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    Two far-right conspiracy theorists to pay up to $1.25m for robocall campaign

    Two far-right conspiracy theorists will pay up to $1.25m in fines for launching a robocall campaign to discourage Black New York voters from participating in the 2020 election, the New York attorney general announced on Tuesday.Jacob Wohl, of Irvine, California, and Jack Burkman, of Arlington, Virginia, were found liable in March 2023 for targeting about 5,500 Black voters as part of the robocall scheme.Under the latest settlement agreement, Wohl and Burkman will pay more than $1m to the New York attorney general’s office, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) and individuals harmed in the robocall campaign.The three parties filed a lawsuit against Wohl and Burkman in 2021 after an investigation by the attorney general’s office found that the pair had broken several state and federal laws.In New York, callers were falsely told that their personal information would be added to a public database and used by police departments to track outstanding warrants or for mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations.One call claimed to come from a spokesperson for a “civil rights organization” founded by Wohl and Burkman, according to a script shared in the press release.“Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines,” the call said.The call then warned that voters should not be “finessed into giving your private information to the man” and should “beware of vote by mail”.One voter suffered “severe anxiety and distress” from the robocalls and later withdrew his voter registration, the press release said.To address the robocalls’ false claims, NCBCP used “considerable resources” to reach misinformed voters.In Tuesday’s release, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, called the robocall scheme “depraved”.“Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate,” James said.“These men engaged in a conspiracy to suppress Black votes in the 2020 general election,” said the NCBCP president, Melanie Campbell, in Tuesday’s press release. “They used intimidation and scare tactics, attempting to spread harmful disinformation about voting in an effort to silence Black voices. Their conduct cannot and will not be toleratedThe settlement agreement is the latest punishment for Wohl and Burkman, who ran similar schemes in at least two other states.Wohl and Burkman were previously ordered to complete 500 hours of registering voters in lower income neighborhoods by an Ohio judge after pleading guilty to charges in connection to a similar robocall campaign.Wohl and Burkman also face additional charges in Michigan, CNN reported. More

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    Several January 6 rioters get early releases ahead of supreme court review

    Several January 6 rioters have won early release from their sentences ahead of a key supreme court review of the legality of a specific federal charge against them – a review that could, in turn, see them ordered to return to prison.A decision on the legal issue, which revolves around how January 6 prosecutors distinguished between conduct qualifying as “obstructing an official proceeding” of Congress and misdemeanor offenses, including shouting to interrupt a congressional hearing, is not expected until the summer, according to the Washington Post.The decision could impact convictions and sentences passed on more than 350 January 6 defendants if the supreme court decides that prosecutors misused criminal statutes to obtain the convictions.Three men have already been granted early releases, according to the Post.They include a Delaware man who carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol and was released one year into a three-year term; a Ohio man who broke through police lines to become one of the first rioters to enter the building, released six months into a 19-month sentence; and a man who entered the Senate chamber draped in a Trump flag, who was freed after serving five months of a 14-month sentence.The law that prosecutors used to charge the men was passed after the collapse of energy trading firm Enron in 2001 and crafted to limit accounting corruption. But the charge was used to prosecute some January 6 rioters in place of charging sedition or insurrection violations.The legality of using the obstruction charge has mostly been upheld by January 6 trial judges, but two judges, one Trump-appointed, have argued that it applies only to tampering or destruction of evidence.In 2021, one of those federal judges, Randolph Moss, said the government could face a “constitutional vagueness problem” if it could not articulate to the courts how the charge distinguished between obstruction of Congress and ordinary trespassing.If the supreme court decides the obstruction charge was not suitable for the January 6 rioters, the decision could also affect the election interference case against Donald Trump.Retired US district judge Thomas F Hogan, who passed sentence on 26 January 6 defendants, told Georgetown law school students earlier this year that if the supreme court rejects the use of the law it “would have a devastating effect on the prosecution side” of January 6 prosecutions that didn’t involve violence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmong those who could see their convictions overturned by the supreme court is Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon shaman” and wore a horned headdress, who was charged under the law. Other include members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys extremist groups.Prosecutors have urged judges to delay releasing the men charged only under the contested obstruction law pending the supreme court appeal, arguing in one case that doing so into another presidential election, “would be releasing defendant into the same political maelstrom that led him to commit his crimes in the first place”. More

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    ‘A dark day’: Arizona governor condemns ruling on near-total abortion ban – video

    The Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, called for an Arizona supreme court ruling to be repealed that permits enforcement of an 1864 law banning almost all abortions. Speaking at a press conference the governor said: ‘The near total civil war-era ban that continues to hang over our heads only serves to create more chaos for women and doctors in our state.’ First passed when Arizona was still a territory, the ban only permits abortions to save a patient’s life and does not make exceptions for rape or incest More

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    Special counsel urges supreme court to reject Trump immunity bid in election trial

    The special counsel pursuing federal criminal charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss filed a US supreme court brief on Monday urging the justices to reject the former president’s bid for immunity from prosecution on the principle that “no person is above the law”.The case is due to be argued before the justices on 25 April. Trump has appealed a lower court’s rejection of his request to be shielded from the criminal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith because he was serving as president when he took the actions at the center of the case.In his last filing before the arguments, Smith told the justices that Trump’s actions that led to the charges, if he is convicted, would represent “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.“The effective functioning of the presidency does not require that a former president be immune from accountability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law,” Smith wrote. “To the contrary, a bedrock principle of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law including the president.“Trump, the first former president to be criminally prosecuted, has pleaded not guilty in this case and the three other criminal cases he faces, seeking to paint them as politically motivated.He has argued that a former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts,” and warned that without such immunity, “the threat of future prosecution and imprisonment would become a political cudgel to influence the most sensitive and controversial presidential decisions”.In August 2023, Smith brought four federal criminal counts against Trump in the election subversion case, including conspiring to defraud the United States, obstructing the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral victory and conspiring to do so, and conspiring against right of Americans to vote.Smith’s view was backed on Monday by a group of 19 retired four-star US military officers and other former high-ranking national security officials, including retired army generals Peter Chiarelli and George Casey, former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Navy secretary Ray Mabus. In a friend-of-court brief, they called Trump’s claim of presidential immunity “contrary to the foundational principles of our democracy.““Unless [Trump’s] theory is rejected, we risk jeopardizing America’s standing as a guardian of democracy in the world and further feeding the spread of authoritarianism, thereby threatening the national security of the United States and democracies around the world,” the former officials told the justices.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court’s decision to hear arguments on Trump’s immunity bid in late April postponed his trial, giving Trump a boost as he tries to delay prosecutions while running to regain the presidency.Trump last October sought to have the charges dismissed based on his claim of immunity. US district judge Tanya Chutkan rejected that claim in December. On appeal, the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit on 6 February ruled 3-0 against Trump’s claim.Trump and his allies made false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and devised a plan to use false electors to thwart congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump also sought to pressure then vice-president Mike Pence not to allow certification to go forward. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a bid to prevent the certification. More

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    Georgia prosecutors urge court to reject Trump attempt to disqualify Fani Willis

    Fulton county prosecutors asked the Georgia state court of appeals on Monday to reject Donald Trump’s request to consider his claim that the district attorney should be disqualified over a relationship with her deputy, arguing that the matter was correctly settled by the lower court judge.“The present application merely reflects the applicants’ dissatisfaction with the trial court’s proper application of well-established law to the facts,” prosecutors wrote in a 19-page filing.Trump was charged alongside more than a dozen associates last year with racketeering over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As part of their bid to dismiss the case, Trump and his co-defendants alleged the district attorney Fani Willis’s relationship meant she should be recused from the case.The effort to have Willis disqualified – which could have also resulted in the entire Fulton county district attorney’s office being disqualified – failed after the presiding judge decided, following days of evidentiary hearings, that Trump and his co-defendants did not prove a conflict of interest.The judge nonetheless ruled the relationship gave the appearance of a conflict, which needed to be addressed. For Willis to continue bringing the case, the judge ordered, her deputy Nathan Wade needed to resign from the district attorney’s office. Wade resigned later that evening.Trump and his co-defendants challenged the ruling last week, arguing to the Georgia state court of appeals that it should clarify the standard for forensic misconduct standard that would require Willis to step down and that the lower court judge should have found there was actual conflict of interest.The Georgia state court of appeals does not have to hear the case and prosecutors on Monday contended that Trump had failed to establish sufficient cause because he did not convincingly show his claims met several specific conditions.Broadly, an order from a lower court is deemed reviewable if the issue at hand is dispositive for the case, if the order appears wrongly decided on the facts and would adversely affect a defendant’s rights, or if it was a novel issue for which the appeals court should create a precedent.The filing from prosecutors argued Trump’s motion was deficient since the lower court found there was no evidence that the Willis-Wade relationship meant they had a “disqualifying personal interest” in bringing or continuing the Trump case, meaning there was also no due process violations.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt also argued the Georgia state court of appeals has previously decided that in the absence of an “actual” conflict, as opposed to the appearance of one, a lower court could not be deemed as having made a clearly unreasonable or erroneous ruling by deciding not to disqualify a defense attorney.The filing added that even if there was some conflict, the issue had been resolved because the lower court allowed Willis to continue prosecuting the case as long as Wade resigned. “This court has sanctioned this same remedy as a cure for the potential appearance of impropriety,” prosecutors wrote. More

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    Robert F Kennedy campaign calls January 6 rioters ‘activists’ in email

    A spokesperson for the independent US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr said a passage in a fundraising email that called January 6 prisoners “activists … stripped of their constitutional liberties” was the result of an error by an outside contractor.“That statement was an error that does not reflect Mr Kennedy’s views,” the spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, told NBC News, which first reported the fundraising email. “It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process.”The email, sent by Team Kennedy, asked for “help … call[ing] out the illiberal actions of our very own government”.It also said: “This is the reality that every American citizen faces – from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange to the J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their constitutional liberties.”Snowden, who leaked information about National Security Agency surveillance to outlets including the Guardian, has lived in Russia for 10 years. Assange founded WikiLeaks, which leaked US national security information, also to outlets including the Guardian. Jailed in the UK since April 2019, he is fighting extradition to the US.On 6 January 2021, Congress was attacked by a mob Donald Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his election defeat by Joe Biden, in support of Trump’s electoral fraud lie. Nine deaths are now linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,300 arrests have been made and nearly a thousand convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. As the presumptive GOP nominee for president this year, he has called January 6 prisoners “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” and featured at rallies a rendition of the national anthem by some held in a Washington jail.Trump has said that if re-elected, he will “free the January 6 hostages being wrongfully imprisoned”.An attorney by training, Kennedy, 70, is the son of a US attorney general, Robert F Kennedy, and nephew of a former president, John F Kennedy. Though his independent campaign is unlikely to win the White House, he has polled strongly. If elected, he has said, he will pardon Snowden and Assange and “look at individual cases” regarding January 6.Kennedy has also said Biden presents “a much worse threat to democracy” than Trump, because of supposed suppression of free speech regarding the coronavirus pandemic – a comment Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic and Covid conspiracy theorist, then claimed was deceptively edited.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Thursday, reporting the Team Kennedy email that called January 6 prisoners “activists”, NBC detailed how just 15 such Trump supporters are being held without having been convicted.“Most of them are credibly accused of violence against law enforcement officials,” NBC said.Examples included two prisoners who have killed people, one “charged with setting off an explosive in a tunnel full of police officers” during the Capitol attack and one “charged with conspiring to kill the FBI employees who worked on his case, a plot that allegedly unfolded after his initial pretrial release”. More

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    New book details Steve Bannon’s ‘Maga movement’ plan to rule for 100 years

    Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.A businessman who became a driver of far-right thought through his stewardship of Breitbart News, Bannon was Trump’s campaign chair in 2016 and his chief White House strategist in 2017, a post he lost after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville that summer.He remained close to Trump, however, particularly as Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.That attempt culminated in the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, when supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden’s win attacked the US Capitol.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,200 arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted by Senate Republicans.Notwithstanding 88 criminal charges for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments, and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil cases over fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”, Trump won the Republican nomination with ease this year.As a Trump-Biden rematch grinds into gear, Bannon remains an influential voice on the far right, particularly through his War Room podcast and despite his own legal problems over contempt of Congress and alleged fraud, both of which he denies.The “uniparty”, in Bannon’s view, as described by Arnsdorf, is “the establishment [Bannon] hungered to destroy. The neocons, neoliberals, big donors, globalists, Wall Street, corporatists, elites.”“Maga” stands for “Make America great again”, Trump’s political slogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArnsdorf writes: “In his confidence that there were secretly millions of Democrats who were yearning to be Maga followers and just didn’t know it yet, Bannon was again taking inspiration from Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.”Eric Hoffer, Arnsdorf writes, was “the ‘longshoreman philosopher’, so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, The True Believer [which] caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao”.Bannon, Arnsdorf writes, “was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50% plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down.“He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties. He wanted a showdown between a globalist, elite party, called the Democrats, and a populist, Maga party, called the Republicans. In that match-up, he was sure, the Republicans would win every time.”Now, seven months out from election day and with Trump and Biden neck-and-neck in the polls, Bannon’s proposition stands to be tested again.
    Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 3pm EDT join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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    RNC plan for 2020 denialist to head ‘election integrity’ unit raises alarms

    As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.Last year Bobb wrote Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024, a book that was chock full of baseless charges about 2020 election fraud.Former judges, ex-Republican congressmen and election watchdogs voice strong concerns about Bobb’s mission and the potential dangers posed by her flood of erroneous charges of voting fraud.“By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.“There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”The RNC’s hiring of Bobb comes as Trump keeps falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and talks up new efforts this year to “guard the vote” to ferret out potential fraud. Experts have conclusively said fraud was not a factor in Trump’s loss by over 7 million votes, and stressed that historically voting fraud has been minimal.Bobb’s “election integrity” post at the RNC is expected to involve teams of poll workers, poll watchers and other efforts in swing states and she has begun talking with key Maga allies with similar missions. Bobb last month told the far-right reporter Breanna Morello that her top goal is “empowering the grassroots”.Bobb was on at least one conference call in March with a half-dozen Trump-allied groups including ones that echo her false claims about 2020 election fraud, according to a person on the call, who said: “We’re all going to coordinate.”Among the groups on the call, he added, was Arizona-based Turning Point Action, which has a track record of promoting falsehoods about 2020 election fraud.Many experts raise red flags about Bobb’s new RNC post.The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said the RNC’s hiring of Bobb “is a further indication of how the RNC has not only become an arm of the Trump campaign, but an outlet for the most extreme elements of the election denial movement”.Likewise, the ex-Republican congressman Dave Trott predicted: “Bobb will be leading the charge and saying the election was rigged if Trump loses.”Some key Democrats are also alarmed by what Bobb’s RNC role may presage.“Putting Christina Bobb in charge of election integrity is like putting Donald Trump in charge of integrity,” the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said. “They’re designing a platform for lies to wage the next insurrection.”Although Bobb’s “election integrity” slot is new and a work in progress, the RNC’s new leadership seems to be banking on her.Lara Trump, the new RNC vice-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on 12 March: “We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [RNC]. That means massive resources going to this one thing.”Lara Trump added: “We will have trained poll watchers, poll observers, poll workers, people in tabulation centers all across this country,” and signaled that volunteers for these slots and lawyers are needed.Bobb, whose official RNC title is senior counsel for election integrity, wrote on X: “I’m honored to be a part of the new team at the RNC.”Besides Bobb, the RNC in March tapped Charlie Spies, who had previously served as its election law counsel, to be its chief counsel.Further, the RNC also named William McGinley, a veteran election lawyer who worked in the Trump administration, as outside counsel for election integrity, a move that could presage more litigation.But Bobb’s litany of baseless fraud claims as she worked with key Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results, shadow her new RNC role.For instance, Bobb used her perch at One America News Network (OAN) to spread bogus claims of fraud that led to a defamation lawsuit against her and OAN by the voting technology firm Dominion; Bobb and OAN have both denied any wrongdoing.Separately Bobb signed a letter falsely certifying to the justice department on Trump’s behalf in 2022 that after a “diligent search” he had returned all the classified documents the special counsel Jack Smith later charged the former president with illegally taking to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.A subsequent FBI raid found about 100 classified documents; Bobb, who reportedly was interviewed by the FBI, indicated that another lawyer drafted the letter she signed.Given that Bobb was only tapped for her RNC post this month, it is unclear whether she has begun recruiting staff or taken other steps to develop the RNC’s election integrity program.But a source close to the Trump campaign stressed that “the key to election observing is redundancy”, meaning that it would involve multiple coordinated efforts, which suggests that the RNC program will be done in tandem with similar poll-watching and poll worker drives by Trump allied groups.The need for “redundancy” and Bobb’s early conference call with several outside groups are emerging as key strategies for Bobb, as she revealed in an interview on 15 March with Morello, a conservative journalist who used to be with Fox News.Bobb told Morello that her top goal at the RNC is “empowering the grassroots. This has to be a grassroots approach … We have to empower people in their communities.”The RNC press office did not reply to a request for comment.The RNC’s election integrity drive this year comes after a few decades when a moratorium was imposed on RNC poll-watching operations due to aggressive tactics it employed in 1981 that went beyond permissible programs.At some polling places in New Jersey in 1981, the GOP used off-duty police officers and provided rewards to some people who claimed they had evidence of voting fraud. After those incidents, the party agreed to halt poll-watching efforts until 2018, when the moratorium terminated.Still, some lawyers and election veterans are troubled by the RNC’s hiring of Bobb given her history of election denialism and Trump’s obsession with debunked claims of fraud in 2020.“I don’t think it’s a good thing when a major party hires fringe characters who don’t understand how elections work,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.Other lawyers express similar worries about Bobb’s background.“It’s unclear whether the RNC wants those who are not already loyalists to take its commitment to ‘election integrity’ seriously,” said the former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman.“But if it does, picking someone who, according to the Florida indictment against Trump, was the vehicle for certifying his false statements about returning all the classified documents in his possession, is an odd choice.”Looking ahead, Chioma Chukwu, the deputy executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, called Bobb’s hiring by the RNC “a dangerous sign of how entrenched the election denial movement has become on the right”.“Elevating Bobb – who continues to push baseless lies about voter fraud – to a top post focused on ‘election integrity’ serves no purpose other than to sow chaos and confusion in November, allowing partisan actors to cry ‘foul’ if their preferred candidate loses.” More