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When I asked Greene about the alleged affair, she replied by texting me a series of screenshots from Chambers’s social-media accounts, including a photo of the sign he put up on his gym. “Let me be clear with you,” Greene texted. “Writing defamatory articles about me is a very bad choice. Be very wise in who your ‘sources’ are.” She also directed me to her attorney, L. Lin Wood, who has lately been suggesting, on Twitter, that Trump’s political opponents deliberately infected the President with the novel coronavirus. When sent a series of claims and allegations about Greene that are addressed in this piece, Wood responded by insisting that the piece was “intended to smear her with false accusations, half-truths, misrepresentations, out-of-context statements, and agenda driven lies”—but, like Greene, he did not specifically refute or deny any of the particular allegations or claims presented to him.

He also circulated an e-mail that one of the medical chairs had sent to his department. “Now is the time to accept the hazards of caring for the sick . . . rather than focusing on making a few extra dollars,” that e-mail read. “I am not indifferent to your anxieties but personally feel demanding hazard pay is not becoming of a compassionate and caring physician.”

For those defending themselves against the lawsuits, their attorneys’ power of discovery would give them extraordinary access to Alfa Bank’s records. But Aven, Khan, and Fridman claim that they do not control their own documents at the bank and cannot produce them. (Public records show that together they control more than sixty per cent of the bank.)

Employees had questions about where Tron was headed and submitted anonymous questions for BitTorrent’s traditional Q&A with the company’s senior leadership. Hours before the Q&A, Sun called together his marketing team “to send him the list of questions,” so he could censor questions he didn’t like, says a former employee officially briefed on the meeting. Sun started reading existential questions about Tron’s future, such as, “What if TRX [Tron’s crypto] drops to zero?” Sun’s mood soured instantly. “He took it extremely personally.” According to the employee, he began yelling and threw a tantrum. “Whoever asked this question, we’re going to track them down,” Sun seethed, before threatening “to kill their entire family.”

Anna studied him. She has blond hair, cut asymmetrically, and wore a cobalt-blue shirt. “No,” she said. “You’re a good example of post-traumatic growth.” In 2004, she had accompanied her father to the site one last time before the towers came down. At dinner, she said that in footage of that visit “you can see the exact moment when you realize this is a stillbirth. You’re brokenhearted. You were misunderstood, blackmailed, your reputation was murdered.”

In the crowd, I noticed men muttering into walkie-talkies, their eyes hidden behind wraparound shades. To me they had the aspect of children playing at war, only their guns were real. There was a loud bang, and I whirled around as hands moved toward triggers. But someone had only knocked a metal sign onto the pavement.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump has denied or diminished the seriousness of covid-19, from its initial outbreak in China to its spread to Europe and beyond. In interviews with Bob Woodward, for the journalist’s book “Rage,” Trump admitted that he well understood from advisers how lethal and fast-spreading the disease could be, but in public statements he downplayed the danger, saying repeatedly that the virus would disappear with the summer’s warm weather and that there was little to worry about. To the despair of the scientific and medical communities, which have uniformly said that the disease can be best contained if people wear protective masks and maintain a social distance, Trump has repeatedly flouted their advice and touted disreputable treatments. As recently as Tuesday’s Presidential debate, in Cleveland, Trump mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for wearing masks and practicing social distancing. “I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said sarcastically of Biden, at the debate. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking two hundred feet away from him, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

Ordinarily, allegations like those that have trailed Guilfoyle would likely prove disqualifying for someone seeking a prominent role in the political arena, particularly in a party trying to close a gender gap. But high-profile female Trump supporters like Guilfoyle provide valuable cover for the President. As Susan Faludi, the feminist author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” points out, “From Amy Coney Barrett to Betsy DeVos to Kimberly Guilfoyle, every woman Trump picks is an emblem of everything women are up against.”

A reader of the Times bombshell, then, can reasonably ask, how is this different from the last bombshell? How is it different from the memoirs by Mary Trump and Michael Cohen? From calling fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers” and “losers”? From all the generals, intelligence officers, and government officials telling Bob Woodward in “Rage” that Trump poses a threat to national security that is even more grave than anyone imagines? Four years ago, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” This might have seemed overheated at the time—the result of a former collaborator’s guilty conscience—and yet, in Woodward’s new book, we read of Secretary of Defense James Mattis sleeping in his clothes at night for fear that he’ll have to race back to the office because the needless war of words between two erratic leaders, Trump and Kim Jong Un, might lead to an unspeakable conflagration.