Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has named spy chief Kyrylo Budanov as his new chief of staff, just over a month after his previous top aide resigned amid a corruption row.
“At this time, Ukraine needs greater focus on security issues,” Zelensky said in a post on social media, publishing a photo of his meeting with Budanov in Kyiv.
Budanov, 39, has until now led the Hur military intelligence, which has claimed a number of highly-effective strikes against Russia.
Zelensky also said he intended to replace his defence minister Denys Shmyhal, appointing his current minister of digital transformation Mykhaylo Fedorov to take up the post.
Budanov’s predecessor, Andriy Yermak, wielded enormous political influence throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion launched in 2022. He also led Ukraine’s negotiating team in crucial talks with the US aimed at ending the war.
In Friday’s post on social media, Zelensky wrote: “At this time, Ukraine needs greater focus on security issues, the development of the defence and security forces of Ukraine, as well as on the diplomatic track of negotiations.
“Kyrylo has specialist experience in these areas and sufficient strength to deliver results.”
The president added that he had already instructed his new office chief to update and present key documents regarding “the strategic foundations” of Ukraine’s defence.
The chief of presidential staff in Ukraine is historically a very powerful position. There was a time in the 2000s when a presidential administration head in Ukraine wielded about as much power as the president himself.
Ostensibly administrative, the role traditionally offered not just close access to the head of state, but also plentiful opportunities to pull the strings of government.
For example, the chief of presidential staff could lobby for government appointments and apply pressure to business circles, often resulting in personal gain.
General Budanov’s appointment suggests an intention to overhaul the role. It puts the president’s office on a war footing – it will very likely be much more focused on security and the war with Russia.
Later on Friday, Zelensky announced other changes to his top team. He said Fedorov had been nominated to serve as his new defence minister because he had “decided to change the structure of the Ukrainian ministry of defence”.
Federov, aged 34, is the youngest minister in the Ukrainian government. His key achievement so far is the development and implementation of Diya, a centralised digital platform for government services.
He is “deeply involved with drones”, and will be tasked in particular with training more drone operators, Zelensky said in his evening address.
He added that Shmyhal remains “part of the team” and will be moved to another area of work.
Zelensky said Budanov was being replaced by 56-year-old foreign intelligence chief Oleh Ivashchenko.
Budanov’s predecessor, former chief of staff Yermak, 54, stepped down on 28 November, and his departure was seen as a major blow to Zelensky.
Yermak quit shortly after his home in Kyiv was raided by the country’s anti-corruption agencies.
He is not accused of any wrongdoing, and the anti-corruption bureau Nabu and specialised anti-corruption prosecutor’s office Sap did not explain why they searched his property.
In the past few months investigators have linked several high-profile figures to an alleged $100m (£75m) embezzlement scandal in the energy sector.
They said they had uncovered an extensive scheme to take kickbacks and influence state-owned companies including state nuclear energy firm Enerhoatom.
The corruption scandal has rocked Ukraine, weakening Zelensky’s own position and jeopardising the country’s negotiating position at a delicate time.
Kyiv, backed by its European allies, is seeking to change the terms of a US-led draft peace plan originally seen as heavily slanted towards Russia.
Russian officials have seized on the scandal, talking up corruption claims.
Dick Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, has died at the age of 84.Cheney died Monday due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.”His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” the statement said.Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement continued. “We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”Prior to serving as vice president under President George W. Bush, Cheney was also chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and a congressman from Wyoming for a decade. Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Bush called Cheney a “decent, honorable man” and said his death was “a loss to the nation.”“History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation — a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held,” Bush said in a statement.Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.His vice presidency was defined by the age of terrorism. Cheney disclosed that he had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile — detractors called it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.”Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush.Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect.From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.That bargain largely held up.”He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events.The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and court challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest court — left the nation in limbo for weeks.Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush’s constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House leader.Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn’t seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own.Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney a few years later bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew closer, too, as the Cheney family became one of Trump’s favorite targets.Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defense in 2022 as she juggled her lead role on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with trying to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.Liz Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment after the insurrection earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But that praise and her father’s support didn’t keep her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a dramatic fall after her quick rise to the No. 3 job in the House GOP leadership.Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill,, serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
Dick Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, has died at the age of 84.
Cheney died Monday due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.
“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” the statement said.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement continued. “We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
Prior to serving as vice president under President George W. Bush, Cheney was also chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and a congressman from Wyoming for a decade.
Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush called Cheney a “decent, honorable man” and said his death was “a loss to the nation.”
“History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation — a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held,” Bush said in a statement.
David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is interviewed for ’The Presidents’ Gatekeepers’ project about White House Chiefs of Staff, July 15, 2011, in Jackson, Wyoming.
Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.
His vice presidency was defined by the age of terrorism. Cheney disclosed that he had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.
In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile — detractors called it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.
For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.
But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush.
Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.
With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect.
From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.
That bargain largely held up.
“He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”
As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events.
The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.
When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.
Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.
Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and court challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest court — left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush’s constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House leader.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn’t seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own.
Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney a few years later bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew closer, too, as the Cheney family became one of Trump’s favorite targets.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defense in 2022 as she juggled her lead role on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with trying to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment after the insurrection earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But that praise and her father’s support didn’t keep her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a dramatic fall after her quick rise to the No. 3 job in the House GOP leadership.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill,, serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.
In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.
He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
Dick Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, died Monday night at the age of 84. Cheney died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.”His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” the statement said.“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement continued. “We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”Prior to serving as vice president under President George W. Bush, Cheney was also chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and a congressman from Wyoming for a decade. Funeral arrangements were not immediately available. Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.His vice presidency was defined by the age of terrorism. Cheney disclosed that he had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile — detractors called it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.”Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush.Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect.From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.That bargain largely held up.”He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events.The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and court challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest court — left the nation in limbo for weeks.Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush’s constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House leader.Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn’t seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own.Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney a few years later bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew closer, too, as the Cheney family became one of Trump’s favorite targets.Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defense in 2022 as she juggled her lead role on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with trying to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.Liz Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment after the insurrection earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But that praise and her father’s support didn’t keep her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a dramatic fall after her quick rise to the No. 3 job in the House GOP leadership.Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill,, serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
Dick Cheney, the nation’s 46th vice president, died Monday night at the age of 84.
Cheney died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family.
“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” the statement said.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the statement continued. “We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
Prior to serving as vice president under President George W. Bush, Cheney was also chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and a congressman from Wyoming for a decade.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.
Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself — all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is interviewed for ’The Presidents’ Gatekeepers’ project about White House Chiefs of Staff, July 15, 2011, in Jackson, Wyoming.
Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”
In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.
His vice presidency was defined by the age of terrorism. Cheney disclosed that he had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.
In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile — detractors called it a smirk — Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.
For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.
But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.
Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush.
Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.
With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect.
From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.
That bargain largely held up.
“He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”
As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”
His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq war. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events.
The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.
When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.
Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.
Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and court challenges — a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest court — left the nation in limbo for weeks.
Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush’s constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.
On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House leader.
Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn’t seem to mind and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own.
Cheney retired to Jackson Hole, not far from where Liz Cheney a few years later bought a home, establishing Wyoming residency before she won his old House seat in 2016. The fates of father and daughter grew closer, too, as the Cheney family became one of Trump’s favorite targets.
Dick Cheney rallied to his daughter’s defense in 2022 as she juggled her lead role on the committee investigating Jan. 6 with trying to get reelected in deeply conservative Wyoming.
Liz Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment after the insurrection earned her praise from many Democrats and political observers outside Congress. But that praise and her father’s support didn’t keep her from losing badly in the Republican primary, a dramatic fall after her quick rise to the No. 3 job in the House GOP leadership.
Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill,, serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.
Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he had been raised, and ran for the state’s single congressional seat.
In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.
In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.
He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary.
U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García of Chicago will not run for reelection, a source close to the congressman said Monday, apparently ceding the spot to his chief of staff, who filed to run for the 4th Congressional District seat that García has held since 2019.
García last week filed to run for reelection next year but on Monday his chief of staff, Patty Garcia, also filed for the same spot. A source who was briefed on the matter told the Tribune that the congressman was expected to withdraw his petitions to run for another term, leaving the Democratic slate free for Patty Garcia to win and all but ensuring she’d be elected in the heavily blue Chicago congressional district.
Rep. García would join four other members of Illinois’ congressional delegation not running for reelection next year — U.S. Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly are running to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, while Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Danny Davis are retiring. Rep. García did not return calls seeking comment.
García, 69, is a former Chicago alderman, Cook County commissioner and state senator and twice unsuccessful mayoral candidate, including being defeated in a 2015 runoff against Mayor Rahm Emanuel and finishing fourth in 2023.
An ally of the late Mayor Harold Washington, García has been an unabashed political progressive and supporter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who calls himself a democratic socialist. In his runs for president, Sanders used García as a surrogate to appeal to Latino voters.
The circumstances involving García’s apparent departure are reminiscent of how he got into Congress in the first place. Only days before the deadline for petition filing in 2017, 13-term Democratic U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez pulled his petitions. A day later, García announced his intention to run for the seat and won Gutiérrez’s backing.
García won the nomination with two-thirds of the primary vote.
Patty Garcia is no relation to the congressman. The Chicago Sun-Times first reported that the congressman would not seek another term.
U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, center, kicks off a reelection campaign for 2026 as he and a coalition of elected officials collect signatures on the first day of petition gathering outside the CTA Orange Line Station in Chicago on Aug. 5, 2025. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
The sudden move by Rep. García came on the final day that petitions to run in the 2026 elections could be filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections, the end of the weeklong period for prospective March 17 primary contenders to appear on the ballot.
In another surprise move, symbolizing the weakened state of Illinois Republicans, no one filed for the GOP primary ballot for state treasurer.
The lack of a GOP challenger to file petitions to face three-term Democratic Treasurer Mike Frerichs represents a further breakdown in a state Republican Party that has been shut out of all statewide offices and two U.S. Senate seats. The GOP is also in a superminority in the legislature and state Supreme Court, and holds only three of the state’s 17 U.S. House seats.
Frerichs’ campaign said the absence of a GOP primary filer marked the first time in at least 90 years that a major political party in Illinois had no candidate file to run in a primary election for statewide office.
The Illinois Republican State Central Committee, made up of representatives from each of the state’s congressional districts, will have the ability to appoint a candidate to fill the treasurer ballot vacancy, but the appointee will be required to obtain at least 5,000 valid signatures from registered voters as a regular candidate would.
All told, more than 630 people filed candidate petitions for the Democratic and Republican primary ballots for federal and state offices in the weeklong filing period, with Democrats facing heavily contested races due to retirements and political ladder-climbing in several open-seat contests.
But the end of the filing period also leaves one week for the filing of objections to the candidacy petitions. And the sheer volume of candidates filing means the likelihood that some will be tossed off the ballot for lacking enough valid petition signatures or other filing mistakes.
Joining Fioretti in seeking the GOP attorney general nomination was JoAnne Giullemette of Chicago, who finished third in a 2022 GOP primary challenge to veteran U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood of Peoria, and Andy Williams Jr. of Darien, a onetime write-in candidate for president.
The winner would take on Democratic incumbent Kwame Raoul, who is seeking a third term as the state’s top law enforcement official.
Filing a Republican challenge to two-term Democratic Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias is Walter Adamczyk of Chicago. Adamczyk, who filed last week, got six votes in a losing bid for 29th Ward Chicago alderman in 2023. Joining Adamczyk on Monday was Diane Harris of Joliet, who lost a 2022 bid for state Senate and lost previous bids for state House and Congress.
Democratic Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s decision not to seek reelection, potentially for a 2027 bid for Chicago mayor, created a rare opening for a state government office. A total of five Democrats filed: state Reps. Margaret Croke of Chicago and Stephanie Kifowit of Oswego, along with state Sen. Karina Villa of West Chicago, Lake County Treasurer Holly Kim and, on Monday, Champaign County auditor George Danos.
Republican Bryan Drew of downstate Benton, a personal injury attorney who lost a GOP primary race for judge last year, filed last week for the party’s comptroller nomination.
With Durbin’s decision to retire after his term ends in 2027, a field of 22 candidates developed to try to succeed him. Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg and Kelly of Lynwood, as well as Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, head a list of 14 Democratic contenders. Eight Republicans, including former state GOP Chair Don Tracy, filed for the nomination.
In the open seat for the 2nd Congressional District, which Kelly is giving up to seek the U.S. Senate nomination, a dozen people filed for the ballot: 10 Democrats and two Republicans. The sprawling district includes parts of the South Side, south suburbs even the downstate city of Danville.
A dozen candidates filed in the northwest suburban 8th Congressional District, where Krishnamoorthi is leaving to seek the U.S. Senate nomination — eight Democrats and four Republicans.
Davis’ decision to retire at the end of his 15th term created a wide-open race in the 7th Congressional District, which covers the West Side and downtown. A total of 13 Democrats and two Republicans filed for the seat.
In the north suburban 9th Congressional District, where 14-term Schakowski, of Evanston, is not seeking reelection, 21 candidates filed — 17 Democrats and four Republicans.
After hearing candidate objections, the State Board of Elections has scheduled Jan. 8 to finalize the primary ballot.
Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday endorsed his former top deputy, Aaron Reitz, to succeed him, giving Reitz a significant boost in the four-candidate Republican primary to be Texas’ top civil lawyer.
Paxton’s endorsement comes after Sen. Ted Cruz, a former solicitor general of Texas, backed Rep. Chip Roy for attorney general. Both Reitz and Roy have served as Paxton’s legal deputies and Cruz’s chief of staff throughout their tenures.
But while Paxton and Roy publicly split in 2020, when Roy called for Paxton to step down after the attorney general’s senior staff reported him to the FBI for alleged bribery and abuse of office, Reitz has positioned himself as the heir to Paxton’s movement, calling himself the attorney general’s “offensive coordinator.”
In his endorsement, Paxton agreed with that assessment, crediting Reitz with handling some of the office’s most high-profile — and controversial — cases.
“He drove our Texas v. Biden docket and spearheaded some of our most consequential battles — on border security, immigration, Big Tech, Covid tyranny, energy and the environment, pro-life, Second Amendment, religious liberty, free speech, and election integrity,” Paxton said in a statement. “Aaron Reitz is the only candidate who is fully vetted, battle-tested, proven, and ready to be Attorney General.”
Reitz and Roy’s careers working for prominent Texas Republicans have mirrored each other in numerous ways.
Roy was the first top aide tapped by both Cruz and Paxton in their current roles. He served as Cruz’s first chief of staff from 2012 through 2014, helping pioneer Cruz’s strategy during the 2013 government shutdown over Obamacare, and then was hired by Paxton as the newly elected attorney general’s first assistant attorney general.
Roy held that position as Paxton’s second in command through early 2016, at which point Roy left after Paxton incited a dramatic staff shake-up in the wake of the embattled attorney general’s first legal troubles. Roy went on to be elected to Congress in a Central Texas district in 2018, a position he has held ever since.
Reitz’s career played out in the reverse order. He was Paxton’s deputy attorney general for legal affairs from 2020 to 2023 before leaving to be Cruz’s chief of staff through early 2025. He then went on to a short stint at the Department of Justice this year before resigning to announce his run for attorney general.
Cruz, a former Texas solicitor general under then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, endorsed Roy on Saturday. While noting that Texas is “blessed” to have a strong slate of conservatives running for the position and that he is friends with each candidate, Cruz said he has known Roy for nearly two decades and, during that time, Roy has consistently displayed the “courage, integrity and conviction” required to be attorney general.
“As my very first chief of staff, Chip has been a close friend and ally of mine for over 12 years,” Cruz said in a statement. “We have been in more fights together than I can count, and I know Chip will always, always, always fight for conservative values.”
Both Cruz and Paxton had previously been letting the attorney general race, the first prominent statewide seat to open up for Texas Republicans in years, play out without weighing in. But Roy’s entry into the race Thursday appears to have upended both men’s calculations.
Roy received further endorsements from some of Congress’ most conservative members, including a fellow Texan, Rep. Keith Self of McKinney. He also won the backing of Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado, Byron Donalds, R-Florida, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
State Sens. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston and Joan Huffman, R-Houston are also running to succeed Paxton. Paxton is forgoing running for a fourth term to instead challenge Sen. John Cornyn in a primary.
Both Reitz and Roy have positioned themselves as the ideological heirs to Paxton’s conservative legal movement, which has put Texas at the forefront of high-profile cases on religious liberty, abortion and election law.
Calling himself the “only pro-Paxton candidate in the race”, Reitz pledged to continue his old boss’ fights.
“Under Ken Paxton, Texas has been a shining example for the conservative movement on how to fight and win against the enemies of Law, Order, and Liberty,” Reitz said in a statement. “My promise to Texans is that I will keep my foot on the gas and energetically carry on Paxton’s legacy.”
Though Paxton and Roy have split over the former’s conduct, Roy said in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Davis Thursday that the two share a similar conservative worldview.
“Ken and his team have done a great job fighting to defend Texas,” Roy said in the radio interview. “We’re going to continue that legacy going forward.”
More all-star speakers confirmed for The Texas Tribune Festival, Nov. 13–15! This year’s lineup just got even more exciting with the addition of State Rep. Caroline Fairly, R-Amarillo; former United States Attorney General Eric Holder; Abby Phillip, anchor of “CNN NewsNight”; Aaron Reitz, 2026 Republican candidate for Texas Attorney General; and State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin. Get your tickets today!
Twilight offered welcome concealment when we met at the prearranged hour. “I really haven’t gone out anywhere” since well before the election, Bill Gates, the outgoing Republican chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, told me in mid-November. He’d agreed to meet for dinner at an outdoor restaurant in the affluent suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona, but when he arrived, he kept his head down and looked around furtively. “Pretty much every night, I just go home, you know, with my wife, and maybe we pick up food, but I’m purposely not going out right now. I don’t necessarily want to be recognized.” He made a point of asking me not to describe his house or his car. Did he carry a gun, or keep one at home? Gates started to answer, then stopped. “I’m not sure if I want that out there,” he said.
As a younger politician, not so long ago, Gates had been pleased and flattered to be spotted in public. Now 51 years old, he never set out to become a combatant in the democracy wars. He shied away from the role when it was first thrust upon him, after the 2020 election, recognizing a threat to his rising career in the GOP. But the fight came to him, like it or not, because the Maricopa County board of supervisors is the election-certification authority for well over half the votes in the state.
When we spoke, Kari Lake was still contesting her loss in Arizona’s gubernatorial election. Months later, she is still anointing herself “the real governor” and saying that election officials who certified her defeat are “crooks” who “need to be locked up.” She reserves special venom for Gates. Speaking to thousands of raucous supporters in Phoenix on December 18, beneath clouds of confetti, Lake denounced “sham elections … run by fraudsters” and singled him out as the figurehead of a corrupt “house of cards.”
“They are daring us to do something about it,” she said. “We’re going to burn it to the ground.” Then she lowered her mic and appeared to mouth, with exaggerated enunciation, “Burn the fucker to the ground.” To uproarious applause, she went on to invoke the Second Amendment and the bloody American Revolution against a tyrant. “I think we’re right there right now, aren’t we?” she said.
All of that may seem a little beside the point from afar, an inconsequential footnote to a 2022 election season that, mercifully, felt more normal than the last one. But Lake shares Donald Trump’s dark gift for channeling the rage of her supporters toward violence that is never quite spoken aloud.
In part as a result of her vilification campaign, Gates is stalked on social media, in his inbox and on voicemail, and in public meetings of the board of supervisors. Based on what law enforcement regarded as a credible death threat, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone removed Gates and his wife from their home in Phoenix on Election Night and dispatched them to a secure location under guard. They knew the drill. “I’ve done it so many times,” Gates recalled. “It’s like, ‘Here we go again.’”
In two successive elections, 2020 and 2022, Gates has had to choose: back his party, or uphold the law. Today, he is a leading defender—in news conferences, in court, and in election oversight—of Arizona’s democratic institutions.
I’d come to Phoenix to try to understand this moment in American politics. November’s midterm election was the first in the country’s history to feature hundreds of candidates running explicitly as election rejectionists. Enough of them were defeated to mark a salutary trend: Swing voters did not seem to favor blatant, self-serving lies about election fraud. That was an encouraging result for democracy, and a balm to many Americans eager for a return to something like political normalcy.
But it was not the whole story. Election deniers won races for secretary of state—the post that oversees election administration—in Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. They make up most of the Republican freshman class in Congress. Even some of the losers came very close. Lake’s election-denying ticket mate, Abe Hamadeh, lost the Arizona attorney general’s race by 280 votes.
Of greatest interest to me was the extent to which the narrow losses of MAGA conspiracists gained legitimacy from the words and actions of people like Gates—otherwise low-profile electoral officials, many of them Republican. I wanted to know how he saw the recent election, and what he expected of the next one. The more time I spent with him, and in Arizona, the more uncertain the reprieve of last November appeared.
“I’m politically dead,” Gates told me. It’s what he thinks most of the time, though not always. He toys with thoughts of running again, even running for higher office, but calculates that he has next to no chance of securing his party’s nomination for any office in 2024. If Trump or a successor tries to overturn the vote in January 2025, somebody else will have to be found to push back.
In Maricopa County alone, four of the five supervisors, all of whom have stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of the county’s election machinery, are Republicans. As ultra-MAGA conspiracists continue to dominate the GOP base, what kind of Republicans will be around to safeguard the next election, or the one after that?
Left: Ballot drop box outside the election center in Phoenix, Arizona. Right: “Unborn Lives Matter,” “Trump 2024 Take America Back,” and “Kari Lake for Governor” flags in a residential backyard in Peoria, Arizona. (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Something goes wrong in just about every voting cycle, and even when things go right, there are always details that can be made to look suspicious by fabulists intent on breaking public confidence. Sound elections rely on the competence, the fairness, the transparency, and, in recent years, the courage of election workers.
On Election Day 2022, Gates and other county authorities planned to ward off conspiracy theories with a smooth and efficiently functioning vote. The technology gods had other plans.
The first sign of trouble turned up around 6:30 a.m. One polling center reported what looked like a tabulator malfunction. Ballots were printing on demand, and voters were filling them in, but the tabulator spat them out unread. The troubleshooting hotline logged a second call a few minutes later, then a third. Soon, dozens of polling places had tabulation failures. Trouble spots filled the status board at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, which stood behind a newly built security fence to keep protesters outside.
“And then it’s like, ‘Oh, crap,’” Gates recalled. “This is a widespread issue.” And “we have literally the eyes of the world on this election.” Voter lines backed up and tempers flared. Nobody knew what was wrong. Gates got on the phone with the president of Dominion Voting Systems, which made the tabulators.
Lake and the far-right information ecosystem had promoted the lie that the ballot was rigged long before Election Day. Social media now lit up with claims that election officials had sabotaged their own machines to suppress the vote in Republican neighborhoods. Lake went on television to say, falsely, that her voters were being turned away.
Gates and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, rushed out a video message at 8:52 a.m. Standing in front of a tabulator, Gates said, “We’re trying to fix this problem as quickly as possible, and we also have a redundancy in place. If you can’t put the ballot in the tabulator, then you can simply place it here where you see the number three. This is a secure box where those ballots will be kept for later this evening, where we’ll bring them in here to Central Count to tabulate them.”
It was the sort of rapid public response—factual, practical, and reassuring—that’s become essential since Trump first began poisoning voter confidence with false claims of fraud. But the Lake campaign and its allies nonetheless saw an opportunity to sow doubt and confusion.
“No. DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN BOX 3 TO BE ‘TABULATED DOWNTOWN,’” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA tweeted repeatedly to nearly 2 million followers. Kelli Ward, the Arizona Republican Party chair, posted the same urgent, all-caps advice, adding falsely that “Maricopa County is not turning on their tabulators downtown today!”
Many Lake supporters refused to use the Box 3 option, fearful that their votes would not be counted, and Gates ordered that voters be allowed to try the tabulators as many times as they wanted. The chaos at some polling stations worsened.
The technical error, diagnosed by midmorning, turned out to be that the printers in 43 of the 223 polling places were printing ballots with ink too faint for the tabulators to read. Nobody knew why; the same settings and equipment had worked fine in the August primaries. By early afternoon, technicians had solved the problem by increasing the heat setting on the print fuser.
Lake spread conspiracy theories throughout the day and in the days that followed, as the vote count went on. All Gates and Richer could do was stand in front of cameras, over and over again, answering every question. Box 3, by one or another name, was a standard voting option, employed in most Arizona counties for decades. There were plenty of polling places with short lines. Fewer than 1 percent of ballots were affected by printer issues, and all of them were being counted anyway. A live public video feed showed the tabulation operations, 24 hours a day. No voter had been turned away because of the glitch.
The office of Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s Republican attorney general, amplified Lake’s accusations and warned in a letter against certifying the election results without addressing numerous “concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law.” Gates’s lawyer responded that the attorney general’s office had its facts wrong. Gates and his fellow supervisors certified the canvass on November 28. Katie Hobbs, the Democrat, had beaten Lake by 17,117 votes.
Lake filed a lawsuit on December 9, a 70-page complaint filled with florid accusations: sabotaged printers and tabulators, “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots,” thousands of Republican voters who’d been disenfranchised—all in Maricopa County alone. The judge threw out most of her charges in pretrial rulings. At trial, Lake was unable to supply any persuasive evidence of wrongdoing or identify even one disenfranchised voter or illegal ballot. She lost again in the Court of Appeals on February 16, and now vows to go to the state supreme court. She has raised more than $2.6 million since Election Day, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, and seems likely to run for the U.S. Senate next year.
Interior building details of the election center in Phoenix, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
M
ost of the election deniers who lost their races around the country in November conceded defeat, with varying degrees of grace. Pretending to win elections they lost turned out to be harder than Trump made it look. Not many politicians have the former president’s bottomless capacity to live and breathe an alternate reality—or make millions of people care. A pair of Joe Biden speeches on democracy, together with the public hearings of the January 6 committee, had also helped discredit election-fraud charges among independent voters. And right-wing media may have been more cautious about baseless fraud claims after the defamation lawsuits brought against them following their performance in 2020. Lake, a charismatic presence who had honed her television skills as a local news anchor, was one of the few candidates who doubled down on conspiracy talk.
But the impact of Lake’s performance was not hard to see. More than 1.2 million people voted for Lake in the governor’s race, three-quarters of a million of them in Maricopa. Many, swept up in her reality-distortion field, believed sincerely that the election had been stolen. Scores of them surged into the board of supervisors’ hearing room on November 16, eight days after the election. Gates had scheduled public comments on election procedures. He sat on the dais with the demeanor of a nervous high-school principal, determined to keep rowdy students under control.
“I’m just going to say this right now: We have children watching this,” he told the crowd, improbably. “So please, no profanity.”
Everyone who signed up to speak would have two minutes. No interruptions. “We’re not going to have any outbursts, okay?” he said. The audience laughed, mocking him.
A woman named Raquel stood up.
“Mr. Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Richer, you both have lost all credibility and any shred of integrity—”
Applause interrupted her. Gates narrowed his eyes.
Raquel accused Gates of founding “a political-action committee to specifically defeat MAGA candidates” and asked how he could fairly run an election. In 2021, amid a spurious “forensic audit” that tried to prove that Trump had won Arizona the previous year, Gates had made a $500 contribution to a PAC formed by Richer, the county recorder, called Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona—“The Arizona election wasn’t stolen” was the first line on its website—but he’d had no role in distributing its funds.
Another woman, Kimberly, told the supervisors that she knew they had sabotaged the ballot printers. “As a former programmer myself, I can tell you there’s no such thing as a glitch,” she said. The crowd, stirring, murmured its assent.
Jeff Zink, a MAGA Republican who had just lost his race for U.S. Congress, brought a more direct sense of grievance. The only reason he had not won, he said, was that “an algorithm took place which shows that at no time did I ever gain any ground whatsoever.” He did not explain what he thought an algorithm is. It did not matter: He had the room behind him.
Some witnesses made specific allegations. Many simply flung vitriol. “I’m just disgusted by your behavior,” said Sheila, a retired city worker. “Look at all these people out here who are suffering so badly because of your falsehoods.”
“You are the cancer that is tearing this nation apart,” said Matt, another speaker, to louder and angrier applause.
“Thank you,” Gates replied tightly.
Several speakers invoked higher powers and threatened divine retribution—or, anyway, retribution in God’s name. “Beware, your sins will find you out,” one speaker said in a quavering voice. Another, a hulk of a man named Michael, said that “God knows what you’ve done … I warn you and I caution you, we got a big God in Jesus’s name.”
Another burst of applause amid angry buzzing. Audience members were beginning to rise from their seats. Two sheriff’s deputies made as if to move toward them and then thought better of it. My sense, sitting near the front, was that the gathering was just below full boil. If the crowd got any hotter, two deputies would not be enough.
“You need to resign today. And I pray that God is going to convict your heart and for what you’ve done,” yelled a furious Lake supporter named Lisette.
Gates tried to respond, beginning to speak of the electoral redundancies that ensure that every vote is counted. But the crowd was standing and shouting. He adjourned the meeting and slipped out a side door, stage right. I joined him a few minutes later in his office across the street. I told Gates that it had looked to me as though the crowd had been making up its mind about whether to rush the dais.
“This is not a game,” he said. “This is very serious. And the danger of violence is just right under the surface.”
Gates picked without enthusiasm at a container of plain chicken and steamed carrots that his wife, the county’s associate presiding judge, had cooked for his lunch. “We’re doing this diet right now,” he said, a bit mournfully. “We’re trying to be good.”
He had rejected the option of packing the room with security, he said. “These are challenging times, because you also don’t want to create a police state, you know? And that’s something that we’re balancing.”
Gates has learned to live with a constant stream of abuse. It began long before the 2022 midterms and has not let up since those elections concluded. One persistent correspondent has written to him several times a month since early 2021. One day, he writes, “Hey I hear little bitch Bill Gates is in hiding? Why? Cause you worked extra hard to steal tao elections … or more? Keep hiding rat shit.” Four days later: “You are scum and deserve to be tried for treason.”
A voicemail left for his chief of staff, Zach Schira, twisted with rage: “I really believe that what we used to do to traitors is what we should do today. Give ’em a fucking Alabama necktie, you piece of shit. Fucking traitor, just like your fucking boss, rigging the election for a little bit of dough, you know? Piece of shit.” (The good old boy who left the message was probably aiming for a lynching metaphor, but he had hit on something else.)
In December, Gates woke up one morning and was moved to post on Twitter about the beauty around him: “If you are in @maricopacounty, step outside and look at the sunrise. We are blessed to live here.” The responses, dozens of them, were almost comically savage.
“Hopefully soon you won’t be able to see that beautiful sunrise, bc you’ll be locked up!”
“Treeeeaaasooon.”
“Quick question. Do you happen to know the penalty for treason? Just curious is all.”
There was more, calling him subhuman, soulless, satanic.
Every now and then, something sufficiently threatening crosses Sheriff Penzone’s desk, and he notifies Gates that it is time to sleep somewhere else. On other occasions, the sheriff will post a pair of undercover deputies outside his home. Most of the time, though, Gates walks and drives and puts himself out there in the world all alone.
A residential property in Peoria, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Gates knows he is far from the only election official under threat. On January 16, police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, arrested a failed Republican political candidate who’d rejected his defeat and allegedly paid gunmen to shoot at the homes of four Democratic officeholders. On January 26, over in Arizona’s Cochise County, the elections director resigned her post after years of abuse, citing an “outrageous and physically and emotionally threatening” working environment.
Gates stays in touch with peers around the country, mostly Republicans, who have stood up against election denial and faced the consequences. They form a little community, like an internet support group, dishing out comfort on bad days and dispatching a friendly word when they see one another in the news.
One member of this informal group is Al Schmidt, who was the sole Republican on the Philadelphia board of elections in the 2020 election and received a deluge of death threats after Trump accused him of being party to corruption. Gates also corresponds with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, both of whom pushed back against Trump’s demands to “find” enough votes to upend Biden’s victory in that state.
“We have done Zoom meetings,” he told me. “We have met in person. We talk on the phone. We text one another. And it’s very helpful because … if you haven’t gone through this, you don’t really understand. And if you have gone through it, you do.”
The simple banter reminds Gates that he has allies, even if far away.
“Yesterday, Trump endorsed an all-in stop the steal candidate for AG so look for me in handcuffs in early 2023. 😊,” Gates said in a text last June to Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the secretary of state of neighboring New Mexico. He was only half-joking: Abe Hamadeh, who nearly went on to win the attorney general’s race, was vowing to prosecute election officials whom he accused of fraud.
“Omg. Well I’ll come bail you out!! ❤️,” Oliver replied.
Chair of the board of supervisors is not even a full-time job in Maricopa, the fourth-largest county in America, with a population of 4.5 million and a $4.5 billion budget. Gates’s day job is associate general counsel for Ping, a large Phoenix-based manufacturer of golf clubs and bags. His position is not undemanding, but election controversies sometimes keep him away from the office for days or weeks at a time. His bosses, he said, “have been very understanding.”
It is hard to convey how little his world resembles the one Gates signed up for when he first ran for county supervisor. He grew up as a self-described “political dork” in Phoenix and chose Drake University, in Des Moines, for college because of its champion mock-trial team and because he wanted to see the Iowa caucuses in person. Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush were his political heroes.
In 2009, Gates won an appointment to the Phoenix city council, where he developed a reputation as an urban technocrat. When he ran for county supervisor in 2016, the planks of his platform involved vacant strip malls, water and sewer problems, and garbage pickup. He called himself an “economic-development Republican” who “wants government to get out of the way to allow … free enterprise to flourish.”
Left: A polling-place tabulator and ballot box. Right: Election canvassing books at the election center in Phoenix. (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
The warehouse section of the election center in Phoenix (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Gates did not much like Trump in the 2016 campaign, and voted for John Kasich in the primary. When Trump came to town for a rally, Gates told The Arizona Republic that Trump’s views “do not reflect the majority of Arizonans and the majority of Arizona Republicans.”
Even so, like a lot of reluctant Republicans, Gates voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton that year. “I believed he would nominate judges to the federal bench who would exercise judicial restraint, and that Mike Pence would have a calming influence,” he told me. Now that he represents the election-certification authority, Gates will not say how he voted in 2020.
If 2022 was hard on Gates and his colleagues, 2020 was worse—a fact that can reasonably support either optimism or pessimism for 2024. The presidency was at stake, not the governor’s office, and the aftermath of the election fell upon Gates and his fellow supervisors like a toxic spill. Arizona, and Maricopa County in particular, became a major focus of Trump’s cries of fraud. Angry mobs descended on the election command center and the homes of some of the supervisors, shouting “Stop the steal.” Alex Jones of Infowars and Representative Paul Gosar worked up the crowds. Gates called the scene outside the command center “Lollapalooza for the alt right.” Police put up temporary fencing to protect the ongoing tabulation. Inside, the staff could hear chanting and the reverberation of drums.
The incumbent president, wielding all the authority of his position, mobilized not only the MAGA grassroots but also the GOP establishment in service of his pressure campaign. Trump twice tried to get one of Gates’s colleagues, then-chair Clint Hickman, on the phone. Ward, the state Republican chair, began calling and texting Gates relentlessly as the deadline neared to certify the presidential vote, on November 20. “Here’s Sidney Powell’s phone number,” she said, according to Gates, referring to a Trump lawyer who would become notorious for outlandish claims. “Will you please call her?”
“I’m going, ‘Who’s Sidney Powell?’” Gates told me. “I never returned that call.”
In her text messages, which Gates provided to me, Ward recited multiple alleged anomalies and conspiracy theories. She attributed a baseless allegation about the corrupt design of Dominion software to an unnamed “team of fraud investigators.” She worried that “fellow Repubs are throwing in the towel. Very sad. And unAmerican.” She noted, “You all have the power that none of the rest of us have.”
The texts went on and on, alternately lawyerly, angry, and pleading.
Gates replied in the end with four words: “Thanks for your input.”
Had he felt threatened by all the arm-twisting from the state party chair? I asked.
“Threat is a strong word,” he told me, adding, “I felt pressure. I felt like if I didn’t do what she wanted to do, that there would be political ramifications, certainly.”
Gates grew up in local government and had a politician’s instinct not to make enemies. But if he fulfilled his lawful duty, he would become a pariah in the state GOP and an enemy of the president of the United States. Knowing that—and Ward made sure he knew—was supposed to crush all thoughts of resistance.
“Once you make that vote to certify, you know you’re not coming back from that,” Gates said. “People thought because I was nice over all these years that I was weak.”
Gates and his fellow supervisors voted unanimously, on schedule, to certify the 2020 election. But that didn’t slow the campaign to overturn the results. “Stop the steal” sentiment intensified as the year drew to a close. The Republican-dominated State Senate issued a subpoena for all of the county’s paper ballots and voting machines, planning to hand them over to a MAGA-run outfit called Cyber Ninjas to “audit” the results. Gates and his colleagues refused to comply, believing that would be illegal. They filed a lawsuit to void the subpoena.
Gates was doing last-minute shopping at Walgreens at about 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve when Rudy Giuliani called him. He did not recognize the number and ignored it, but he kept the voicemail, which he played for me.
“I have a few things I’d like to talk over with you,” Giuliani says, after introducing himself. “Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans, sort of, we’re both in this kind of situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve it for everybody. So give me a call, Bill. I’m on this number, any time, doesn’t matter, okay? Take care. Bye.”
Gates shook his head at the memory.
“Someone who on 9/11 I had great respect for,” he said. “I didn’t return his call.”
In early 2021, state legislators moved to have Gates and his colleagues taken into custody for contempt if they did not hand over the ballots, notwithstanding the pending court case. Gates assured his crying daughters—there are three of them, now all in college—that he would be all right.
“So I actually shot a video on my camera—this was sort of like, you know, a hostage video,” Gates said. “Like, ‘If, you know, if you’re watching this, I’m now in custody,’ kind of explaining why I had done what I did, why I thought we were right.”
For all the sense of menace, there was something liberating about this period, Gates told me, and it was around this time that he began to speak out more often and more forcefully in defense of elections and the people who run them.
“They made allegations that our employees had deleted files, basically committed crimes,” Gates said. “That’s when this board, along with Recorder Richer and other countywide electeds, stood up and said, ‘We’re going to push back now. This is a lie. You’re accusing our folks of committing crimes. We can’t stand by silent.’”
The county court eventually ruled that Maricopa had to turn over the ballots and voting machines, and the Cyber Ninjas circus began. It found no evidence of fraud but stretched on for months, keeping Gates in the news as a foil.
His career, he believed then, was finished. He had no reason to hold back.
“Once you’re dead, there’s nothing they can do to you,” he said. “Right?”
Pedestrians walking along Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
“You know,” Gates told me, “I think this is the most dangerous time for the state of our democracy other than the Civil War.”
By any accounting, the 2020 election was more dangerous than the one last year. Gates knows as well as anyone that it’s too soon to say the worst is behind us. As a presidential nominee, Trump or another candidate could bring a subversive focus and intensity to the party that’s all but impossible during the midterms. More than a third of Republicans are still hard-core Trump supporters, and nearly two-thirds still believe the 2020 election was rigged. The race late last month for chair of the Republican National Committee pitted an incumbent who was all in for Trump against two challengers who competed to be more so.
Yet for all that, and despite what he’s just been through (again), Gates does see hopeful possibilities—possibilities he didn’t see two years ago. Many of the most strident election deniers did lose, he points out. Gripped by MAGA fever, the GOP has now experienced three successive setbacks at the ballot box, in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Some of the party’s elected leaders have distanced themselves from Trump since the midterms, and polls of GOP voters show some softening of support.
If Arizona rejected the extremists who ran for statewide office—Lake and Hamadeh and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state—does that mean a politician like Gates might still have a chance? It’s an important question, because extremists who win primaries won’t always lose local general elections, and in the worst case, it wouldn’t take many extremists in roles like his to throw the country into chaos.
There is no clear answer yet, for Gates or for American democracy. In the biggest picture, the range of plausible outcomes in 2024 is as wide as it has been in living memory.
On January 11, Gates handed over the chair’s gavel to his colleague Clint Hickman. Until next year, when his term expires, Gates will simply be one of five members of the county board.
Recently, he has allowed himself to imagine running for statewide office. Democrats defeated all of the Arizona election deniers in 2022, but perhaps a mainstream Republican could win next time.
“Maybe we can take another shot at this. Maybe we can fight to get candidates who can appeal to the big tent,” he said. “That was the party that I joined.”
Did he really think it could happen as soon as 2024? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Things change. Two years is a long time in politics.”
This article initially misstated Bill Gates’s job title at Ping.
