Eliana Willis

From 3h agoGood morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
The House and Senate are out.
Donald Trump appeared to warn former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, against testifying before the Fulton County grand jury in the state’s 2020 election investigation.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury,” Trump posted on Truth Social today.Trump added:
He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia.
His post came days after the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s January 6 case in Washington DC, warned against making “inflammatory statements” that could intimidate witnesses in that trial.Duncan confirmed he had been asked to testify before the grand jury on Tuesday hearing evidence of alleged meddling in the 2020 presidential election.“Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness,” Duncan tweeted.The US will send Ukraine a new military aid package worth around $200m, secretary of state Antony Blinken announced.The latest security aid package includes air defense munitions, artillery rounds, anti-armor capabilities, and additional mine-clearing equipment, according to the statement.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, please follow our live blog. After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign on Sunday evening tried to walk back on comments he made earlier in the day in support of a nationwide abortion restriction after the first three months of pregnancy.In an interview at the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy told NBC News that he believes “a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life”.Asked if he would sign a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy if he were elected president, he said “yes, three months”.
Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.
But in a later statement, Kennedy’s campaign team said he had “misunderstood” the reporter’s questions, citing a “crowded” and “noisy” exhibit hall at the fair.The statement continued:
Mr Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion.
In response, NBC reporter Ali Vitali shared a transcript of the full exchange and said she asked her questions multiple times to make sure the presidential candidate understood the subject.Twice impeached and now arrested and indicted three times. Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida and Washington over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is simultaneously reeling from a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation toward writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.And more criminal charges could be on the way for Trump in Georgia as early as this week.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have gathered evidence directly connecting members of the former president’s legal team to the voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a report.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.Investigators are in possession of text messages and emails indicating the breach was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, CNN reported, citing sources.Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach shared a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to the report.Investigators have also probed the involvement of Trump’s then attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the sources said.Georgia former state senator Jen Jordan has been spotted at the Fulton County courthouse today, according to NBC.Jordan had been expected to testify before a grand jury as part of the Georgia prosecutor’s investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his election loss in the state.The indictment that the Fulton County district attorney, Fanis Willis, may bring against Donald Trump as early as this week could be the most sprawling case against the former president in response to his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.“I think people are going to be surprised at the level of preparedness and the level of sophistication of the prosecution,” Clint Rucker, a former prosecutor in Fulton County, told AP.He added that he was not surprised the investigation has taken so long. While Willis is likely to let her team of prosecutors handle the trial, he said there was no question that she is calling the shots.
When she says stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go,’ that’s not being braggadocious’. It’s her saying pretty much to anybody who’s interested, ‘Look, we’re ready.’
The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this:
In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
The film’s montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis relentlessly poring over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.We’d watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she’d refuse to back down from the task at hand. She’d advocate for what she believed to be right even when it wasn’t popular. She’d appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as: “Lady justice is actually blind. This is the reality. If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.”According to some of Willis’s colleagues who have worked with her over more than 20 years, all of this would be an accurate depiction of the district attorney.Defense attorney Brian Steel has known Willis her entire career and says she’s both “extremely honest” and “extremely hard working”. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs described her as “transparent”, a “zealous advocate for the state” and the “best trial attorney” in the Fulton county district attorney’s office. He said:
What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is.
Read the Guardian’s full profile of Willis here. The district attorney’s office in Georgia has spent more than two years investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies kicked off an aggressive pressure campaign in an attempt to overturn the election results in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner.Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, which became the consuming focus of the former president and his allies, according to a Washington Post report today. Those close to Trump pushed state officials to identify fraud that would cast Biden’s victory in doubt, it writes.
In the process, they personally targeted individual election workers with false claims of cheating, unleashing waves of threats, and amplified conspiracy theories about rigged machines that persist today. In the end, after Trump sought to use every lever of power to overturn the results, top state Republicans stood in his way, refusing to buckle under the pressure.
Some of the most fantastical claims of fraud came directly from Trump and his allies, “who amplified baseless accusations on conservative media and unleashed new waves of outlandish tips from rank-and-file Republicans”.The former president’s accusations also turned election workers in Georgia and other states into targets of harassment and threats.
They spread false claims that thousands of mail ballots should be discarded because of questionable signatures, that a mother-daughter team of election workers in Atlanta had triple-tallied counterfeit votes, that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another.
For the purposes of the Trump case, prosecutors in Georgia will be required to show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors have been examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Donald Trump and his allies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney, Fani Willis, had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
The House and Senate are out. More

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected early this week to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants that could include the former president, according to two people briefed on the matter.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week. The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day.For weeks, the prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the sources said.The expansive Rico statute, for the purposes of the Trump case, would require only that prosecutors show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors were examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Trump and his allies, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”. More

The office of the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has issued summonses to former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and journalist George Chidi to testify before a grand jury on Tuesday regarding Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in that state.The announcement of the summonses confirmed previous reporting by the Guardian that Willis’s office in Atlanta on Tuesday would present evidence to a grand jury weighing charges against the former president. Prosecutors could ask the grand jury to hand up charges on Tuesday as well, having completed an internal review of evidence in the case weeks ago.“I can confirm that I have been requested to testify before the Fulton county grand jury on Tuesday. I look forward to answering their questions around the 2020 election,” Duncan tweeted on Saturday.He added: “Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness.”Speaking to CNN, Duncan said that he has “no expectations as to the questions, and I’ll certainly answer whatever questions are put in front of me”.Similarly, Chidi wrote: “I’ve just received a call from district attorney Fani Willis’s office. I have been asked to come to court Tuesday for testimony before the grand jury.”In recent weeks, Willis’s office has considered several potential statutes under which to charge the former president and affiliated operatives, including solicitation to commit election fraud and conspiracy to commit election fraud, sources familiar with the matter have told the Guardian.Other state election law charges that have been under consideration include solicitation of a public or political officer to fail to perform their duties and solicitation to destroy, deface or remove ballots, sources said.They also added that Willis is looking to charge certain Trump operatives who were involved in accessing voting machines and copying sensitive election data in Georgia’s Coffee county in January 2021 with computer trespass crimes.Last month, sources familiar with the nearly three-year investigation into the former president told the Guardian that Willis has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass.The sprawling investigation began after Trump placed a phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on 2 January 2021 and pressured him to “find 11,780 votes” in the state which his Democratic rival Joe Biden ultimately won on his way to clinching the presidency.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump can be heard saying in a recording. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated … So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn indictment could come soon after the grand jury hears the case and in turn constitute a fourth active criminal case against Trump, who’s been facing mounting legal woes since April.The former president is already facing federal criminal conspiracy charges related to purported attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and his alleged encouragement of the January 6 US Capitol attack.Additionally, New York state prosecutors filed charges against him related to hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.The ex-president is also facing a separate federal indictment pertaining to his alleged illegal hoarding of government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after his presidency.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the cases against him and denies wrongdoing. More

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia has evidence to charge multiple allies of the former president involved in breaching voting machines in the state, according to two people briefed on the matter.The potential charges at issue are computer trespass felonies, the people said, though the final list of defendants and whether they will be brought as part of a racketeering case when prosecutors are expected to present evidence to the grand jury next week remain unclear.To bring a racketeering case under Georgia state law, prosecutors need to show the existence of an “enterprise” predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes, of which computer trespass is one. The Guardian has reported that prosecutors believe they have sufficient evidence for a racketeering case.The statute itself prohibits the intentional use of a computer or computer network without authorization in order to remove data, either temporarily or permanently. It also prohibits interrupting or interfering with the use of a computer, as well as altering or damaging a computer.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.The story about how a group of Trump allies gained unauthorized access to voting machines – informed by deposition transcripts, surveillance tapes and other records – can be traced back to 2020, when the top elections supervisor for Coffee county came across the “adjudication” system for mail ballots within the machines.A spokesperson for the Fulton county district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.In Georgia, mail ballots are marked by hand. If a ballot cannot be read by the machine, because of stray marks or other errors, it goes through an adjudication process whereby a bipartisan panel reviews the ballot and agrees on the voter’s intention before telling the machine how to count it.The adjudication process became a point of controversy in local Republican party circles after the elections supervisor, Misty Hampton, said in a viral November 2020 video that the person entering the information could theoretically tell it to falsely count a ballot intended for one candidate for another.Swapping a vote through the adjudication process would be straightforwardly illegal, and there is no evidence that such conduct took place during the 2020 presidential election. If it had, it would have been detected during the subsequent statewide hand count, experts have said.On 5 January 2021, Georgia held runoff elections for the state’s two US Senate seats. That day, amid a fraught atmosphere, the Coffee county GOP chair, Cathy Latham, was the Republican member on the bipartisan adjudication panel.As Latham later recounted in depositions in a long-running lawsuit brought by the Coalition for Good Governance, the ballot scanner in Coffee county repeatedly jammed as it tried to read mail-in ballots. And in Latham’s retelling, it appeared to jam more often for ballots marked for Republican candidates.When Latham complained, the on-site Dominion Voting System technician advised her to wipe the ballot scanner with a cloth. Latham said in her statement that the wiping did not work, and it was only after the technician held his phone near the scanner that the problems were resolved.According to Latham’s account, the suspicion was that the technician had downloaded something to the ballot scanner through his phone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere remains no such evidence to date and the Georgia secretary of state’s office has affirmed the scanners have no wireless capability. But that bizarre episode appears to have been the trigger for a number of Trump allies to see if someone could have manipulated the election.The day after the Capitol attack in Washington, on 7 January 2021, surveillance video picked up Eric Chaney, a member of the Coffee county elections board, arriving at the county’s elections office around 11am. Latham also arrived at the office around an hour later.The tapes then show Latham greeting data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in “imaging”, or making exact copies, of electronic devices, and Scott Hall, a bail bond business owner with ties to the local Republican party hunting for evidence of election fraud.What happened inside the elections office is only partially captured on surveillance video, but records show the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives and flash memory cards.The company believed it had authorization to collect the data, SullivanStrickler’s director of data risk Dean Felicetti later said in a deposition, and suggested that Hampton and Latham had given their approval.Most of the imaging work apparently took place off camera, though tapes from the lobby of the Coffee county elections office show Latham, Hampton and Chaney with the SullivanStrickler experts as they bend over to look at computer screens and walk around elections equipment.Lawyers for Latham and Hampton did not respond to requests for comment. But Latham’s previous lawyer has told the Washington Post that she did not authorize the copying and had “not acted improperly or illegally”. Hall and Chaney also did not respond to requests for comment.The next day, according to text messages, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – who helped organize the clandestine operation and paid for it through her non-profit – was informed that SullivanStrickler would post the data it had gathered on to a password-protected site from where it could be downloaded.Breaches of the Coffee county voting machines appear to have happened at least two additional times. On 18 January 2021, they were accessed on a second occasion when Hampton arrived with Doug Logan, the CEO of elections security firm CyberNinjas, and a retired federal employee named Jeffrey Lenberg.The pair spent at least four hours that afternoon inside the elections office, and then returned the following day for another nine hours. Lenberg then again gained access to the elections office every day for four days starting on 25 January 2021.What Lenberg did inside remains uncertain. But in a subsequent podcast interview, Lenberg said he and Logan went to Coffee county after hearing about the Senate runoffs incident because they wanted to see if they could replicate the error but “didn’t touch” the machines themselves. More

The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling. The judges wrote that Twitter “did not question the validity of the search warrant” but argued that the non-disclosure agreement was a violation of the first amendment and wanted the court to assess the legality of the agreement before it handed any information over.The warrant ordered Twitter to provide the records by 27 January. A judge found Twitter to be in contempt after a court hearing on 7 February, but gave the company an opportunity to hand over the documents by 5pm that evening. Twitter, however, only turned over some records that day. It didn’t fully comply with the order until 9 February, the ruling says. The delay in compliance prompted the court to Twitter in contempt, and on Wednesday, the federal court in Washington upheld that decision.Smith has charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an attempt to stay in power in a criminal indictment unsealed last week.Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.Trump says he is innocent and has portrayed the investigation as politically motivated. His legal team has indicated it will argue that Trump was relying on the advice of lawyers around him in 2020 and had the right to challenge an election he believed was rigged.Trump had been a prolific user of Twitter, both before and during his presidency. Amassing more than 88 million followers, he used the platform to attack opponents, promote racist ideology, encourage violence against journalists, and even threaten nuclear war.Trump was banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol for inciting violence.Trump’s account was reinstated in November 2022, following Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. The decision was condemned by online safety and civil rights advocates who say Trump’s online presence has created risks of real-world violence.Trump has yet to tweet after being allowed back on to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president posted to Truth Social on Wednesday that the Justice Department “secretly attacked” his Twitter account, and he characterized the investigation as an attempt to “infringe” on his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

A previously unseen internal memo from the 2020 Trump campaign describes in detail the plot by Donald Trump and his lawyers to subvert election results in six states, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.The memo describes a three-pronged plan to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory on 6 January 2020, that involved coordinating with Republican electors and campaign attorneys in six states, as well as Mike Pence.It also emphasized the importance of the participation by “all six states” and “messaging about this being a routine measure” as well as “logistics” regarding what is now known as the fake electors scheme.The letter was written by Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney associated with Trump who is believed to be one of six unnamed co-conspirators in the indictment against Trump over his attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Much of Chesebro’s actions have been revealed through previous memos and through the January 6 investigation last year, but this memo brings further details to light about the fake electors scheme that he concocted.It was addressed to a Wisconsin lawyer, James R Troupis, the lead attorney for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, who oversaw the fake electors scheme in his state. Troupis filed a lawsuit in December 2020 asking the Wisconsin supreme court to throw out hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots, saying they violated voting requirements. The court ultimately rejected the lawsuit.Chesebro wrote to Troupis that “it seems feasible” the Trump campaign could subvert Biden’s victory. His plan would “force the Members of Congress, the media, and the American people to focus on the substantive evidence of illegal election and counting activities in the six contested States, provided three things happen”.He then lays out those three steps, describing a plan in detail.According to Chesebro’s plan, Republican electors in all six states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – would meet and cast votes for Trump on 14 December 2020, the deadline for electors to send their votes to Congress for certification in January.Attorneys in each of the six states would simultaneously file lawsuits that would lead to either a Trump victory or a Biden loss – which would be pending on 6 January, the certification date.Finally, on the day Congress meets to certify the electors’ votes, “Pence, presiding over the joint session, takes the position that it is his constitutional power and duty, alone, as president of the Senate, to both open and count the votes, and that anything in the Electoral Count Act to the contrary is unconstitutional,” according to language from the memo.Pence, who is running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has lashed out against his former ticket-mate and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” for plotting to overturn the election.According to the indictment, Trump repeatedly “pressured” Pence to participate in the plan, to which the vice-president replied: “You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome”.The indictment identified six co-conspirators, including one who is widely believed to be Chesebro. Co-Conspirator 5, thought to be Chesebro, “assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding”.The indictment also described the previously unseen 6 December 2020 memo as a “sharp departure” from an earlier and previously reported memo that Chesebro sent to Troupis outlining a plan to use “alternate” electors to send votes for Trump to Congress for certification amid a recount – even though Biden won the state.“I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on January 6,” Chesebro wrote in the 6 December 2020 memo. “But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on December 14.”Trump pleaded not guilty on all counts in the 6 January case, which charged him with three counts of conspiracy and one count of obstruction of an official proceeding – certifying the electoral vote. More

From 3h agoGood morning, US politics blog readers. A lawyer allied with former president Donald Trump initially pitched the now-infamous plan to use fake electors in swing states to subvert the 2020 election results as “a bold, controversial strategy” that the supreme court would “likely” reject, according to a secret memo.Federal prosecutors are portraying the memo, dated 6 December 2020 and written by Kenneth Chesebro, as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts to keep him in power evolved into a criminal conspiracy, according to a New York Times report. The existence of the memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Trump.Chesebro, identified as “co-conspirator 5” in the federal indictment of Trump, reportedly argued that the plan would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column”. He wrote in the memo:
I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on Jan. 6. But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on Dec. 14.
The document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo”, provides new details about how the plan originated and was discussed behind the scenes. The memo show the plan was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect”, prosecutors said.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
3pm EST: President Joe Biden will speak about his administration’s clean energy and manufacturing investments in Albuquerque.
5.55pm EST: Biden will fly to Salt Lake city.
The House and Senate are out.
An internal Trump campaign memo by Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer allied with Donald Trump, reveals new details about how the former president and his team initiated the plan to interfere with the electoral college process and install fake GOP electors in multiple states after losing the 2020 presidential election.The 6 December 2020 memo, made public on Tuesday by the New York Times, shows how Chesebro laid out the plan to put forth slates of Republican electors in seven key swing states that Trump had lost.The document, which federal prosecutors described as a “fraudulent elector memo”, revealed that Chesebro proposed the appointment of fake electors, and detailed a “messaging” strategy to portray them as evidence if legislatures later concluded Trump as the victor in those states.In the memo, Chesebro acknowledges that he is suggesting a “bold, controversial strategy” that the supreme court would “likely” ultimately reject. He argues that the plan would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column”.The memo was referenced in the four-count indictment against Trump by a Washington DC grand jury last month. The indictment identifies, but does not name, Chesebro as a co-conspirator in Trump’s alleged conspiracy to obstruct certification of the 2020 election.In separate, previously seen emails, Chesebro had also suggested having then-vice president Mike Pence open and count the electoral votes alone. Pence would then certify the fake electors’ votes, even though Biden would have won the state, according to the plan.There has been open debate within the Democratic party over whether Senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, whose health and cognitive abilities have come into question after a two-and-a-half-month absence due to shingles and other medical complications, should resign.Questions over Feinstein’s ability to effectively represent California, the most populous US state, have been a sensitive issue for Democrats going back years. As her diminishing health plays out in the public eye there is a renewed urgency to the situation. Riding out her term in absentia until retirement next year is also not a viable option, with Feinstein the tie-breaking vote on the Senate judiciary committee, which holds confirmation hearings for judicial nominees, and effectively the only person who can ensure that Joe Biden’s picks for judges go through.Feinstein’s compounding health issues and status as the oldest member of Congress now present Democrats with a complex problem that has pitted several prominent members of Congress against each other, as several lawmakers issued calls in recent weeks for Feinstein to step down.California Democrats, who voted her into office six times, are increasingly divided over whether she should continue to serve. More than 60 progressive organizations called on her to step down – noting that the 39 million constituents she represents deserve “constant representation”. It hasn’t helped that the senator has physically shielded herself from her constituents and the press, dismissing questions about her health and ability to serve.Feinstein’s eventual return to Washington on 10 May only prompted a new round of debate and news coverage, after she arrived looking exceedingly frail and appeared confused by reporters’ questions about her absence. Feinstein suffered more complications from her illness than previously disclosed, the New York Times reported, including post-shingles encephalitis and a condition known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome which causes facial paralysis.Read the full story here.California senator Dianne Feinstein’s latest medical setback comes days after she reportedly handed power of attorney over to her daughter.Katherine, a former San Francisco judge, is said to have been given power of attorney over her mother amid an ongoing dispute regarding her late husband Richard Blum’s estate, according to the New York Times.Senator Dianne Feinstein was hospitalized after tripping and falling in her San Francisco home, according to multiple reports.The 90-year-old Democratic senator was taken to a nearby hospital and returned home on Tuesday night, TMZ reported.Feinstein’s spokesperson told the San Francisco Chronicle that she spent an hour or two in the hospital. Her scans were clear, he added.Feinstein has struggled with her health in recent years. She was absent from the Senate for two-and-a-half-months due to shingles and other medical complications.The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s election subversion case, US district judge Tanya Chutkan, has set a date for a hearing on a proposed protective order by prosecutors.The protective order, if granted, will govern how evidence is handled in the case. The order, requested last Friday by special counsel Jack Smith’s team, asks for Trump to be prohibited from publicly sharing evidence in the case during the discovery phase.The decision to schedule the hearing for Friday morning comes a day after the special counsel’s office and Trump’s legal team filed dueling motions over the proposed protective order.Trump is not required to be present at the Friday hearing in Washington DC, Chutkan said.Donald Trump last week pleaded not guilty to charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election by conspiring to block Congress from confirming Joe Biden’s victory over him. He also pleaded not guilty to charges that he obstructed the certification by directing his supporters to descend on the Capitol on the day of the January 6 attack.He is also accused of – and has pleaded not guilty to – scheming to disrupt the election process and deprive Americans of their right to have their votes counted.John Lauro slammed the indictment as politically motivated and full of holes. He said:
This is what’s called a Swiss cheese indictment – so many holes that we’re going to be identifying.
Lauro suggested that his side would argue that Trump’s actions were protected by his constitutional right to free speech as well as presidential immunity.Taking aim at Biden, the Democratic incumbent, Lauro added:
This is the first time in history that a sitting president has used his justice department to go after a political opponent to knock him out of a race that creates grave constitutional problems.
Lauro confirmed that he planned to file a motion to dismiss the conspiracy charges, as well as another to transfer the case from Washington DC’s federal courthouse to one in West Virginia, a state where Trump won 69% of the votes in 2020, his second largest margin of victory in a state after Wyoming.“We would like a diverse venue and diverse jury to have an expectation that will reflect the characteristics of the American people,” he said. “I think West Virginia would be an excellent venue.”Lauro was brought on to Trump’s legal team in mid-July. He has defended a string of controversial clients who include Dewayne Allen Levesque – manager of the Pink Pony nightclub in Florida who was acquitted of charges of racketeering, conspiracy, and aiding and abetting prostitution – and the disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who admitted to taking payoffs from bookies in exchange for a one-year, three-month prison sentence.Trump will not accept a plea deal in the criminal conspiracy charges, Lauro told CBS.Donald Trump’s attorney has suggested that Mike Pence could help his former boss fight off the 2020 election-related criminal conspiracy charges against Trump, claiming that the former vice-president would be the “best witness” for the defence.In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, attorney John Lauro played down differences between the former president and Pence’s accounts of what happened in the run up to the 6 January 2021 certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump, whose supporters attacked the US Capitol that day.Asked on Face the Nation whether he feared that Pence would be called as a prosecution witness in the case, Lauro said: “No, no in fact, the vice-president will be our best witness.
There was a constitutional disagreement between the vice-president [Pence] and president Trump, but the bottom line is never, never in our country’s history, as those kinds of disagreements have been prosecuted criminally. It’s unheard of.
Earlier on Sunday, Pence – who is running against Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – told CBS that he had “no plans” to testify for the prosecution. But he did not rule it out. In response to Lauro’s assertion last week that all Trump did was ask him to pause the certification, Pence said: “That’s not what happened.”The Fulton county district attorney’s office investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has been issuing summons to witnesses to testify before the grand jury, as part of the final presentation by prosecutors that is expected to take just a couple of days before they ask the grand jury to return an indictment, according to two people familiar with the matter.Charges stemming from the Trump investigation could come as early as next Tuesday if the presentment starts on Monday, the people said. That dovetails with a timeline inferred from district attorney Fani Willis instructing her staff to move to remote work during that period because of security concerns, the Guardian has previously reported.The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia is expected to present evidence to a grand jury and ask it to return indictments as early as next Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter.The prosecutors in the office of district attorney Fani Willis completed its internal reviews for criminal charges in the Trump case weeks ago, the people said. The review process, to identify any weakness with the case, is typically seen as the final step before charges are filed.Willis has also privately indicated to her senior staff that the prosecutors on the Trump case were sufficiently prepared that they could go to trial tomorrow, the people said.In the Trump investigation, prosecutors have developed evidence to pursue a sprawling racketeering case that is predicated on a statute about influencing witnesses and computer trespass by Trump operatives in Coffee county, the Guardian has previously reported.The extent of Trump’s legal jeopardy remains unclear. But the racketeering statute in Georgia is especially expansive and attempts to solicit or coerce certain activity – for instance, Trump’s call to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger – could be included in the indictment.The district attorney’s office has also weighed several state election law charges, including: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud and conspiracy to commit election fraud, as well as solicitation of a public or political officer to fail to perform their duties and solicitation to destroy, deface or remove ballots.Willis originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who sought to help Trump stay in power as so-called fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end.The newly disclosed memo by Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro includes a strategy to explain why pro-Trump electors were meeting in states where Joe Biden was declared the winner, the Times reported.Chesebro wrote:
I believe that what can be achieved on Jan. 6 is not simply to keep Biden below 270 electoral votes. It seems feasible that the vote count can be conducted so that at no point will Trump be behind in the electoral vote count unless and until Biden can obtain a favorable decision from the Supreme Court upholding the Electoral Count Act as constitutional, or otherwise recognizing the power of Congress (and not the president of the Senate) to count the votes.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. A lawyer allied with former president Donald Trump initially pitched the now-infamous plan to use fake electors in swing states to subvert the 2020 election results as “a bold, controversial strategy” that the supreme court would “likely” reject, according to a secret memo.Federal prosecutors are portraying the memo, dated 6 December 2020 and written by Kenneth Chesebro, as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts to keep him in power evolved into a criminal conspiracy, according to a New York Times report. The existence of the memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Trump.Chesebro, identified as “co-conspirator 5” in the federal indictment of Trump, reportedly argued that the plan would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column”. He wrote in the memo:
I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on Jan. 6. But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on Dec. 14.
The document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo”, provides new details about how the plan originated and was discussed behind the scenes. The memo show the plan was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect”, prosecutors said.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
3pm EST: President Joe Biden will speak about his administration’s clean energy and manufacturing investments in Albuquerque.
5.55pm EST: Biden will fly to Salt Lake city.
The House and Senate are out. More

Federal prosecutors asked a federal judge to reject Donald Trump’s request for fewer restrictions over how he can publicly share evidence in the case involving his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, arguing the former president was seeking to abuse the discovery process.“The defendant seeks to use the discovery material to litigate this case in the media,” prosecutors wrote in an eight-page brief on Monday. “But that is contrary to the purpose of criminal discovery, which is to afford defendants the ability to prepare for and mount a defense in court.”The court filings, submitted to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, highlighted comments made over the weekend by Trump lawyer John Lauro about former vice-president Mike Pence being a potential witness to stress the importance of strict restrictions.“This district’s rules prohibit defense counsel from doing precisely what he has stated he intends to do with discovery if permitted: publicize, outside of court, details of this case, including the testimony of anticipated witnesses,” prosecutors wrote.Trump has characterized the indictment, charging him with four felonies over his attempt to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January 2021 and overturn the results of the 2020 election, as a political witch-hunt and infringing on his first amendment rights.To that end, his lawyers filed a brief earlier on Monday asking the judge to issue a less restrictive protective order, a routine step in criminal cases to ensure evidence turned over to defendants in discovery is used to help construct a defense and not to chill witnesses.The 29-page document asked for various accommodations, such as giving Trump the ability to make public any transcripts of witness interviews that are not protected by grand jury secrecy rules, and to expand the circle of people who could gain access to the discovery material.But the prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith provided a line-by-line refutation of Trump’s requests, including that he be permitted to share evidence turned over to his legal team in discovery with people other than his own lawyers, such as volunteer attorneys.Allowing such broad language, prosecutors wrote, would render it boundless and allow Trump to share evidence, for instance, with any currently unindicted co-conspirators who are also attorneys and could benefit from otherwise confidential information.The procedural dispute between prosecutors and Trump’s legal team sets up an early test for Chutkan, who will now decide the matter. Chutkan ordered both sides to confer and jointly inform her by Tuesday 3pm of potential dates for a hearing to take place before 11 August.But a bitter fight this early in the process, over the protective order, which prosecutors say must be implemented before they start turning over evidence to Trump, suggests the case could be marked by contentious pre-trial motions from the former president with an eye on delay.As in the classified documents case, Trump’s overarching strategy in legal cases is to delay them. If a trial drags past the 2024 election and Trump were to win, he could try to pardon himself or direct his attorney general to drop the charges and jettison the case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe current dispute started almost immediately after Trump was arraigned last week, when prosecutors took the routine step of asking for a protective order but specifically referenced a vaguely threatening post from Trump that read “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”The prosecutors did not ask the judge to impose a gag order on Trump to prevent him from discussing the case, but made an inferential argument that there needed to be clear rules on how Trump could publicly use evidence turned over to him in discovery.Their main requests were to limit the people with access to the discovery materials to just people with an interest in the case, such as Trump’s lawyers, and to create a special category of “sensitive materials” that “must be maintained in the custody and control of defense counsel”.The sensitive materials would include things like “personally identifying information” of witnesses and information that emerged from the grand jury during the criminal investigation, which is kept secret under federal law.Under the proposed protective order, the government also allowed Trump’s lawyers to show him the sensitive materials. But he would not be permitted to keep copies or write down any personal information about the people in the materials, since that would circumvent the rule about copies.The Trump campaign responded hours later, saying in a statement that the post had not been directed at anyone involved in the case and suggesting that prosecutors were seeking to punish him for engaging in first amendment activity, or “the definition of political speech”. More