Eliana Willis

Donald Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis scrambled to secure a plea deal for herself in the Georgia election subversion case after watching two other indicted lawyers fold, it was revealed on Wednesday.The haste in which her legal team acted to snag an advantageous agreement for their client was laid out by Ellis’s own attorney Frank Hogue in an exclusive interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.He said surprise guilty pleas by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, charged alongside Trump in Fulton county over the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, injected urgency into discussions with the prosecutor, Fani Willis.“I think what really accelerated it was Powell and Chesebro falling as they did, one right after the other. It looked like timing was of the essence for us,” Hogue told the Journal-Constitution.A tearful Ellis, 39, pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings last week, becoming the fourth of 19 defendants to admit a role in the plot by Trump and his allies to keep him in office.She avoided a trial and the possibility of up to a five-year prison sentence. Her cooperating with prosecutors could include her testifying against Trump in his upcoming trial on 13 charges including racketeering, forgery, perjury, filing false documents and false statements.Negotiations took place over a three-day period, Hogue said, although he did not say if they were initiated by the prosecution or defense. Originally, he said, Willis offered a deal in which Ellis would plead guilty to an offense under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) often used in mob prosecutions.“That was about a three-second conversation. Long enough to say, ‘No, we’re not doing Rico,’” he said.The final deal was struck on the afternoon of 23 October, and announced in court the following morning, he told the newspaper’s legal podcast Breakdown.Hogue said it was “a good deal” for Ellis, because it ensured she was able to keep her license to practice law or maintain a pathway to earning it back if it was surrendered.“To get out of it with five years’ probation, terminate in three, which I’m sure it will for her, and the restitution and the other conditions of probation, none of it’s onerous for her,” he said.“She’s already back in Florida and resuming her life and doesn’t have to face any of this any more. So for her, my feeling is it’s a good result.”Unlike Chesebro and Powell, Ellis chose to read out in court a personal apology. Wiping away tears, she said she looked back at her experience with “deep remorse”.“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information,” she said.“What I should have done, but did not do, was make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”In a radio appearance last month, Ellis said she also regretted ever becoming part of Trump’s team of lawyers. Instead, she switched allegiance to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.“Why I have chosen to distance is because of [Trump’s] frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong,” she said on her American Family Radio show.Ellis could be a star witness against Trump and the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, an alleged mastermind of the election plot who pleaded not guilty last month to 13 charges, including one of racketeering. Asked if Giuliani should be worried, Hogue said: “I think he should be. I think there’s enough for Mayor Giuliani to worry about that wouldn’t have anything to do with Jenna Ellis.“She wouldn’t be a help to him, I don’t think, if she was to be called as a witness,” he added. “But I think his troubles extend far beyond her.” More

A multi-pronged effort to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot as an insurrectionist resumes in earnest, beginning with a court case in Colorado on Monday, the first of two states that will hear legal arguments this week.Those seeking to have the former president ruled ineligible are relying on a civil war-era provision of the 14th amendment to the US constitution that states no person can hold public office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.They argue that Trump’s incitement of the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol, in which his supporters attempted to block Congress certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, perfectly encapsulates the clause that has yet to be seriously tested in a courtroom.In Denver on Monday, and in Minnesota’s supreme court on Thursday, hearings will commence in cases that could ultimately end up in the US supreme court, regardless of which side wins in the lower court. The rulings are likely to be swiftly appealed, dragging the cases out with next year’s general election only 12 months away.“We’ve had hearings with presidential candidates debating their eligibility before – Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, John McCain,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, listing candidates challenged on whether they met the constitutional requirement of being a “natural-born citizen”.But the arguments against Trump, he said, rely on an obscure clause of the constitution with an “incendiary” bar against insurrection. “Those legal questions are very heavy ones,” he said, noting that even if they are seen as long shots, they raise important issues and have a plausible legal path to success.Among those who support the argument for Trump’s removal from the ballot are the Virginia senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, who told ABC last month that the “language is specific” in the 14th amendment clause.“In my view, the attack on the Capitol that day was designed for a particular purpose at a particular moment and that was to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power as is laid out in the constitution,” he said.“So I think there is a powerful argument to be made.”Dozens of cases citing the amendment have been filed in recent months, but the ones in Colorado and Minnesota seem the most important, according to legal experts. They were filed by two liberal groups with significant resources, and in states with a clear, swift process for challenges to candidates’ ballot qualifications.That means the Colorado and Minnesota cases are taking a more legally sound route to get courts to force election officials to disqualify Trump, in contrast to other lawsuits that seek a sweeping ruling from federal judges that Trump is no longer eligible for the presidency.The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) watchdog group filed the Colorado lawsuit. “By instigating this unprecedented assault on the American constitutional order, Trump violated his oath and disqualified himself under the 14th Amendment from holding public office, including the office of the president,” its filing states.Trump’s lawyers say the provision has not been used in 150 years, and the plaintiffs are interpreting it incorrectly. They contend it was never meant to apply to the office of president, which is not mentioned in the text, unlike “senator or representative in Congress” and “elector of president and vice-president”.They also insist Trump never “engaged in insurrection” and was simply exercising his free speech rights to warn about election results he did not believe were legitimate.The then president was impeached for a historic second time in 2021 for inciting the attack on the Capitol, though he was acquitted by the US Senate.Trump has been predictably dismissive. “This is like a banana republic,” he told the conservative radio host Dan Bongino last month. “And what they’re doing is, it’s called election interference. Now the 14th amendment is just a continuation of that. It’s nonsense.”The arguments in Colorado could feature testimony from witnesses to the 6 January 2021 attack, and other moves by Trump to overturn his 2020 election defeat. He is already facing charges in a federal case in Washington DC and a state case being heard in Fulton county, Georgia, over those efforts.Associated Press contributed reporting More

Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows testified to a federal grand jury about efforts by the former president to overturn the results of the 2020 election after receiving immunity from special counsel prosecutors, ABC News reported on Tuesday.The testimony that Meadows provided to prosecutors included evidence that he repeatedly told Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election that the allegations about fraud were unsubstantiated, ABC reported.Exactly when Meadows was granted immunity and when he testified before the grand jury in Washington remains unclear but he appeared at least three times, ABC reported. Trump was indicted in August for conspiring to defraud the United States among other charges stemming from the investigation.The cooperation of Meadows in the criminal case against Trump would be a victory for the special counsel, Jack Smith, because Meadows was among the closest advisers to Trump in the post-2020 election period and had direct knowledge of virtually every aspect of the charges.Meadows could be a major witness against Trump in the special counsel’s case given his proximity to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, from the fake electors scheme to Trump’s pressure on the then vice-president Mike Pence to stop the congressional certification of the results.As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was also around Trump on January 6 as the then White House counsel Pat Cipollone implored Trump not to go to the Capitol for fear of being “charged with every crime imaginable”, as Meadows’ former aide Cassidy Hutchinson recounted to the January 6 committee.But it was unclear how valuable the information Meadows provided to prosecutors actually will be for trial purposes. In the classified documents investigation, the justice department gave immunity to the Trump adviser Kash Patel, whose information was nowhere in the indictment.The testimony from Meadows is also unlikely to materially affect Trump’s defense. Trump has consistently argued there were some advisers who said the election was stolen, and some who said it was not – and he agreed with the people alleging there was outcome-determinative election fraud.As part of the immunity deal with prosecutors, the evidence Meadows gave before the grand jury cannot be used against him for federal charges. Neither spokesperson for the special counsel nor a lawyer for Meadows could be immediately reached for comment.“Wrongful, unethical leaks throughout these Biden witch-hunts only underscore how detrimental these empty cases are to our democracy and system of justice and how vital it is for President Trump’s first amendment rights to not be infringed upon by un-constitutional gag orders,” a Trump spokesperson said.Meadows was not charged by prosecutors in federal district court in Washington when Trump was indicted, but he was charged weeks later alongside Trump by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, as part of a sprawling Rico indictment over the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.Like Trump, Meadows pleaded not guilty in the Fulton county case. A federal judge last month denied Meadows’ motion to transfer the case from state to federal court. Meadows appealed that decision to the 11th circuit, and oral arguments are scheduled to take place in December. More

When Liz Cheney warned fellow Republicans five days before January 6 of a “dark day” to come if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, the then House GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy, swiftly slapped her down.“After Liz spoke,” the former Wyoming representative’s fellow anti-Trumper Adam Kinzinger writes in a new book, “McCarthy immediately told everyone who was listening, ‘I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference. She speaks for herself.’”Five days after Cheney delivered her warning on a Republican conference call, Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s win.McCarthy’s statement, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.Kinzinger details McCarthy’s “notably juvenile” intervention – and even what he says were two physical blows delivered to him by McCarthy – in Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, which will be published in the US this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds convicted, some with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack, and acquitted a second time when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. When the dust cleared from the January 6 attack, McCarthy was among 147 House and Senate Republicans who still voted to object to results in key states.Like Cheney, Kinzinger, from Illinois, sat on the House January 6 committee, then left office. Unlike Cheney, who was beaten by a Trump ally, Kinzinger chose to retire.Cheney has maintained a high profile, warning of the threat Trump poses as he leads polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, 91 criminal charges (17 concerning election subversion) and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, and refusing to rule out a presidential run of her own.Kinzinger has founded Country First, an organisation meant to combat Republican extremism, and become a political commentator. In his book, he says he responded to McCarthy on the 1 January 2021 conference call by issuing his own warning about the potential for violence on 6 January and “calling on McCarthy to say he wouldn’t join the group opposing the electoral college states.“He replied by coming on the line to say, ‘OK, Adam. Operator, who’s up next?’”Such a “rude and dismissive tone”, Kinzinger says, “was typical of [McCarthy’s] style, which was notably juvenile”.McCarthy briefly blamed Trump for January 6, swiftly reversed course, stayed close to the former president and became speaker of the House, only to lose the role after less than a year, in the face of a Trumpist rebellion.Kinzinger accuses McCarthy, from California, of behaving less like a party leader than “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”. And while characterising McCarthy’s dismissal of Cheney’s warning about January 6 as “a little dig”, Kinzinger also details two physical digs he says he took from McCarthy himself.“I went from being one of the boys he treated with big smiles and pats on the back to outcast as soon as I started speaking the truth about the president who would be king,” Kinzinger writes.McCarthy “responded by trying to intimidate me physically. Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber. As he passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.“If we had been in high school, I would have dropped my books, papers would have been scattered and I would have had to endure the snickers of passersby. I was startled but took it as the kind of thing Kevin did when he liked you.“Another time, I was standing at the rail that curves around the back of the last row of seats in the chamber. As he shoulder-checked me again, I thought to myself, ‘What a child.’”Kinzinger is not above robust language of his own. Describing Trump’s Senate trial over the Capitol attack, the former congressman bemoans the decision of the Republican leader in that chamber, Mitch McConnell, to vote to acquit because Trump had left office – then deliver a speech excoriating Trump nonetheless.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger writes, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.” More

Former lawyer for then-president Donald Trump Sidney Powell has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case in Fulton county, just days before jury selection for her trial was scheduled to start.The plea agreement has Powell paying a $6,000 fine and $2,700 restitution to the state of Georgia as well as writing an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, testifying at trial, and serving six years of probation.More details soon … More

Protesters rallied in Washington DC, calling on the Biden administration and Congress to press for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. About 200 demonstrators, many from the group Jewish Voice for Peace, filled the rotunda of the Cannon House office building on Capitol Hill and staged a sit-in, calling for an end to the bombing and to ‘let Gaza live’. A number of arrests were made by US Capitol police, who handcuffed protesters and escorted them out of the building More

Lawyers for Donald Trump have urged a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, advancing a sweeping interpretation of executive power that contends that former presidents are immune from prosecution for conduct related to their duties while in office.The request to throw out the indictment, handed up earlier this year by a federal grand jury in Washington, amounts to the most consequential court filing in the case to date and is almost certain to precipitate a legal battle that could end up before the US supreme court.In their 52-page submission to the presiding US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, Trump’s lawyers essentially argued that Trump enjoyed absolute immunity from criminal prosecution because the charged conduct fell within the so-called “outer perimeter” of his duties as president.The filing contended that all of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the indictment, from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification to organizing fake slates of electors, were in his capacity as president and therefore protected.Whether Trump’s motion to dismiss succeeds remains uncertain: it raises novel legal issues, such as whether the outer perimeter test applies to criminal cases, and whether Trump’s charged conduct even falls within a president’s duties.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, could counter that Trump cannot make either argument. The outer perimeter test is widely seen as applying to only civil cases, for instance, and Trump is alleged as having acted not in his capacity as a president, but as a candidate.The Trump lawyers repeatedly suggested that the outer perimeter test – used by the supreme court in Nixon v Fitzgerald (1982) in which the justices found that presidents have absolute immunity from damages liability for acts related to their presidential duties – should apply to criminal cases.“To hold otherwise would be to allow the President’s political opponents to usurp his or her constitutional role, fundamentally impairing our system of government,” wrote Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche, John Lauro and Gregory Singer.But Trump faces an uphill struggle, given a federal judge in Washington last year ruled in a separate civil suit against Trump that not everything he did as president was covered by presidential immunity. That case, Blassingame v Trump, is now under appeal at the DC circuit.At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that not only was Trump entitled to absolute presidential immunity, but the immunity applied regardless of Trump’s intent in engaging in the conduct described in the indictment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“An allegedly improper purpose for an official act does not rob the act of its official character,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “A president’s purpose or motive is once again irrelevant to whether his acts fall under the outer perimeter of his responsibilities.”Trump’s lawyers argued that his attempts to seek investigations into supposed election fraud were protected because, as the head of the executive branch, he had an obligation to “take care” to enforce federal election laws through his tweets and directions to the justice department.The Trump lawyers also claimed that all of the conduct in the indictment was protected, notably including the fake electors plot, since it was related to him trying to get Pence to act in a “certain way” on 6 January 2023 – though omitting that “way” was to unlawfully stop the certification.Trump’s latest filing adds to the issues that the judge presiding in the case will have to decide in the coming weeks. Chutkan is scheduled to first hear oral arguments on 16 October about whether to issue a limited gag order against Trump to limit his public attacks against prosecutors. More

Facing a likely roadblock from House Republicans, US president Joe Biden says he is worried their infighting in Congress could hurt Ukraine aid but said there was a ‘majority of members of the House and Senate in both parties’ that support the need for it. The president promised to deliver a speech soon to outline why the US needs to continue to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, and suggested there were ‘other means’ by which he could find funding but gave no further details More