U.S. Postal Service Warns of Potential Mail-In Ballot Delays

This briefing has ended. Follow our latest coverage of the Biden vs. Trump 2020 election here.

The Postal Service said delays could affect multiple states.

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The general counsel for the Postal Service warned that “certain deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots are incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.”Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

The Postal Service has warned states that it may not be able to meet their deadlines for delivering last-minute mail-in ballots, another development in a growing controversy over the new postmaster general’s handling of vote-by-mail operations as President Trump continues to rail against the practice.

In letters sent in July to states across the country — including electoral battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan — Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel for the Postal Service, warned that “certain deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots are incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.”

As many states turn to vote-by-mail operations to carry out elections safely amid the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Marshall urged them to require residents request ballots at least 15 days before an election — rather than just the four days allowed under some state laws.

“This mismatch creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted,” Mr. Marshall wrote.

Many states have long allowed voters to request a mail ballot close to the election — only one, Rhode Island, meets the standard now being suggested by the Postal Service — but the Postal Service suggested that the large volume of voting by mail at a time of widespread delivery delays meant that states would be better off building more time into their systems.

In response to the warning letters, some states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, have called for extensions on counting late-arriving ballots in the November election.

“We have asked the legislature to change Michigan law to allow ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive within a certain window to be counted,” said Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

The increased demand for vote-by-mail operations comes as the Postal Service itself is undergoing cuts to its operations. The new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and ally of Mr. Trump, has argued that he is modernizing the money-losing agency to make it more efficient. Among his moves have been cuts to overtime for postal workers, restrictions on transportation and the reduction of the quantity and use of processing equipment at mail processing plants.

In June, shortly after Mr. DeJoy was selected to lead the agency, union officials received a notice that Postal Service management was removing 671 machines used to sort mail quickly due to a “reduction to letter and flat mail volume.”

In a letter to American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein, Rickey R. Dean, the contract administrator, wrote that the Postal Service planned to remove 502 delivery bar code sorters, 87 advanced facer canceling systems, 55 flat sorting machines and 27 flat sequencing systems before the end of September.

Mail operations in several battleground states were hit hard by the cuts. On the list for removal were 24 delivery bar code sorters in Ohio, 11 in Detroit, 11 in Florida, nine in Wisconsin, eight in Philadelphia and five in Arizona.

The Postal Service’s inspector general has opened an investigation into the complaints about mail delays.

The Postal Service’s inspector general said Friday she had opened an investigation into complaints that leading Democrats have filed against the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and ally of President Trump, who has begun of series of cuts to the agency that Democrats say have slowed down the delivery of mail and endanger vote-by-mail operations.

“We are in receipt of the congressional request and are conducting a body of work to address concerns raised,” a spokeswoman for U.S. Postal Service Inspector General Tammy L. Whitcomb said.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and others last week requested the inspector general investigate “all recent staffing and policy changes put in place” by Mr. DeJoy.

“We just heard that @OIGUSPS is investigating all aspects of our request to audit the Postmaster General’s operational changes at @USPS & his personal conflicts of interest,” said Ms. Warren in a tweet. “I’ll keep using every in the toolbox to stop Trump & DeJoy from sabotaging the USPS.”

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Trump, who has railed against voting by mail, requests his mail-in ballot.

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President Trump has said that the Postal Service will not be able to handle widespread voting by mail in November without billions of dollars that he has opposed allocating.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The country’s most outspoken critic of voting by mail has requested his vote-by-mail ballot.

The Palm Beach County elections department in Florida has prepared mail ballots for this Tuesday’s primary election for President Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, according to local registration records.

The Trumps changed their primary residence last year from Manhattan, which has been less than welcoming to the president since his election, to Mr. Trump’s members-only Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, which had long been their winter home.

How and where a president votes is typically a footnoted formality. But Mr. Trump has broadly questioned the legitimacy of voting by mail, without evidence of significant voter fraud, and made statements suggesting that he views expansion of mail voting as a threat to the Republican Party.

He has sought to deny the option to millions of Americans in states like Nevada, through litigation, while attempting to block additional funding for the Postal Service that he says would be needed to handle a crush of mail-in ballots prompted by the pandemic.

Those moves have raised concerns among Democrats and voting rights groups that he is seeking to undermine the mail-balloting system and lay the groundwork for casting doubt on the November election should he lose.

Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada, a Democrat who recently signed a universal mail-in ballot law, has said Mr. Trump’s fraud claims are unfounded. “We have never had any problems,” he told CNN last week.

Mr. Trump has supported mail-in voting in some states where he says it is secure, including Florida, which he suggested last week could handle mail voting successfully because it had “a great Republican governor” in Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said on Thursday, “The president supports absentee voting, not universal mail-in voting, which contain several safeguards that prevent fraud and abuse.”

Mr. Trump suggested Thursday that he was using the funding as a negotiating chip with congressional Democrats on a larger stimulus package. “If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” he said. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

The Trumps’ ballot request was first reported by The Palm Beach Post. They have until 7 p.m. on Tuesday to return their ballots for the upcoming elections, which include primaries for county commission, state legislature and federal offices.

Viral falsehoods about Kamala Harris have surged since she joined the Biden ticket.

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Kamala Harris with her husband, Doug Emhoff, at her first event as part of the Democratic ticket on Wednesday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

As Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced that he had selected Senator Kamala Harris of California as his vice-presidential running mate, internet trolls got to work.

Since then, false and misleading information about Ms. Harris has spiked online and on TV. The activity has jumped from two dozen mentions per hour during a recent week to over 3,200 per hour in the last few days, according to the media insights company Zignal Labs, which analyzed global television broadcasts and social media.

Much of that rise is fueled by fervent supporters of President Trump and adherents of the extremist conspiracy movement QAnon, as well as by the far left, according to a New York Times analysis of the most widespread falsehoods about Ms. Harris. On Thursday, Mr. Trump himself encouraged one of the most persistent falsehoods, a racist conspiracy theory that Ms. Harris is not eligible for the vice presidency or presidency because her parents were immigrants.

“Sadly, this wave of misinformation was predictable and inevitable,” said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.

Many of the narratives are inaccurate accusations that first surged last year during Ms. Harris’s campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. Here are three false rumors about Ms. Harris that continue circulating widely online.

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Judge orders Trump campaign to submit evidence today of fraud in mail voting.

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Carol Lynch used a dropbox to cast her primary vote in Mount Laurel, N.J., last month.Credit...Joe Lamberti/Camden Courier-Post, via Associated Press

With President Trump and congressional Democrats fighting over funding the Postal Service, many states — and politicians up for re-election this fall — are grappling with the uncertainty around the expansion of mail-in balloting prompted by the pandemic.

Some key developments in the last 24 hours:

A federal judge in Pittsburgh ordered the Trump campaign to produce proof of voter fraud claims. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan on Thursday ordered Republicans who have challenged Pennsylvania’s expansion of mail-in voting to turn over evidence by the end of today that the system has led to ballot irregularities or face the possible dismissal of their suit.

The state Democratic Party and the Sierra Club, which intervened in the case, had requested that the plaintiffs — the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania’s Republican Party — turn over specific evidence of fraud, after the Republicans claimed the changes provided “fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting” and other manipulations.

“Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much,” wrote Mr. Ranjan, a Trump appointee.

Postal Service warns Pennsylvania on deadlines. In a separate Pennsylvania lawsuit, the Postal Service’s general counsel sent a stark warning to state officials late last month over their last-minute attempt to expand voting by mail.

Thomas J. Marshall, the counsel, wrote to Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, whose department oversees elections, that some mail ballots might not be delivered on time because the state’s pre-existing deadlines for sending out ballots were too tight for its “delivery standards,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

In response, Pennsylvania officials petitioned the State Supreme Court to extend the deadlines.

All New Jersey voters will get mail-in ballots. Gov. Philip D. Murphy announced Friday that every registered voter in the state would be mailed a ballot and could choose whether to vote by mail or in person.

New Jersey, which conducted its July primaries almost entirely by mail, would become the ninth state in the country to automatically send voters mail-in ballots if Mr. Murphy takes the actions he outlined.

Kentucky voters can request absentee ballots if they have health concerns about in-person voting. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat, and Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, said on Friday that early, in-person voting would be open in the three weeks leading up to the Nov. 3 election to avoid overcrowding at polling stations.

Mr. Beshear said he wanted to commend Mr. Adams for “putting ideology on the shelf to make sure that we have an election that both stresses health and enfranchisement.”

The postal workers’ union endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee. In a statement, the National Association of Letter Carriers, which represents nearly 300,000 active and retired postal workers, said Mr. Biden and Senator Kamala Harris of California, Mr. Biden’s running mate, had been steadfast defenders of the U.S. Postal Service.

The House minority leader signaled Republican support for a post office funding deal. Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican and close Trump ally, told CNBC Friday that his members were open to including new cash for mail-in voting in the stalled coronavirus relief package. “The Postal Service will have the funding that it needs,” he said.

President Obama said Mr. Trump was trying to “kneecap” the post office. The former president, speaking on a podcast released Friday, joined the chorus of Democrats accusing his successor of attempted voter suppression.

“What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to encourage voting, and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it,’” Mr. Obama told David Plouffe.


Senator Susan Collins of Maine broke with Trump on Postal Service funding. Ms. Collins, a Republican facing the toughest re-election campaign of her career, said Thursday that she opposed cuts for the post office and believed that her state’s no-questions-asked mail-in voting system was safe and secure.

Biden’s windfall after the Harris pick: $50 million and counting.

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Biden and Harris Officially On the Ballot

Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris signed the official paperwork to put them on the ballot in all 50 states.

“We’re going to sign our request to get on the ballot in each of the states. We’re going to, I’m starting off by signing Delaware, and Senator’s going to sign California. And then you guys are going to get down to the real work and get all the states and territories. So thank you. Ready, set, go.” “I’m ready. Go! I’m signing this because I am in this race to win. And, with that guy right there. And we’re going to get it done.”

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Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris signed the official paperwork to put them on the ballot in all 50 states.CreditCredit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has raised more than $50 million since he named Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, an enormous outpouring of donations that could allow the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to expand the electoral playing field in the final 80-plus days until the election.

On a Biden staff call on Thursday evening, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign manager, told fellow aides to Mr. Biden that the campaign had raised $48 million in the first 48 hours since Ms. Harris was named to the ticket. The campaign has twice broken its own record for its busiest hour collecting money online: the first time immediately after Ms. Harris was named and the second during her first public speech on Wednesday.

Other Biden officials confirmed the campaign had surpassed the $50 million mark later on Thursday.

To put that sum in perspective, it is more than Ms. Harris raised in her own 2020 presidential bid last year and nearly as much as the $60.8 million that Mr. Biden raised in all of 2019.

And there was not similar financial momentum behind beating Donald J. Trump four years ago: Hillary Clinton raised $89 million combined with the Democratic Party in the entire month of July, the month that she named Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate and held the party’s convention.

One small indicator of the energy for the Biden-Harris ticket: The campaign said it had sold more than $1.2 million in yard signs by the end of Wednesday evening.

On Friday, Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden held a photo op in Delaware to sign documents required to appear on the ballot as the Democratic ticket. Ms. Harris was asked about being the target of attacks by Mr. Trump and his allies.

“I’m signing this because I am in this race to win,” she said, “and with that guy right there, and we’re going to get it done.” Mr. Biden was also scheduled to attend a virtual fund-raiser on Friday.

Mr. Biden has already announced a $280 million fall television and digital ad reservation across 15 states set to begin on Sept. 1, though the specific amounts in each state have not been detailed or fully booked.

The infusion of cash could allow the Biden campaign to invest more heavily in large and expensive states, such as Ohio and Texas, that are not considered as crucial to winning the Electoral College.

Through July, the Biden campaign had advertised almost exclusively in six states that Mr. Trump won in 2016 — Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona — and that are seen as bellwether battlegrounds for 2020.

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Reaction to Biden-Harris mask mandate was predictable. That was the plan.

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A sign advising mask-wearing hanging in a storefront in downtown Nashville. Credit...Brett Carlsen for The New York Times

As calculated political risks go, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s call for a three-month national mask mandate was considerably more calculation than risk.

His partnership with Kamala Harris began with a call for the nation’s governors to implement a three-month mask mandate, a fitting start for a stability-based campaign that wants to excite rather than inflame.

Mask mandates have been a staple question posed to focus groups by pollsters from both parties in the past few months, and in public surveys between half and three-quarters of Americans support mask-wearing. The Biden-Harris proposal was aimed, people involved in the planning said, at drawing a contrast with President Trump among the groups where the president is losing ground — especially among women (who tend to favor masks more than men), older voters more susceptible to the virus and young voters who tend to favor Democrats anyway.

Those most aggrieved by the announcement quickly responded. A Trump-adjacent conservative talk show host, Dan Bongino, tweeted on Thursday that “the Harris-Biden ticket thinks you’re all too stupid to make health care decisions for yourself.” FOX fixtures, like Dr. Marc Siegel, took issue with the plan’s suggestions that facial coverings be worn at all times, taking issue with mask-wearing outside because he claimed “where it seems to spread is indoors.”

Progressives were broadly supportive, although a handful of observers said the announcement had negatively influenced their support for the Biden-Harris ticket.

“In a rational world, this is disqualifying for Biden,” John Ziegler, a libertarian radio host who has been supportive of Mr. Biden in the past, wrote in a tweet late Thursday. “Not that I matter at all, but this is the final nail in the coffin of me ever actively supporting him. And for the record, I was strongly supporting him at the start of the primary process.”

Harris praises Biden’s ‘audacity’ to select a Black woman as running mate.

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Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Senator Kamala Harris in Wilmington on Wednesday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Senator Kamala Harris praised Joseph R. Biden Jr. for selecting the first woman of color to be part of a major party’s presidential ticket, saying in her first sit-down interview as the democratic vice-presidential pick that it might have otherwise taken decades for a woman of color to reach this milestone.

“Joe Biden had the audacity to choose a Black woman to be his running mate,” Ms. Harris said in the interview with The 19th, a nonprofit news site focused on women and politics. “How incredible is that? And what a statement that is about Joe Biden.”

The interview offered another glimpse into how Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden plan to cast themselves as being uniquely situated to address systemic issues regarding race and gender.

Ms. Harris rejected the idea that her selection would automatically win the ticket support from women of color, and spoke extensively on how the campaign will prioritize women in its policy proposals.

“Every issue is a woman’s issue and women’s issues should be everyone’s issues,” Ms. Harris said. “In a Biden-Harris administration, women are going to be a priority, understanding that women have many priorities and all of them must be acknowledged.”

When asked, Ms. Harris would not say whether she believes a Black woman must be selected to fill her Senate seat if elected vice president, but called the lack of Black women in both chambers “inexcusable.”

Her husband, Douglas Emhoff, would become the first-ever Second Man if the ticket wins in November, and Ms. Harris also did not specify the role he will play in the campaign. She did discuss, however, the “incredible relationship” between Mr. Emhoff and Mr. Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden.

“They bonded actually when we were all running,” Ms. Harris said. “And I do believe that their relationship is a very special one that America’s also going to witness.”

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Trump refrains from disavowing QAnon conspiracy.

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Trump Avoids QAnon Conspiracy Theory Question

President Trump refrained from disavowing the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked about it by an Associated Press reporter. The F.B.I. has called it a potential domestic terrorism threat.

“I want to ask you: You congratulated Marjorie Taylor Greene in a tweet, you called her ‘a future Republican star.’ Green has been a proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory. She said it’s something that should be, would be worth listening to. Do you agree with her on that?” “Well, she did very well in the election: She won by a lot, she was very popular. She comes from a great state, and she had a tremendous victory. So absolutely, I did congratulate her. Please go ahead, go ahead please —” “— specifically on QAnon and her decision to embrace that conspiracy theory, do you agree with her on that? That was the question.” “Go ahead, please?”

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President Trump refrained from disavowing the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked about it by an Associated Press reporter. The F.B.I. has called it a potential domestic terrorism threat.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

President Trump on Friday refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory, avoiding questions from a reporter about whether he agreed with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican nominee for a House seat in Georgia, in her support of a movement that has been labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat by the F.B.I.

Ms. Greene is a proponent of a convoluted pro-Trump conspiracy theory involving a “deep state” of child-molesting Satanist traitors who are plotting against the president.

At a news briefing on Friday, an A.P. reporter, Jill Colvin, asked the president whether he agreed with Ms. Greene’s statement that the conspiracy theory was something “worth listening to.”

“She won by a lot,” he responded. “She comes from a great state.”

When pressed again by Ms. Colvin about whether he agreed specifically with her support of the QAnon conspiracy theory, Mr. Trump did not answer the question, and called on another reporter.

Earlier, on Twitter, Mr. Trump endorsed Ms. Greene, calling her a “future Republican Star” and “a real WINNER!”

Mr. Trump has long used his fame and platform to amplify conspiracy theories and undermine his political enemies by muddying the waters when it comes to facts. A day earlier, Mr. Trump appeared to begin elevating the lie that Kamala Harris, who was born in California, was not eligible for national office because her parents were immigrants.

“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, promoting a false assertion from behind the podium in the White House briefing room.

A low debate bar is already being set for Biden, and for Pence.

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Vice President Mike Pence may be able to credibly claim victory if he merely holds his own in a debate with Ms. Harris.Credit...Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Even the most unpredictable presidential campaign has three Big Moments. The first is now behind us, with Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s selection of Kamala Harris for vice president.

The next two are coming up: the conventions — the Democratic event next week, and the Republican one the week after — followed by the debates between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

The who-won, who-lost interpretation of debates is often established before any candidate steps onto a stage. And with Ms. Harris in place, that appears to be happening already — to the benefit of Republicans in the vice-presidential debate, and to the benefit of Democrats in the presidential debate.

The coverage of Ms. Harris has focused on her considerable debating skills, on display in the Democratic primary and in her tough questioning in the Senate of, among others, Attorney General William P. Barr.

“Mike Pence is going to have a very, very difficult time in the vice-presidential debate,” Steve Schmidt, a former Republican consultant who is a leader of the Lincoln Project, a group trying to unseat Mr. Trump, said on MSNBC.

So Mr. Pence may be able to credibly claim victory if he merely holds his own.

By contrast, Mr. Trump has — presumably not by design — been lowering expectations for his opponent with his put-downs of Mr. Biden’s mental competence. In truth, while Mr. Biden was not the strongest debater during the Democratic primaries, he did not come across as the doddering 77-year-old that the president has portrayed.

Mr. Trump has set a pretty low bar for Mr. Biden.

“Biden has to just not make a mistake,” said Susan Estrich, who managed the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, a Democrat. “He’s a former two-term vice president. Nothing he says is scary. Trump can’t win the debate. He has to force Biden to somehow lose it. Literally all Biden has to do is not lose it.”

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Poll: 58% of Biden supporters prefer to vote by mail, vs. 17% of Trump supporters.

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A polling station in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in June.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

A Pew Research Center poll on the presidential race offers insights into the partisan divide over voting by mail during the pandemic that has fueled President Trump’s campaign against the practice and, in turn, his opposition to new funding for the Postal Service.

Eighty percent of registered voters who support Mr. Trump or lean toward supporting him said they would rather vote in person — with 60 percent saying they would do so on Election Day and 20 percent saying they planned to vote early.

Only 17 percent of Trump voters or leaners cited voting by mail as a preference.

By contrast, a majority of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s backers — 58 percent — said they preferred voting by mail, according to the poll, which was conducted in late July and early August and released on Thursday.

Those percentages closely track other political metrics associated with the pandemic, particularly support for government mask mandates, which are widely supported by Democrats and moderate independents but opposed by many Republicans.

Pew also found stark illustration of the core demographics behind the limited but bedrock-solid support Mr. Trump enjoys from his base.

Whites without college degrees prefer Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, 64 percent to 34 percent.

For the rest of the electorate, the ratio flips, to 68 percent for Mr. Biden and 30 percent for Mr. Trump.

The overall result, the poll found, is that Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump 53 percent to 45 percent, a finding consistent with many recent national polls.

Trump visited his ailing brother in a Manhattan hospital.

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Mr. Trump hugged his brother, Robert, on election night in 2016.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

President Trump on Friday traveled to Manhattan to visit Robert S. Trump, his brother, who was hospitalized at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and is said to be gravely ill.

Robert Trump, two years younger than the president at age 72, has been ailing for months and was also hospitalized in June. Mr. Trump said his brother was again “having a hard time” during a Friday news conference at the White House.

Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, added in an email that “Robert is very special” to the president, but did not say why he was in the hospital.

In recent years, Robert Trump has taken on the role of unofficial family spokesman. He helped the president in an unsuccessful bid to block the publication of a memoir by their niece Mary L. Trump — the daughter of their deceased older brother Fred Trump Jr. — that described decades of family dysfunction and brutality that she claims made Donald Trump into a reckless leader.

Robert Trump, who worked in the family real-estate empire, told The New York Times last month that President Trump was “selfless” — “much more so than anyone would ever realize.”

Known for being less interested in the limelight than his brother, Robert Trump served more of a background than public role in the family business. “You could consider him the quietest of Trumps,” Michael D’Antonio, the Trump biographer, said of the younger brother. “He was glad to stay out of the spotlight. He had a very low key role in the Trump Organization itself. I could never tell quite what he did, but it was not public facing.”

Robert Trump, who for years was married to Blaine Trump, a well-known New York City socialite, was more accepted in elite society circles than his older brother ever was, Mr. D’Antonio said. But he was always loyal to his older brother. He was already ill when he helped the president in a lawsuit aimed at stopping the release of Mary Trump’s book. “It seemed Robert was being dragged out of a sick bed to somehow contest this,” Mr. D’Antonio said. “He was willing to be used by Donald but never eager to be out front.”

The president is also expected to speak to a New York City police union Friday evening from his private club in Bedminster, N.J.

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An expected guilty plea in the review of the Russia inquiry is sure to please Trump.

A former F.B.I. lawyer intends to plead guilty after he was charged with falsifying a document as part of a deal with prosecutors conducting their own criminal inquiry of the Russia investigation, according his lawyer and court documents made public on Friday.

The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, 38, who was assigned to the Russia investigation, plans to admit that he altered an email from the C.I.A. that investigators relied on to seek renewed court permission in 2017 for a secret wiretap on the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Mr. Clinesmith’s lawyer said he made a mistake while trying to clarify facts for a colleague.

Mr. Clinesmith had written texts expressing opposition to President Trump, who is likely to tout the plea agreement as evidence that the Russia investigation was illegitimate and politically motivated. Mr. Trump has long been blunt about seeing the continuing investigation by the prosecutor examining the earlier inquiry, John H. Durham, as political payback whose fruits he would like to see revealed in the weeks before the election.

Prosecutors did not reveal any evidence in charging documents that Mr. Clinesmith’s actions were part of any broader conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump. And the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has found that law enforcement officials had sufficient reason to open the Russia investigation and found no evidence that they acted with political bias.

Manhattan prosecutors say Trump is not entitled to details of tax returns inquiry.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said on Friday that President Trump was not entitled to learn more about the scope of its criminal investigation into his business dealings, rejecting Mr. Trump’s latest effort to block a subpoena for his tax returns.

The office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., wrote in a pair of new court filings that Mr. Trump should be treated like any other recipient of a subpoena, who is typically unable to access details of secret grand jury proceedings.

The filings came in response to Mr. Trump’s renewed efforts this month to stop Mr. Vance’s prosecutors from accessing eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns.

Earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the subpoena was too broad and amounted to illegal harassment. They asked a Manhattan federal judge for a hearing to discuss whether Mr. Vance’s office should be forced to disclose the justifications for the subpoena.

The office had suggested last week that it was investigating the president and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a broader investigation than prosecutors had acknowledged before.

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Inside Biden’s exhaustive V.P. search.

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Though Ms. Harris was seen from the start as a front-runner, Mr. Biden did not begin the process with a favorite in mind.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

During Ms. Harris’s delicate audition to become Mr. Biden’s running mate, she faced daunting obstacles, including an array of strong competitors, unease about her within the Biden family and bitter feuds from California and the 2020 primary season that exploded anew.

Though Ms. Harris was seen from the start as a front-runner, Mr. Biden did not begin the process with a favorite in mind. Interviews with more than three dozen people involved in the vice-presidential search — including advisers to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, allies of other prospects and Democratic leaders — showed that he settled on her only after an exhaustive review that forged new political alliances, deepened existing rivalries and further elevated a cohort of women as leaders in their party.

Ms. Harris was one of four finalists for the job, along with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser. But in the eyes of Mr. Biden and his advisers, Ms. Harris alone covered every one of their essential political needs.

Ms. Rice had sterling foreign-policy credentials and a history of working with Mr. Biden, but was inexperienced as a candidate. Ms. Warren had an enthusiastic following and became a trusted adviser to Mr. Biden on economic matters, but she represented neither generational nor racial diversity. Ms. Whitmer, a moderate, appealed to Mr. Biden’s political and ideological instincts, but selecting her also would have yielded an all-white ticket.

Other candidates rose and faded in the process: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois powerfully impressed Mr. Biden’s search team, but his lawyers feared she would face challenges to her eligibility because of the circumstances of her birth overseas. Representative Karen Bass of California emerged as a favorite among elected officials and progressives — Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke glowingly of her to Mr. Biden — but the relationship-focused Mr. Biden barely knew her.

In the end, Mr. Biden embraced Ms. Harris as a partner for reasons that were both pragmatic and personal — a sign of how the former vice president, who is oriented toward seeking consensus and building broad coalitions, might be expected to govern. Indeed, Mr. Biden has already told allies he hopes a number of the other vice-presidential contenders will join his administration in other roles.

Trump plans to hold his R.N.C. speech on the White House lawn, raising legal questions.

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Mr. Trump on the South Lawn of the White House last month.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Mr. Trump said in an interview Thursday that he planned to deliver his renomination speech for the Republican National Convention from the South Lawn at the White House, a move that raises legal questions about using federal property for campaign purposes.

“I’ll probably be giving my speech at the White House because it is a great place. It’s a place that makes me feel good, it makes the country feel good,” Mr. Trump told The New York Post. “We’d do it possibly outside on one of the lawns, we have various lawns, so we could have it outside in terms of the China virus,” he said, using a term widely criticized as xenophobic to refer to the coronavirus pandemic.

Melania Trump, the first lady, is expected to deliver her speech from the White House residence, according to a person familiar with the plans. And Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a senior White House adviser, is expected to have a prime-time speaking slot on the same night as her father, and also deliver her speech from the White House, the person said. Vice President Mike Pence, meanwhile, is set to deliver his convention speech from the Fort McHenry monument in Baltimore.

Fort McHenry is also federal property run by the National Park Service, and ethics experts have raised questions about public servants using federal property for political purposes.

Mr. Trump had previously said he was still deciding between giving the speech at the White House or at the Gettysburg battlefield, after plans for a convention in Charlotte, N.C., and then in Jacksonville, Fla., had both been scrapped because of health concerns about bringing a large group of people together in the middle of a pandemic.

But using the White House as the backdrop for one of the peak political moments of the fall campaign raises questions about whether it would be a breach of the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while on the job. Mr. Trump himself is not subject to the act. But everyone who works for him, and who would be involved in setting up the event, would be.

In his interview with The New York Post, Mr. Trump did not address the legal issues. Instead, he appeared to be more concerned with ensuring that he would deliver the address in front of a crowd of supporters. “We could have quite a group of people. It’s very big, a very big lawn. We could have a big group of people,” he said.

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