TIPPED OFF SPIES
1
U(D54G1D)y+?!_!#!$!" When someone in the grip of a mental health emergency be- haves erratically in New York City, it is the Police Department that is often called in. When there are serious disciplinary problems in the schools, or when homeless people are found sleeping in the subways, police officers are asked to take over. The Police Department’s purview is so vast that elite offi- cers trained for hostage situations sometimes find themselves as- signed to animal control duties, chasing a runaway deer through the Bronx or corralling an es- caped boa constrictor, as they did recently at the height of the coro- navirus pandemic. For decades, a succession of city governments have turned to the department as a catchall fix for many of society’s ills, outside of traditional crime-fighting. That has meant deploying a force of 36,000 officers with a paramilitary approach that at times can be un- necessarily confrontational. Now, after weeks of protests against police brutality spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a political move- ment has gathered momentum to curtail the New York Police De- partment’s size and mission creep. Calls to “defund the police” have resonated with the City Council, where the speaker has proposed cutting $1 billion from the department’s $6 billion budget Does N.Y.P.D. Get Too Much? Perhaps It’s Asked to Do Too Much By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and ALI WATKINS Money to Fight Crime, and to Chase Deer Continued on Page A18 ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS State senators embraced after passing a bill to remove an emblem of the Confederacy. Page A19. Retiring a Flag in Mississippi WASHINGTON — United States intelligence officers and Special Operations forces in Af- ghanistan alerted their superiors as early as January to a suspected Russian plot to pay bounties to the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan, according to officials briefed on the matter. They be- lieved at least one U.S. troop death was the result of the bounties, two of the officials said. The crucial information that led the spies and commandos to focus on the bounties included the re- covery of a large amount of Amer- ican cash from a raid on a Taliban outpost that prompted suspicions. Interrogations of captured mili- tants and criminals played a cen- tral role in making the intelligence community confident in its as- sessment that the Russians had offered and paid bounties in 2019, another official has said. Armed with this information, military and intelligence officials have been reviewing American and other coalition combat casu- alties over the past 18 months to determine whether any were vic- tims of the plot. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not at- tacked American positions since a February agreement to end the long-running war in Afghanistan. The details added to the picture of the classified intelligence as- sessment, which The New York Times reported Friday has been under discussion inside the Trump administration since at least March, and emerged as the White House confronted a grow- ing chorus of criticism on Sunday over its apparent failure to autho- rize a response to Russia. Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelli- gence, expanding on a similar White House rebuttal a day earli- er. But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the ad- ministration has yet to authorize. The president “needs to imme- diately expose and handle this, and stop Russia’s shadow war,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a mem- ber of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on Twitter. Appearing on the ABC program “This Week,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had not been briefed on the intelligence assess- ment and had asked for an imme- diate report to Congress. She ac- cused Mr. Trump of wanting “to ig- nore” any charges against Russia. “Russia has never gotten over the humiliation they suffered in Afghanistan, and now they are taking it out on us, our troops,” she said of the Soviet Union’s bloody CASH DISCOVERY TIPPED OFF SPIES ABOUT BOUNTIES WARNINGS IN EARLY 2020 Russian Plot Is Suspected in at Least One U.S. Military Death This article is by Eric Schmitt, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fan- dos. Continued on Page A12 CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES People celebrated a milestone for Pride in the pouring rain, though festivities were scaled back because of the pandemic. Page A13. 50 Years of Pride Just after Donald J. Trump was elected president, Barack Obama slumped in his chair in the Oval Office and addressed an aide standing near a conspicuously placed bowl of apples, emblem of a healthy-snacking policy soon to be swept aside, along with so much else. “I am so done with all of this,” Mr. Obama said of his job, accord- ing to several people familiar with the exchange. Yet he knew, even then, that a conventional White House retire- ment was not an option. Mr. Obama, 55 at the time, was stuck holding a baton he had wanted to pass to Hillary Clinton, and sad- dled with a successor whose fixa- tion on him, he believed, was rooted in a bizarre personal ani- mus and the politics of racial back- lash exemplified by the birther lie. “There is no model for my kind of post-presidency,” he told the aide. “I’m clearly renting space in- side the guy’s head.” Which is not to say that Mr. Obama was not committed to his pre-Trump retirement vision — a placid life that was to consist of writing, sun-flecked fairways, pol- icy work through his foundation, producing documentaries with Netflix and family time aplenty at a new $11.7 million spread on Martha’s Vineyard. Still, more than three years af- ter his exit, the 44th president of the United States is back on a po- litical battlefield he longed to leave, drawn into the fight by an enemy, Mr. Trump, who is hellbent on erasing him, and by a friend, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is equally intent on embracing him. The stakes of that re-engage- ment were always going to be high. Mr. Obama is nothing if not protective of his legacy, especially in the face of Mr. Trump’s many at- tacks. Yet interviews with more than 50 people in the former presi- dent’s orbit portray a conflicted combatant, trying to balance deep Obama Is Drawn Back to a Political Battlefield He Wanted to Quit By GLENN THRUSH and ELAINA PLOTT Tougher Line on Trump Marks New Phase in Unique Retirement Continued on Page A16 WASHINGTON — Sidney Pow- ell, a firebrand lawyer whose pug- nacious Fox News appearances had earned her numerous private phone conversations with Presi- dent Trump, sent a letter last year to Attorney General William P. Barr about her soon-to-be new cli- ent, Michael T. Flynn. Asking for “utmost confidenti- ality,” Ms. Powell told Mr. Barr that the case against Mr. Flynn, the president’s former national se- curity adviser who had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., smacked of “corruption of our be- loved government institutions for what appears to be political pur- poses.” She asked the attorney general to appoint an outsider to review the case, confident that such scrutiny would justify end- ing it. Mr. Barr did what she wanted. He appointed a U.S. attorney six months later to scour the Flynn case file with a skeptical eye for documents that could be turned over as helpful to the defense. Ulti- mately, Mr. Barr directed the de- partment to drop the charge, one of his numerous steps undercut- ting the work of the Russia inves- tigation and the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. The private correspondence be- tween Ms. Powell and Mr. Barr, disclosed in a little-noticed court filing last fall, was the first step to- Flynn’s Lawyer Enlisted Allies In High Places This article is by Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage and Adam Gold- man. Continued on Page A14 Kim Victory was paralyzed on a bed and being burned alive. Just in time, someone rescued her, but suddenly, she was turned into an ice sculpture on a fancy cruise ship buffet. Next, she was a subject of an experiment in a lab in Japan. Then she was being at- tacked by cats. Nightmarish visions like these plagued Ms. Victory during her hospitalization this spring for se- vere respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus. They made her so agitated that one night, she pulled out her ventilator breath- ing tube; another time, she fell off a chair and landed on the floor of the intensive care unit. “It was so real, and I was so scared,” said Ms. Victory, 31, now back home in Franklin, Tenn. To a startling degree, many co- ronavirus patients are reporting As Body Fights, Virus Splinters Patients’ Minds By PAM BELLUCK Delirium overtook Kim Victory during a 3-week hospital stay. WILLIAM DeSHAZER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Continued on Page A7 HOUSTON — Melissa Estrada had tried to be so careful about the coronavirus. For months she kept her three children at home, and she always wore a mask at the grocery store. She and her daugh- ter even stitched face coverings for relatives and friends. But over the weekend Ms. Estrada, 37, was fighting the virus at Houston Methodist Hospital af- ter a week of treatments that in- cluded an experimental drug, steroids, intensive care and high doses of oxygen. She probably contracted the virus while attend- ing a dinner with relatives who had also been cautious, she said. Within days, all four adults and several children who had been at the gathering tested positive for the coronavirus. “It was really, really scary,” Ms. Estrada said of her illness. She worried constantly about leaving her children motherless. “You hear about it and you think it’s the older people or the people with un- derlying issues,” she said. “And I’m healthy. I don’t understand how I got this bad.” Coronavirus cases are rising quickly in Houston, as they are in other hot spots across the South and the West. Harris County, which includes most of Houston, has been averaging more than 1,100 new cases each day, among the most of any American county. Just two weeks ago, Harris County was averaging about 313 new cases daily. Measures to cope with the surge and to plan for its peak were evident over the weekend at Methodist, which called nurses to work extra shifts, brought new laboratory instruments on line to test thousands more samples a day and placed extra hospital beds in an empty unit about to be Houston Surge Fills Hospitals With the Young Race to Find Bed Space Before the Peak Hits By SHERI FINK Continued on Page A8 A new documentary followed the cam- paigns of female politicians of color and found much reason for hope. Above, Representative Rashida Tlaib. PAGE C1 ARTS C1-8 Change at the Ballot Box Florida workers are nervous as Disney World and other destinations start to reopen amid surging infections. PAGE B1 BUSINESS B1-9 Hoping for Magic The Indigenous leader and activist Allan Adam’s beating by the police spurred outrage in Canada. PAGE A9 INTERNATIONAL A9-12 ‘They Did It to the Chief’ The president later deleted the tweet, which showed a heated exchange be- tween retirees, with one Trump sup- porter yelling “White power!” PAGE A15 NATIONAL A13-19 Trump Retweets Racist Post Major League Baseball is set to have a 60-game schedule. But that is not likely to help with labor strife or with ques- tions of a sport’s relevance. PAGE D1 SPORTSMONDAY D1-6 A Season Under Dark Clouds Worldwide racism protests have fo- cused attention on the country’s long- held biases over skin tone. PAGE A10 India Grapples With Colorism The flights, which could begin as soon as Monday, are a major step in getting Boeing’s plane flying again. PAGE B1 737 Max Will Get Test Flights Li Zhensheng’s powerful photographs remain a rare visual testament to the brutality of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. He was 79. PAGE B10 OBITUARIES B10-11 He Captured Horrors in China Jamelle Bouie PAGE A20 EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21 A fivefold increase over two weeks prompted officials to impose limits for the coming July 4 holiday. PAGE A7 TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-8 ‘Scary’ Surge in Florida President Trump has used judicial appointments to his advantage. Should Democrats run on the courts? PAGE A15 Leveraging Judges Late Edition VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,739 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 Today, clouds and sunshine, thun- derstorms, high 88. Tonight, partly cloudy, low 70. Tomorrow, partly sunny, showers or thunderstorms high 83. Weather map, Page B12. $3.00
Transcript of TIPPED OFF SPIES
C M Y K Nxxx,2020-06-29,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
U(D54G1D)y+?!_!#!$!"
When someone in the grip of amental health emergency be-haves erratically in New YorkCity, it is the Police Departmentthat is often called in. When thereare serious disciplinary problemsin the schools, or when homelesspeople are found sleeping in thesubways, police officers are askedto take over.
The Police Department’spurview is so vast that elite offi-cers trained for hostage situationssometimes find themselves as-signed to animal control duties,chasing a runaway deer throughthe Bronx or corralling an es-caped boa constrictor, as they didrecently at the height of the coro-navirus pandemic.
For decades, a succession ofcity governments have turned tothe department as a catchall fix
for many of society’s ills, outsideof traditional crime-fighting. Thathas meant deploying a force of36,000 officers with a paramilitaryapproach that at times can be un-necessarily confrontational.
Now, after weeks of protests
against police brutality spurredby the killing of George Floyd inMinneapolis, a political move-ment has gathered momentum tocurtail the New York Police De-partment’s size and missioncreep.
Calls to “defund the police”have resonated with the CityCouncil, where the speaker hasproposed cutting $1 billion fromthe department’s $6 billion budget
Does N.Y.P.D. Get Too Much? Perhaps It’s Asked to Do Too MuchBy MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
and ALI WATKINSMoney to Fight Crime,
and to Chase Deer
Continued on Page A18
ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
State senators embraced after passing a bill to remove an emblem of the Confederacy. Page A19.Retiring a Flag in Mississippi
WASHINGTON — UnitedStates intelligence officers andSpecial Operations forces in Af-ghanistan alerted their superiorsas early as January to a suspectedRussian plot to pay bounties to theTaliban to kill American troops inAfghanistan, according to officialsbriefed on the matter. They be-lieved at least one U.S. troop deathwas the result of the bounties, twoof the officials said.
The crucial information that ledthe spies and commandos to focuson the bounties included the re-covery of a large amount of Amer-ican cash from a raid on a Talibanoutpost that prompted suspicions.Interrogations of captured mili-tants and criminals played a cen-tral role in making the intelligencecommunity confident in its as-sessment that the Russians hadoffered and paid bounties in 2019,another official has said.
Armed with this information,military and intelligence officialshave been reviewing Americanand other coalition combat casu-alties over the past 18 months todetermine whether any were vic-tims of the plot. Four Americanswere killed in combat in early2020, but the Taliban have not at-tacked American positions since aFebruary agreement to end thelong-running war in Afghanistan.
The details added to the pictureof the classified intelligence as-sessment, which The New YorkTimes reported Friday has beenunder discussion inside theTrump administration since atleast March, and emerged as theWhite House confronted a grow-ing chorus of criticism on Sundayover its apparent failure to autho-rize a response to Russia.
Mr. Trump defended himself bydenying the Times report that hehad been briefed on the intelli-gence, expanding on a similarWhite House rebuttal a day earli-er. But leading congressionalDemocrats and some Republicansdemanded a response to Russiathat, according to officials, the ad-ministration has yet to authorize.
The president “needs to imme-diately expose and handle this,and stop Russia’s shadow war,”Representative Adam Kinzinger,Republican of Illinois and a mem-ber of the House Foreign AffairsCommittee, wrote on Twitter.
Appearing on the ABC program“This Week,” Speaker NancyPelosi said she had not beenbriefed on the intelligence assess-ment and had asked for an imme-diate report to Congress. She ac-cused Mr. Trump of wanting “to ig-nore” any charges against Russia.
“Russia has never gotten overthe humiliation they suffered inAfghanistan, and now they aretaking it out on us, our troops,” shesaid of the Soviet Union’s bloody
CASH DISCOVERYTIPPED OFF SPIES
ABOUT BOUNTIES
WARNINGS IN EARLY 2020
Russian Plot Is Suspectedin at Least One U.S.
Military Death
This article is by Eric Schmitt,Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fan-dos.
Continued on Page A12
CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
People celebrated a milestone for Pride in the pouring rain, though festivities were scaled back because of the pandemic. Page A13.50 Years of Pride
Just after Donald J. Trump waselected president, Barack Obamaslumped in his chair in the OvalOffice and addressed an aidestanding near a conspicuouslyplaced bowl of apples, emblem of ahealthy-snacking policy soon tobe swept aside, along with somuch else.
“I am so done with all of this,”Mr. Obama said of his job, accord-ing to several people familiar withthe exchange.
Yet he knew, even then, that a
conventional White House retire-ment was not an option. Mr.Obama, 55 at the time, was stuckholding a baton he had wanted topass to Hillary Clinton, and sad-dled with a successor whose fixa-tion on him, he believed, wasrooted in a bizarre personal ani-mus and the politics of racial back-lash exemplified by the birther lie.
“There is no model for my kindof post-presidency,” he told theaide. “I’m clearly renting space in-side the guy’s head.”
Which is not to say that Mr.Obama was not committed to hispre-Trump retirement vision — a
placid life that was to consist ofwriting, sun-flecked fairways, pol-icy work through his foundation,producing documentaries withNetflix and family time aplenty ata new $11.7 million spread onMartha’s Vineyard.
Still, more than three years af-ter his exit, the 44th president of
the United States is back on a po-litical battlefield he longed toleave, drawn into the fight by anenemy, Mr. Trump, who is hellbenton erasing him, and by a friend,Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is equallyintent on embracing him.
The stakes of that re-engage-ment were always going to behigh. Mr. Obama is nothing if notprotective of his legacy, especiallyin the face of Mr. Trump’s many at-tacks. Yet interviews with morethan 50 people in the former presi-dent’s orbit portray a conflictedcombatant, trying to balance deep
Obama Is Drawn Back to a Political Battlefield He Wanted to QuitBy GLENN THRUSH and ELAINA PLOTT
Tougher Line on TrumpMarks New Phase inUnique Retirement
Continued on Page A16
WASHINGTON — Sidney Pow-ell, a firebrand lawyer whose pug-nacious Fox News appearanceshad earned her numerous privatephone conversations with Presi-dent Trump, sent a letter last yearto Attorney General William P.Barr about her soon-to-be new cli-ent, Michael T. Flynn.
Asking for “utmost confidenti-ality,” Ms. Powell told Mr. Barrthat the case against Mr. Flynn,the president’s former national se-curity adviser who had pleadedguilty to lying to the F.B.I.,smacked of “corruption of our be-loved government institutions forwhat appears to be political pur-poses.” She asked the attorneygeneral to appoint an outsider toreview the case, confident thatsuch scrutiny would justify end-ing it.
Mr. Barr did what she wanted.He appointed a U.S. attorney sixmonths later to scour the Flynncase file with a skeptical eye fordocuments that could be turnedover as helpful to the defense. Ulti-mately, Mr. Barr directed the de-partment to drop the charge, oneof his numerous steps undercut-ting the work of the Russia inves-tigation and the special counsel,Robert S. Mueller III.
The private correspondence be-tween Ms. Powell and Mr. Barr,disclosed in a little-noticed courtfiling last fall, was the first step to-
Flynn’s LawyerEnlisted Allies
In High PlacesThis article is by Mark Mazzetti,
Charlie Savage and Adam Gold-man.
Continued on Page A14
Kim Victory was paralyzed on abed and being burned alive.
Just in time, someone rescuedher, but suddenly, she was turnedinto an ice sculpture on a fancycruise ship buffet. Next, she was asubject of an experiment in a labin Japan. Then she was being at-tacked by cats.
Nightmarish visions like theseplagued Ms. Victory during herhospitalization this spring for se-vere respiratory failure caused bythe coronavirus. They made herso agitated that one night, shepulled out her ventilator breath-ing tube; another time, she fell offa chair and landed on the floor ofthe intensive care unit.
“It was so real, and I was soscared,” said Ms. Victory, 31, nowback home in Franklin, Tenn.
To a startling degree, many co-ronavirus patients are reporting
As Body Fights,Virus SplintersPatients’ Minds
By PAM BELLUCK
Delirium overtook Kim Victoryduring a 3-week hospital stay.
WILLIAM DeSHAZER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Continued on Page A7
HOUSTON — Melissa Estradahad tried to be so careful about thecoronavirus. For months she kepther three children at home, andshe always wore a mask at thegrocery store. She and her daugh-ter even stitched face coveringsfor relatives and friends.
But over the weekend Ms.Estrada, 37, was fighting the virusat Houston Methodist Hospital af-ter a week of treatments that in-cluded an experimental drug,steroids, intensive care and highdoses of oxygen. She probablycontracted the virus while attend-ing a dinner with relatives whohad also been cautious, she said.Within days, all four adults andseveral children who had been atthe gathering tested positive forthe coronavirus.
“It was really, really scary,” Ms.Estrada said of her illness. Sheworried constantly about leavingher children motherless. “Youhear about it and you think it’s theolder people or the people with un-derlying issues,” she said. “AndI’m healthy. I don’t understandhow I got this bad.”
Coronavirus cases are risingquickly in Houston, as they are inother hot spots across the Southand the West. Harris County,which includes most of Houston,has been averaging more than1,100 new cases each day, amongthe most of any American county.Just two weeks ago, HarrisCounty was averaging about 313new cases daily.
Measures to cope with thesurge and to plan for its peak wereevident over the weekend atMethodist, which called nurses towork extra shifts, brought newlaboratory instruments on line totest thousands more samples aday and placed extra hospitalbeds in an empty unit about to be
Houston SurgeFills HospitalsWith the Young
Race to Find Bed SpaceBefore the Peak Hits
By SHERI FINK
Continued on Page A8
A new documentary followed the cam-paigns of female politicians of color andfound much reason for hope. Above,Representative Rashida Tlaib. PAGE C1
ARTS C1-8
Change at the Ballot BoxFlorida workers are nervous as DisneyWorld and other destinations start toreopen amid surging infections. PAGE B1
BUSINESS B1-9
Hoping for MagicThe Indigenous leader and activistAllan Adam’s beating by the policespurred outrage in Canada. PAGE A9
INTERNATIONAL A9-12
‘They Did It to the Chief’
The president later deleted the tweet,which showed a heated exchange be-tween retirees, with one Trump sup-porter yelling “White power!” PAGE A15
NATIONAL A13-19
Trump Retweets Racist PostMajor League Baseball is set to have a60-game schedule. But that is not likelyto help with labor strife or with ques-tions of a sport’s relevance. PAGE D1
SPORTSMONDAY D1-6
A Season Under Dark Clouds
Worldwide racism protests have fo-cused attention on the country’s long-held biases over skin tone. PAGE A10
India Grapples With ColorismThe flights, which could begin as soonas Monday, are a major step in gettingBoeing’s plane flying again. PAGE B1
737 Max Will Get Test Flights
Li Zhensheng’s powerful photographsremain a rare visual testament to thebrutality of Mao Zedong’s CulturalRevolution. He was 79. PAGE B10
OBITUARIES B10-11
He Captured Horrors in China
Jamelle Bouie PAGE A20
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21A fivefold increase over two weeksprompted officials to impose limits forthe coming July 4 holiday. PAGE A7
TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-8
‘Scary’ Surge in Florida
President Trump has used judicialappointments to his advantage. ShouldDemocrats run on the courts? PAGE A15
Leveraging Judges
Late Edition
VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,739 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Today, clouds and sunshine, thun-derstorms, high 88. Tonight, partlycloudy, low 70. Tomorrow, partlysunny, showers or thunderstormshigh 83. Weather map, Page B12.
$3.00
