell by 25% in the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025 when the ads were on the air, according to Nick Fradkin, the group’s director of public health strategy.

Officials in other states said calls had fallen off too — by about 45% in Texas, 25% in California, and 18% in New York. In Virginia, enrollment in the quit line counseling services fell by half from October 2025 through February 2026, said Logan Anderson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health.

In recent weeks, the CDC offered $40 million, down from the usual $65 million, for states to air archived antismoking ads. It is unclear whether new ads will be created.

In North Carolina, at least, “we don’t have the media machine that produced those fabulous ads,” Herndon said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — At the base of Yosemite Falls, where white waters roared down a granite cliff, a couple jockeyed through dense crowds to try to take the perfect waterfall selfie. A family of five traded off resting in the single available seat on a wooden bench. A tourist tripped over a toddler, who fell and began wailing.

There was one spectacle at Yosemite National Park last weekend not in the glossy brochures: the visitors themselves.

The crown jewel of the nation’s park system, Yosemite is even more crowded than usual this year, after a decision by the Trump administration to do away with summer reservations here and at other popular parks.

In the first half of 2026, visitors to and employees of California’s regal wilderness park reported hourslong traffic jams, waits at entrance stations, and long lines just to purchase a bite to eat.

Employees of Yosemite and organizations that support it say that the hordes of visitors are demoralizing staff and damaging the park, as well as its reputation. Many visitors are determined to make the most of their visit, even with long waits. But some travelers have abandoned their plans altogether and driven out of the park’s gates after being turned away from every at-capacity major attraction.

”This is a far cry from the awe-inspiring sights Yosemite is known for,” the state’s two U.S. senators, Democrats Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, wrote in a letter last week to the administration criticizing the cancellation of Yosemite’s reservation system.

July is already the busiest month across national parks. And at Yosemite, it’s shaping up to be chaotic.

On the morning of July 3, so many people had already arrived at Yosemite Valley, known for its sprawling meadows and towering palace of granite rock faces, that by 7 a.m. drivers were circling lot after lot as they tried to find a spot.

“The traffic is terrible in the park,” said Lakshmi Duddukuru, 41, who spent 45 minutes of her first trip to Yosemite searching for a parking space. She spoke as she scaled the steep Mist Trail, where throngs of hikers were ascending in a slowly snaking line.

Yosemite offers free shuttles to transport visitors between popular destinations, but many were too full to pick up any of the dozens of people waiting at the stops. On one bus, a frustrated driver trying to squeeze in more sightseers shouted, “If you’re not touching somebody, you’re not close enough.”

Yosemite Valley helped inspire the creation of the national park system, as it was the first federally protected land to be designated for public use, under an act signed in 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln. Its waterfalls and glacier-carved monoliths, such as Half Dome and El Capitan, have made it one of the country’s most beloved national parks — and most visited.

In 2020, Yosemite began experimenting with a summer reservation system to manage its ever-growing summer crowds. But Yosemite, as well as Arches National Park and Glacier National Park, did away with reservations this year, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order urging parks to rescind restrictions to improve access and help local economies.

Ray McPadden, Yosemite’s superintendent, said that a reservation system should be a last resort. In previous years the park had to turn families away because they hadn’t booked a visit in advance, he said, which was unfair to them and meant a loss of fees that could have gone toward fixing up trails, campgrounds, and bathrooms.

McPadden thinks the park is not overly crowded, except on holidays and Saturdays, he said. He expects a 12% increase in visits compared with last year, which would be about 4.7 million visitors, and the second-busiest year in the park’s history.

“No secret: Yosemite is really popular,” he said. “We are having a great summer.”

Some park employees disagree. The union local representing Yosemite staff, NFFE Local 465, said in a statement that the decision to end the reservation system had undermined staff and was “disheartening and disappointing,” particularly when the park was short-staffed after federal cuts. Gridlock traffic inside lengthens staff members’ commutes and makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to perform their duties, the local said.

Advocacy organizations point out that Yosemite did not benefit much from fee revenue over the holiday weekend. As part of his overhaul of the National Park Service, Trump ended free park entry on some days, such as Martin Luther King’s Birthday, while granting free park admission to U.S. residents on Trump’s birthday, which coincides with Flag Day, as well as July 3, 4, and 5.

They worry that overcrowding encourages people to go off trail, and that guests aren’t as supervised as they once were. The bumper-to-bumper traffic also means that ambulances and other emergency vehicles can be delayed.

The overcrowding “is an environmental disaster for the park, and it’s a safety issue for visitors,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada program manager for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association.

For the most part, however, visitors seemed unfazed by the crowds. The magnificence of Yosemite’s glassy rivers and giant sequoias is difficult to diminish, and tourists said they expected summer crowds when they traveled.

Duddukuru, who was visiting from Chicago, said that despite the delays the park was “wonderful.” She and her family had to wait 45 minutes to board a shuttle, but then spotted a bear, so the delay felt worth it, she said.

Sasha Rubeiz, 23, said one particularly narrow trail felt a little dicey with so many other hikers, but they were mostly not a bother on her first, “unreal” visit here. She tilted her head up toward soaring pine trees and blue skies.

“I’m looking up more than down,” said Rubeiz, who lives in Sacramento, Calif.

McPadden said he was working on solutions to some of the crowding issues, including new fencing and boulders to stop people from parking illegally. He said he hoped to install digital signs showing guests which parking lots are already full so they don’t waste time circling.

He would not say whether a reservation system would return next year. “I try to follow the facts, which generally are very, very positive here in the park,” he said.

Brett Birkbeck, a police officer who lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., ate a hot dog and drank red wine out of a plastic cup as he set up camp at dusk under pine trees.

Birkbeck, 49, said the crowds could not put a damper on his annual summer trip to Yosemite, during which he and his friends hike and grill ribs for a week in one of the most spectacular places on Earth.

“I call it pressing the reset button on the year,” he said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Justice Department on Saturday forcefully argued that an offer from India’s richest man, Gautam Adani, to invest billions of dollars in the United States played no role in the department’s decision to abandon criminal charges against him.

In a letter filed Saturday, Trent McCotter, the principal associate deputy attorney general, defended the Justice Department’s decision after a federal judge demanded that the government explain its move. McCotter accused people within the department of leaking to media outlets about the case and acting “unethically.”

The New York Times reported in May that Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a lawyer for Adani, had met privately with Justice Department officials to argue why the case should be abandoned. He asserted that prosecutors lacked basic evidence, and said that Adani could invest $10 billion in the United States and create tens of thousands of jobs, if the charges were dropped.

McCotter appeared to acknowledge the existence of such an offer, but said that the decision to end the criminal case had been reached before the offer was made.

“Before that topic first arose, I had already firmly concluded I would seek dismissal of the securities charges no matter what,” McCotter wrote in a letter to Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York.

McCotter assailed Justice Department lawyers, current or former, whom he accused of leaking information in hopes of preventing a flawed case from being dismissed.

Giuffra declined to comment. The Justice Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Adani, an industrial titan in India and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was indicted along with seven co-defendants in November 2024, in the last weeks of the Biden administration. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said that he had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials to secure lucrative solar energy contracts for his company, Adani Green Energy.

Although the bribes took place in India, Adani and his co-conspirators were subject to American law because his company had sought investments from people in the United States, prosecutors said at the time.

Adani’s lawyers and McCotter have vigorously disputed that reasoning. On Saturday, McCotter wrote that no harm was done to U.S. investors and that the case was fundamentally about Indians bribing other Indians, which the Justice Department had no interest in litigating.

McCotter wrote that if someone searched for the word “India” in the indictment, it would appear more than 200 times.

Yet the trajectory of the case against Adani — particularly the investment proposal — has highlighted the highly transactional approach to justice during President Donald Trump’s second term.

In May, days after federal prosecutors wrote that they had chosen “not to devote further resources” to the criminal case, multiple Justice Department lawyers withdrew from the case, signaling internal disagreement over the move.

The next month, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) wrote in a letter to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, that the department’s decision “gives the appearance that the DOJ is an equal partner in corrupt behavior.”

Federal prosecutors cannot unilaterally decide to end a case. Garaufis, who will ultimately decide whether to drop charges, ordered prosecutors to provide a more detailed explanation for their decision.

Judges have little ability under federal law to stop the government from abandoning criminal cases. But experts say that increasingly, under Trump, judges have scrutinized the rationale behind such decisions.

After the Justice Department in 2025 moved to dismiss federal bribery charges against Eric Adams, then the mayor of New York City, the judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, called the government’s rationale — that the case was harming Adams’ ability to help with Trump’s immigration crackdown — “unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep.”

On Saturday, McCotter chided Garaufis for what he called a “judicial inquisition.” Such queries, he argued, risked exposing “privileged internal debates” within the Justice Department.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.