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<!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Browsing a list of 100 books is exciting, but can be overwhelming. Want to find one to read right away? We can help! Here is a cheat sheet to the list, broken into categories. Clicking a book cover will take you to the full review.–><!–> –> Let’s ease into things. How about a […] More
New revelations about the tense relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump in the fall of 2020 have emerged in a trove of thousands of court documents released on Sunday as part of a massive defamation lawsuit filed against the network by voting technology company Smartmatic.One exchange showed that Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, told star anchor Sean Hannity in a 1 October 2020 text chain that Trump could not appear on Fox again if he attacked the network.“Sean, sorry, but the president is not coming back on air if he uses it to attack us,” Murdoch wrote to a group that also included his father, Rupert, and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. “It is the same rule we have with the other side. This is a golden rule,” signing the message with “Thx L.” (In a 1 October 2020 interview with Hannity, Trump said Fox was “a much different place than it used to be”.)Hannity’s response to Murdoch’s message was redacted. The situation got worse in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when many Fox News supporters turned against the network, including Trump himself, leading to something of an existential crisis at the long-dominant channel.In a separate correspondence after the November 2020 presidential election, after many Trump supporters had grown angry at Fox News over its call of the state of Arizona for Joe Biden, Hannity acknowledged the anger from the president’s side. “Trump people hate Fox,” he wrote to a producer. “Hate hate hate.”While Fox publicly stood behind its Arizona call in the face of internal and external blowback, according to a 6 November 2020 email from Scott, Lachlan Murdoch said that Fox should consider reversing its call of the state of Arizona for Biden if his margin fell below 1% of the vote. “I’m not recommending we do that at this time,” Scott said.The documents released on Sunday are copies of the exhibits that were cited in previous filings between the parties. They include both longer versions of previously cited conversations and many new internal text messages and email exchanges that have not previously been made public.In a previously unreported 23 November 2020 email to his son, Rupert Murdoch suggested they chat about the viewer backlash against Fox News. “Getting killed in audience numbers,” he wrote. “All day long. We have to keep our nerve but worth a discussion. Won’t hurt subscriber revenue, but will soon cut into [advertisements].” Lachlan Murdoch wrote that he would call his father the following morning. “Agree re FNC,” he wrote. “Keeping me awake at night.”In another previously unreported 21 January 2021 email to his son Lachlan, Rupert wrote that he was “still getting criticism for [Fox News Channel]. Saying leading voices encouraged stolen election bullshit and pushed Jan 6 rally.” In the same thread, Murdoch talked about ousting business network host Lou Dobbs. “Just take him off the air and negotiate later,” he wrote. Dobbs’s show was cancelled the following month.The elder Murdoch also talked about hiring former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, saying that it’s “hard to attack a Black woman”.The documents released on Sunday also included a version of Smartmatic’s deposition of Rupert Murdoch. When asked by a Smartmatic lawyer whether he took any steps “to make sure that hosts with shows on Fox News Media did not endorse claims about the 2020 election being stolen,” Rupert Murdoch responded: “No. No.”“I was very happy [with] the way Fox News was handling it,” Rupert Murdoch said of the network’s post-election coverage.Rupert Murdoch also acknowledged that Fox News made a decision to “pivot” after the election by “moving away from our support of Trump”. But he said it was difficult to do so. “Our very large audience tended to be Trump supporters,” he said. “We didn’t want to upset them totally. That, we did before. They’d been attacking us.”Murdoch also affirmed that he believed Trump’s claims of a stolen election contributed to the January 6 US Capitol attack – though he denied it was a “riot” and said it was “intended to be just be a rally outside the Capitol”.In his own deposition, Lachlan Murdoch said he didn’t think Fox News did anything to “endorse” claims of election fraud made by Trump’s supporters. He also re-affirmed the journalistic value of covering the president’s election fraud claims. “I can’t imagine a more newsworthy story than the sitting president of the United States calling into question the election results,” he said, according a transcript of his deposition.“We did not make the allegations against Smartmatic. The president and his lawyers and associates made the allegations against Smartmatic,” Lachlan Murdoch said. “We reported those allegations, which I believe were incredibly newsworthy. So we did not make an apology for reporting the sitting president’s allegations about a voting system.”Smartmatic was indicted by the Department of Justice last month as part of an investigation into bribery in the Philippines. The company denies the charges, calling the indictment “targeted, political, and unjust”.Fox News has strenuously denied Smartmatic’s claims and said the company has vastly overstated its value.“The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech,” a Fox News spokesperson said. “Now, in the aftermath of Smartmatic being criminally charged with bribery in the Philippines and the Government’s motion to include evidence of Smartmatic’s business dealings in Venezuela and Los Angeles County, we are eager and ready to continue defending our press freedoms.”Fox had petitioned the judge in the case to delay the trial, pending the criminal case against Smartmatic, but on Monday that effort was denied.“Today’s decision is an important victory for Smartmatic as we progress in our efforts to hold Fox accountable for its lies,” a Smartmatic spokesperson said. “The court made clear that Fox’s attempts to delay accountability won’t work, and its day of reckoning is coming.”Both parties are tentatively scheduled to argue their case for summary judgement next month. 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Donald Trump on Sunday appeared to endorse the discredited conspiracy theory that Venezuela’s leadership controls electronic voting software worldwide and caused his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.White House officials have previously said that Trump’s increasingly bellicose policy toward Venezuela is driven by concerns about migration and the drug trade. But the president’s new comment, made on Truth Social, hints that his hostility to Venezuela may also be based on an outlandish, implausible theory ruled to be false by a judge in 2023.Fox News paid $787m in 2023 to Dominion Voting to settle a lawsuit that was based in part on identical claims about Venezuela’s supposed role in the 2020 election.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s remarks.Trump’s post came two days after the Guardian reported that Trump’s Department of Justice has been extensively interviewing conspiracists who are pushing the idea that Venezuela controls voting companies and flips votes to the candidates it favors.The US attorney in Puerto Rico, W Stephen Muldrow, has repeatedly interviewedthe former CIA officer Gary Berntsen and Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil, who claim to have proof of the scheme and the two have also briefed a taskforce out of Tampa. Berntsen, and author Ralph Pezzullo, were also guests on the podcast of far-right media personality Lara Logan on Friday.Trump on Sunday reposted the Logan podcast segment, and wrote:“We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”Trump did not specifically mention Venezuela, but the podcast was a rehash of the allegations and was built around a self published book called Stolen Elections, which recounts the theory.The post came as Trump has sent extensive military resources, including a navy aircraft carrier, to the region.On Monday the administration ramped up pressure, designating the Venezuelan-based so-called Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. In July the treasury department had already named it a “specially designated global terrorist”.An indictment filed in 2020 alleged that the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, heads the reputed organization.“Who knows what the process is inside the White House,” said David M Rowe, a political science professor at Kenyon College who specializes in national security. “If it captures Trump’s attention, my understanding is it is part of the process. Trump needs to find justification in his own mind for war.”Rowe said that narcoterrorism claims about Venezuela have not resonated with Trump’s America First base, which has been reluctant to support overseas intervention. “As a kind of casus belli, a reason for war, narcoterrorism looks extremely weak. An attack on the American electoral system is stronger. If he can argue to the Maga movement that they did intervene in the US political system, it’s a stronger case for war,” he said.Berntsen, the ex-CIA officer promoting the theory, was asked by the Guardian on Monday about the president’s apparent affirmation of his theory, and replied: “The President knows this is NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY, he knows the truth, evidence in possession of DOJ.”A Venezuelan opposition figure who supports strong action against Maduro but is dismissive of the election claims told the Guardian on condition of anonymity that proponents of the conspiracy theory are trying to take advantage of access to the administration. “I think there is someone inside the White House that these people have access to. They might be overselling this crap and there are people who refuse to let go of the 2020 election conspiracy bullshit.” More
Federal investigators have been interviewing multiple people who are pushing unfounded claims that Venezuela helped steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.Two promoters of the conspiracy theory have repeatedly briefed the US attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, W Stephen Muldrow, and have shared witnesses and documents with officials, according to four sources. Muldrow declined to comment.In addition to the Puerto Rico talks, people pushing the conspiracy have been interviewed by federal investigators for a federal taskforce in Tampa which is looking at Venezuelan drug trafficking and money laundering, four sources told the Guardian. The US attorney’s office in Tampa declined to comment.An investigation of this sort underscores how Trump’s justice department is becoming a major weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss – while potentially strengthening the administration’s case for military action against Venezuela.While there were a variety of conspiracy theories that helped fuel Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement – dead voters, stolen, fraudulent or forged ballots, and secret computer servers in Germany – the purported influence of Venezuela was always a central claim. It asserted that electronic voting in the US was secretly controlled by the impoverished regime, both by President Nicolás Maduro and his deceased predecessor Hugo Chávez.Not only was it bizarre on its face, but a judge in Delaware ruled it false in 2023, and Fox News, Newsmax and OAN later paid a total of hundreds of millions in total damages in defamation claims. At heart, the theory was that Smartmatic, which had the contract for electronic voting machines in Los Angeles, and Dominion, which ran voting in many other parts of the country, had been created or influenced by Venezuela to fix elections.The revival of the claim appears to bind together two themes: Trump’s consistent “rigged election” complaints, and his antagonism to Venezuela’s socialist regime.With a military buildup in the Caribbean and increased sabre-rattling from the Trump administration towards Maduro, the unfounded election-rigging theories could provide another rationale for military action against Maduro.‘Very receptive’How could a discredited conspiracy theory, be investigated as a plausible case by the US justice department five years after it first bubbled up?The story starts with two unique characters who claim to have been pursuing the election claims for years: Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil. They have become sources for the Trump camp and ultimately for investigators and have promoted two major allegations about Venezuela, as the reporters Seth Hettena and Jonathan Larsen have written on Substack.The first theme links Tren de Aragua, the street gang Trump has designated as a terrorist organization, closer to Maduro. The other major theme Berntsen and Rodil promoted was the old voting conspiracy and the allegations that Venezuela helped rig elections worldwide.Berntsen is a former CIA case officer who came to the public eye even before writing a book in 2006 about his hunt for Osama bin Laden. “A formidable guy, a warrior, no question,” said one former official who knew him.Berntsen projects the plainspoken demeanor of an expert with field experience battling an intransigent bureaucracy. He is also a fierce champion of Trump and of an invasion of Venezuela.“I don’t dabble in conspiracy theories,” Berntsen wrote in a message to the Guardian. “I spent my life defending our country and constitution. I led many major operations and investigations and saved many lives.”He added: “The Department of Justice and FBI and key White House Staff are investigating and coordinating efforts to defend our system and charge those guilty of Stealing Elections and violating other laws accountable for their actions.”Rodil is a Venezuelan expatriate based in Washington, and says he has been a consultant to US law enforcement investigating Venezuelan crime for 20 years. A close associate of his said he specializes in recruiting Venezuelan informants and witnesses for US cases.The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in 2022 that Rodil was under investigation in Spain for extorting three Venezuelans there, trying to get money in exchange for influencing US authorities on cases. It is unclear what happened to that case.Rodil told the Guardian it was false, and said those who accused him were charged in the US.Even before Trump’s return to office earlier this year, the sources say Berntsen and Rodil have been feeding information, documents and witnesses about the voting claims to Muldrow, the US attorney out of Puerto Rico and to an organized crime taskforce called Panama Express, or Panex, which is based out of Tampa.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSources familiar with the relationship between Muldrow, Berntsen and Rodil say there has been extensive cooperation on the matter. “They work together. Muldrow has been very receptive,” one of the sources said of the voting allegations. That source said there had been multiple briefings in Puerto Rico.Muldrow is one of the few US attorneys to have kept a job after Trump took over the White House. First appointed by Trump in 2019, he stayed in office during Biden’s term. He is a staunch Republican and Trump supporter, say two people who know him. Muldrow spent a good portion of his career in Tampa, and one source who knows him says he has a good working relationship with Pam Bondi, the current Trump US attorney general. She was the Florida state AG while Muldrow was based in the Tampa US attorney’s office.Several sources said Muldrow had turned over information to the Panex taskforce which used to focus primarily on the drug flow from Colombia but was now targeting Venezuela as well.This is now the taskforce working directly with Rodil and Berntsen, they say.In response to detailed questions, Muldrow emailed the Guardian: “In accordance with Department of Justice policies, I am not able to provide you with a comment.”Rodil told the Guardian that allegations involving so-called election integrity issues were incidental to conversations with Muldrow, rather than the central point of the briefings. He protested that while one witness talked about Smartmatic and election integrity, that was not the substance of Muldrow’s interest, and he said Muldrow only heard a portion of the evidence involving faked election results.Berntsen wrote in a message to the Guardian that “indictments are going to be released in the near future,” and said he and his colleagues believe that “your goal is to discredit the claims against Smartmatic and Dominion, the entities linked to a massive criminal cartel that stole US elections and elections worldwide.”‘Trump knows they need to be stopped’Ralph Pezzullo, the co-author of Berntsen’s 2006 book, is a true believer in the conspiracy theories Berntsen and Rodil are promoting now.In September, Pezzullo published an e-book called Stolen Elections: the Takedown of Democracies Worldwide, which described the Venezuela conspiracy theories, and is based on the accounts of Berntsen and Modil and witnesses they introduced to Pezzulo.Pezzullo wrote that the US voting was a “system created in Venezuela – and still electronically linked to Venezuela – that is designed to steal elections by remotely altering results”.Pezzullo said he too had spoken to Muldrow about the allegations. Pezzullo told the Guardian that his phone call with Muldrow was set up by Berntsen and claimed Muldrow assured him that the claims of election fraud were correct.“They’ve been attacking the US with the election machines and with the drugs,” Pezullo said, of Venezuela. “Trump knows they need to be stopped.” More
January 20 January 27-31 February 5 February 11-18 February 10-14 February 18 February 28 March 5 March 6 March 11 April 3 April 7 April 7 April 4-15 May 3 May 12 May 21 May 28 July 9 July 11 Late September October 21 October 28-30 <!–>Trump also undid one of the largest investigations in […] More
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The only remaining criminal case against Donald Trump has been revived after the head of Georgia’s prosecutor’s council appointed himself to replace Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, who was removed from the election interference case in September.Pete Skandalakis, a Republican and the executive director of the prosecuting attorneys’ council of Georgia, the state body that provides legal training and is often charged to mitigate prosecutorial conflicts, wrote in a statement on Friday that he would be taking over from Willis.A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to find enough votes to beat Biden.The case remains the only criminal prosecution of Trump, but it has been on life support after Willis was disqualified by the Georgia supreme court, which ruled that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, revealed in dramatic court filings in January 2024, created an impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest.Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. While president, Trump is protected from state-level prosecutions, but the other 14 remaining defendants are still subject to prosecution.“The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case,” Skandalakis said. “Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment.”Fulton county’s courts have called on Skandalakis to resolve a conflict before in this case, after Scott McAfee, Fulton county superior court judge, found that Willis’s office had a conflict of interest with Burt Jones, who served as one of 16 “alternate” GOP electors in Georgia to cast a vote for Trump during the 2020 legal conflict over election results. Skandalakis ultimately declined to press charges in the case against Jones, who is now Georgia’s lieutenant governor and a candidate for governor in 2026.McAfee set a 14 November deadline for Skandalakis to find a new prosecutor on the Trump racketeering indictment to avoid dismissing the case entirely.“While it would have been simple to allow Judge McAfee’s deadline to lapse or to inform the court that no conflict prosecutor could be secured – thereby allowing the case to be dismissed for want of prosecution – I did not believe that to be the right course of action,” Skandalakis said.“The public has a legitimate interest in the outcome of this case. Accordingly, it is important that someone make an informed and transparent determination about how best to proceed.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSkandalakis noted that he did not receive the complete investigative file from Fulton county prosecutors until last week. He appointed himself as prosecutor to “complete a comprehensive review and make an informed decision regarding how best to proceed”.In addition to Trump, Mark Meadows, the president’s former chief of staff, and former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani remain defendants in the case. Trump pardoned Meadows and Giuliani of any federal crime related to the 2020 election, a largely symbolic gesture.Upon receipt of Skandalakis’s letter naming himself as prosecutor, McAfee wasted no time jumping into the case. He immediately scheduled a pretrial status conference for 1 December, asking prosecutors to tell him whether they intend to seek a superseding indictment to continue the case. Later Friday afternoon, he dismissed three of the counts in the case involving forgery and filing of false documents in federal court. More
Members of Georgia’s election denial movement have claimed in recent weeks that the justice department is investigating debunked fraud claims in the state stemming from the 2020 election.The development would be just the latest in a series of moves by Trump acolytes at the DoJ who are transforming the voting section of the agency from an office focused on protecting Americans’ voting rights to one that is in lockstep with an election denial movement that incessantly demands investigations and drastic reductions in access to the polls based on Donald Trump’s lies about elections.On 2 October, Republicans from the Georgia legislature invited several election deniers to speak at a hearing designed to help lawmakers decide whether to end the state’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, an organization that helps election officials remove ineligible voters from voter rolls.Among those invited was Mark Davis, a political consultant and frequent voter registration challenger. Davis’s presentation was titled “Felony Residency Violations”, and alleged that hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters may have voted illegally in recent elections because they had moved, but had voted in their former jurisdictions.“On September 10th, I received a call from an investigator with the Department of Justice about these specific violations,” Davis claimed.Davis nor the justice department responded to requests for comment.Davis said he had submitted formal complaints about 97 voters to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, adding that they should be investigated for possible violations of the federal Voting Rights Act. His alleged conversation with the justice department “makes these issues even more important”, he said at the hearing.Davis’s revelation marked the second time in recent months that election deniers had claimed the justice department was investigating unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. At the heart of their claims is a 25 August letter from Ed Martin, who defended January 6 rioters and has since been appointed by Trump as an attorney at the DoJ. In the letter, Martin demanded “immediate access” to 148,000 ballots and ballot envelopes from the 2020 election that the state’s election denial movement believes will prove their false claims of a stolen election that year.The letter – whose authenticity the Guardian has not been able to independently verify – was allegedly sent to the judge Robert CI McBurney, who has overseen election-related cases in Georgia. McBurney did not respond to a request for comment; nor did Martin. But on 29 October, Martin posted an emoji denoting intrigue when the letter was posted on X by Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists.“I am requesting your permission to immediately access the approximately 148,000 absentee ballots and envelopes currently being held at the Fulton County ballot warehouse,” Martin wrote in the letter, which has only been shared publicly by Mitchell and an anonymous, far-right X account. “I am at present undertaking an investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice. A review of the ballots and envelopes is imperative for this work.”The letter also states that a copy would be sent to the office of Ché Alexander, clerk of the Fulton county superior court. Alexander’s office said it had not received the letter.Martin’s supposed investigation into 2020 election fraud claims offers more evidence that Trump’s justice department is working hand-in-hand with the election denial movement, said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights advocacy organization.“Trump’s DOJ is actively working with the same crackpots who tried to overturn his 2020 loss,” Flugrath said in a statement. “Investigators are reaching out to discredited activists and partisan operatives to advance bogus claims of fraud.”The voting section of the justice department’s civil rights division has taken the lead in pursuing Trump’s lies about election fraud, demanding lists of voters and their personal information from more than 30 states. The DoJ’s potential involvement in unfounded fraud investigations represents a new front in the Trump administration’s pursuit of fraud claims headed into next year’s midterm elections.On 15 October, Donald Trump himself appeared to reference those very ballots in remarks to reporters, falsely claiming that he won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.“I hope they go into the votes which are being stored in Fulton county and take a real look at those votes, because I won it the second time too,” Trump said.To gain access to full voter registration lists, or “VRLs”, the DoJ has sued seven states, prompting voting rights groups to warn that the Trump administration is helping states to purge hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Americans from voter rolls heading into next year’s elections.In Texas, the Trump administration’s use of social security and justice department databases has resulted in claims that more than 2,000 voters are non-citizens, who are ineligible to vote in federal elections. A county election official there warned in a 29 October court filing that, in one county, more than a quarter of those identified as noncitizens had already proved their citizenship.The official warned that the use of the databases to identify possible noncitizens could result in large numbers of eligible voters having their ability to vote “improperly cancelled”. After being identified as possible noncitizens by Texas’s Republican secretary of state, 2,724 voters have begun receiving notices that they could have their ability to vote revoked, “in some cases with minimal apparent verification by counties of whether the recipients are actually noncitizens”, the county election official said.Trump’s justice department has demanded unredacted VRLs from at least 30 states, including Georgia. On 7 August, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received a demand for unredacted VRLs from the justice department’s civil rights division, the Guardian has learned. The letter, which has not been previously reported, also asked Raffensperger’s office to list election officials throughout the state “who are responsible for implementing Georgia’s general program of voter registration list maintenance”.“Please also provide a description of the steps that you have taken, and when those steps were taken, to ensure that the State’s list maintenance program has been properly carried out in full compliance with the NVRA,” the letter states.The Trump administration has used language in the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, to claim the federal government should have access to unredacted voter lists.Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment.A month after Martin’s letter, the state election board’s three Trump-supporting Republican members outvoted the lone Democrat to subpoena the same 148,000 ballot envelopes that Martin’s letter demanded. The subpoena is part of the board’s ongoing work with the justice department, said one of the board’s Republican members, Janelle King.“We sent a letter to the DoJ asking for help, and they are helping,” King said during a 21 October gathering of Republicans in Fannin county. King’s comments have not been previously reported. “Now, you heard President Trump made a comment about Fulton county not too long ago, so that tells me that some stuff is getting up there – they are talking about it. So the plan is, I’m hoping, that the DoJ gets involved, and forces them to hand it over.”Asked by an election denial activist during her remarks whether the state election board was actively talking to the justice department, King smiled and laughed. “Yes, they’re communicating with us.”On 30 October, the justice department sent a letter to Fulton county demanding access to “all records in your possession responsive to the subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board”.When the Fulton county board of elections met on 7 November to certify the results of the 4 November elections, Republican board member Julie Adams, an election denier who has worked with a variety of conspiracy theorists and organizations tied to Trump, inquired about the 148,000 ballots that are the intense focus of Georgia’s election denial movement.“I’m asking if we have the ballots from 2020,” Adams said as a fellow board member reminded her that the ballots were in McBurney’s possession as part of an ongoing lawsuit. “I just want to be on the record that I’m not obstructing anything from the SEB or the Department of Justice.” More
