The New York Times - USA (2020-06-29)

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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 A

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 Goldmanand Nicholas Fan-

dos.

Continued on Page A

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 A

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 Savageand Adam Gold-

man.

Continued on Page A

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 A

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 A

A new documentary followed the cam-

paigns of female politicians of color and

found much reason for hope. Above,

Representative Rashida Tlaib. PAGE C

ARTS C1-

Change at the Ballot Box

Florida workers are nervous as Disney

World and other destinations start to

reopen amid surging infections. PAGE B

BUSINESS B1-

Hoping for Magic

The Indigenous leader and activist
Allan Adam’s beating by the police
spurred outrage in Canada. PAGE A

INTERNATIONAL A9-

‘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 A

NATIONAL A13-

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 D

SPORTSMONDAY D1-

A Season Under Dark Clouds

Worldwide racism protests have fo-
cused attention on the country’s long-
held biases over skin tone. PAGE A

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 B

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 B

OBITUARIES B10-

He Captured Horrors in China

Jamelle Bouie PAGE A

A fivefold increase over two weeks EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-

prompted officials to impose limits for

the coming July 4 holiday. PAGE A

TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-

‘Scary’ Surge in Florida

President Trump has used judicial

appointments to his advantage. Should

Democrats run on the courts? PAGE A

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.