Steven Lee Myers

The internet was spewing racist and sexist attacks long before Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) began her presidential campaign, including when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sought the job. Since the last major election, however, it has become even more noxious—and more central to American politics. In 2008, then-Sen Obama (D-IL) Obama faced an ecosystem in which Facebook had millions of users, not billions, and the iPhone was just a year old. In 2016, Clinton’s campaign monitored a handful of social media platforms, not dozens.

Judge Terry Doughty of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana restricted parts of the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online.

Dozens between government officials and executives at Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media companies that have spilled into public are at the heart of a partisan legal battle that could disrupt the Biden administration’s already struggling efforts to combat disinformation. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, have sued the White House and dozens of officials, accusing them of forcing the platforms to stifle the voices of its political critics in violation of the constitutional guarantee of free speech.

For much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Trump and the Russian government.

And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Trump. The FBI’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue. Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.

Documents released in the Hillary Clinton email investigation show intense disagreement in 2015 between the State Department and the FBI over whether some of Clinton’s emails should be considered classified, including a discussion of a possible “quid pro quo” to settle one dispute.

The new batch of documents indicated that in one particular case, a senior State Department official, Patrick F. Kennedy, pressed the FBI to agree that one of Clinton’s emails on the 2012 Benghazi attack would be unclassified — and not classified as the bureau wanted. What remained unclear from the documents was whether it was Kennedy or an FBI official who purportedly offered the “quid pro quo”: marking the email unclassified in exchange for the State Department’s approving the posting of more FBI agents to Iraq.

Donald Trump and other Republicans quickly seized on the new documents as evidence of what Speaker Paul D. Ryan called “a cover-up.”

The dispute over Hillary Clinton’s email practices now threatens to shadow her for the rest of the presidential campaign after the disclosure that the FBI collected nearly 15,000 new emails in its investigation of her and a federal judge’s order that the State Department accelerate the documents’ release. As a result, thousands of emails that Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department could be released just weeks before the election in November.

The order, by Judge James Boasberg of Federal District Court, came the same day a conservative watchdog group separately released hundreds of emails from one of Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, which put a new focus on the sometimes awkward ties between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. The FBI discovered the roughly 14,900 emails by scouring Clinton’s server and the computer archives of government officials with whom she corresponded. In late July, it turned them over to the State Department, which now must set a timetable for their release, according to Judge Boasberg’s order.