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    Trump Allies Begin First Line of Attack Against Arizona Election Case

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    The challenges from defendants charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election will be a test case for a new but little-known state law aimed at curbing political prosecutions.Allies of former President Donald J. Trump charged in a sweeping Arizona election case on Friday began filing what is expected to be a series of challenges, seizing on a new state law aimed at curbing litigation and prosecutions involving political figures.The law was originally crafted by Kory Langhofer, a Phoenix lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign during the 2020 election but who subsequently fell out of favor with the former president. He said the 2022 law’s intent was to limit politically motivated prosecutions on both sides of the aisle.The new challenges could have the effect of delaying the election case in Arizona for several months, given the timeline for decisions and appeals. The case was brought in April by the state attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat.The 18 defendants have each been charged with nine counts of fraud, forgery and conspiracy. The indictment lays out a series of efforts by the defendants to overturn Arizona’s election results, from the plan to deploy fake electors on Mr. Trump’s behalf, despite his loss at the polls, to the steps some took to put pressure on “officials responsible for certifying election results.”Seven Trump advisers are among those charged, among them Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Eleven Republicans committed to Mr. Trump who claimed to be the state’s electors, even though President Biden had already been certified by state officials as the winner in Arizona, were also charged.Seven Trump advisers are among those charged, among them Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer.Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Eastman, Former Trump Election Lawyer, Should Be Disbarred, Judge Finds

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      The decision was only the latest effort by bar officials to seek accountability against a group of lawyers who sought to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office despite his election loss.A judge in California recommended on Wednesday that the lawyer John Eastman be stripped of his law license, finding he had violated rules of professional ethics by persistently lying in his efforts to help former President Donald J. Trump maintain his grip on power after losing the 2020 election.In a 128-page ruling, the judge, Yvette Roland, said Mr. Eastman had willfully misrepresented facts in lawsuits he helped file challenging the election results and acted dishonestly in promoting a “wild theory” that Mr. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, could unilaterally declare him the victor during a certification proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.“In sum, Eastman exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon,” Judge Roland found, adding that he had breached “his ethical duty as an attorney to prioritize honesty and integrity.”The ruling said Mr. Eastman would lose his license within three days of the decision being issued. While he can appeal the finding, the ruling makes his license “inactive,” meaning that he cannot practice law in California while a review is taking place.The decision was only the latest effort by bar officials across the country to seek accountability against a group of lawyers who pushed false claims of election fraud and sought to help Mr. Trump stay in office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kenneth Chesebro Is a Key Witness as ‘Fake Electors’ Face Charges

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      Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to deploy people claiming to be Trump electors in states won by President Biden, is cooperating with inquiries in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.Twenty-four of the so-called fake Trump electors now face criminal charges in three different states, and one of the legal architects of the plan to deploy them, Kenneth Chesebro, has emerged as a witness in all of the cases.Mr. Chesebro, a Harvard-trained lawyer, helped develop the plan to have Republicans in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 present themselves as Trump electors. The scheme was part of an effort to have Congress block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021.Earlier this week, a Nevada grand jury indicted six former Trump electors, including top leaders of the state’s Republican Party, on charges of forging and submitting fraudulent documents.In August, a grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 allies, including three who were fake electors in Georgia. And in July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought charges against all 16 Republicans who acted as Trump electors in her state. (In October, she dropped charges against one of them, James Renner, in exchange for his cooperation.)Interest in Mr. Chesebro intensified after he pleaded guilty in October to a single felony charge of conspiracy in Georgia and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He had originally been charged with seven felonies, including one charge under the state racketeering law.“Everything happened after the plea in Georgia,” said Manny Arora, one of Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers in Georgia. “Everyone wants to talk about the memos and who he communicated with.”The lawyer was referring to memos written by Mr. Chesebro after the 2020 election that outlined what he himself called “a bold, controversial strategy” that was likely to be rejected by the Supreme Court. Since his plea agreement in Georgia, Mr. Arora said, Mr. Chesebro was interviewed in Detroit by Ms. Nessel’s office, and he was also listed as a witness this week in the Nevada indictment.Asked if Mr. Chesebro had agreements in place to avoid prosecution in the various jurisdictions, another one of his lawyers, Robert Langford, said “that would be a prudent criminal defense, that’s typically what you do,” adding that he did not “want to comment on anything happening in any of the states.”Mr. Chesebro is also expected in Arizona next week, where the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has been conducting her own inquiry into the electors plot for several months, people with knowledge of that inquiry said. (Mr. Chesebro’s Michigan and Arizona appearances were reported earlier by CNN and The Washington Post.)Mr. Chesebro worked for Vice President Al Gore during the presidential election recount battle of 2000 but later came to back Mr. Trump. He and another lawyer, John Eastman, are seen as the key legal architects of the plan to use bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump, a development that left some of his old colleagues scratching their heads.“When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him,” Lawrence Tribe, who was Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel and a Chesebro mentor, recently said.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers continue to generally defend his conduct, saying he was simply an attorney offering legal advice during the 2020 election. But Mr. Arora said that the legal team in Georgia decided to take a plea agreement because the document that was signed by the fake electors in Georgia did not include language explaining that what they were signing was a contingency plan, pending litigation.“They didn’t do that in Georgia,” he explained. “Because he was involved in it and that language wasn’t in there, we decided to plead to that count. It wasn’t because the whole thing was fraudulent or that this was a scam.”The three state electors investigations have taken very different approaches.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a broad racketeering case that includes Mr. Trump and top aides like Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff. Ms. Willis reached cooperation agreements with most of the fake electors before charges were brought.The Michigan and Nevada cases center on the electors themselves, rather than those who aided their actions, though Ms. Nessel has said that her inquiry remains open.Underlying claims of widespread election fraud that propelled the alleged fake electors scheme have never been substantiated. New legal filings this week from Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Justice Department who has charged Mr. Trump in his own federal election inquiry, underscore the illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s chronic claims of election fraud, highlighting that as far back as 2012 he was making baseless contentions about President Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.Mr. Trump made similar statements after his 2016 loss in the Iowa caucus, when he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” and after he lost the popular vote in the general election to Hillary Clinton, which he said he won “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” More

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      Sidney Powell Seeks Distance From Trump Ahead of Georgia Trial

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      Ms. Powell, a lawyer who promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud after Donald J. Trump’s 2020 defeat, now says she never represented him or his campaign.Few defenders of Donald J. Trump promoted election fraud theories after his 2020 defeat as stridently as Sidney K. Powell. In high-profile appearances, often alongside other members of the Trump legal team, she pushed conspiracies involving Venezuela, Cuba and China, as well as George Soros, Hugo Chávez and the Clintons, while baselessly claiming that voting machines had flipped millions of votes.But now Ms. Powell, who next week will be one of the first defendants to go to trial in the Georgia racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 17 of his allies, is claiming through her lawyer that she actually “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign” after the election.That claim is undercut by Ms. Powell’s own past words, as well as those of Mr. Trump — and there is ample video evidence of her taking part in news conferences, including one where Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, introduced her as one of “the senior lawyers” representing Mr. Trump and his campaign.Most of the Georgia charges against Ms. Powell relate to her role in a data breach at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga. There, on the day after the Jan. 6 riots, Trump allies copied sensitive and proprietary software used in voting machines throughout the state in a fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.At a recent court hearing, Ms. Powell’s lawyer, Brian T. Rafferty, said that his client “had nothing to do with Coffee County.”But a number of documents suggest otherwise, including a 392-page file put together by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that was obtained by The New York Times. The file, a product of the agency’s investigation into the data breach, has been turned over to Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican.It is not clear that Mr. Carr will take any action, given that Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has already brought racketeering charges against Ms. Powell, Mr. Trump and 17 others. The Fulton indictment accuses them of participating in a “criminal organization” with the goal of subverting Georgia’s election results.Brian Rafferty, a lawyer representing Ms. Powell, spoke during a hearing this week.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerJury selection in Ms. Powell’s trial and that of Kenneth Chesebro, a legal architect of the plan to deploy fake electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia and other swing states, starts on Monday. Ms. Powell and Mr. Chesebro demanded a speedy trial, their right under Georgia law, while Mr. Trump and most other defendants are likely to be tried much later.Ms. Powell’s vow during a Fox Business Network appearance in 2020 to “release the kraken,” or a trove of phantom evidence proving that Mr. Trump had won, went viral after the election, though the trove never materialized. The next year, after Dominion Voting Systems sued her and a number of others for defamation, Ms. Powell’s lawyers argued that “no reasonable person would conclude” that some of her wilder statements “were truly statements of fact.”That led the office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, to crow that “The Kraken Cracks Under Pressure,” and precipitated a spoof of Ms. Powell on Saturday Night Live.Not all are convinced that her conduct veered into criminality.“You have to separate crazy theories from criminal conspiracies,” said Harvey Silverglate, a Boston-area lawyer and civil liberties advocate who has a unique perspective: He is representing John Eastman, another lawyer-defendant in the case, and is a co-author of a 2019 book with Ms. Powell that looked at prosecutorial overreach.“That’s the big dividing line in this whole prosecution — what is criminal and what is wacky, or clearly erroneous or overreaching,” Mr. Silverglate said.Ms. Powell, he added, is “in a tougher position” than his own client, because the accusations against her go beyond the notion that she merely gave legal advice to the Trump campaign as it sought to overturn Mr. Biden’s win. But Mr. Silverglate also said he didn’t think prosecutors would win any convictions in the Georgia case or the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump in New York, Florida and Washington, given how politicized the trials will be.“I think in any jurisdiction — even Washington, D.C. — you will have at least one holdout,” he said.Ms. Powell is a North Carolina native and a onetime Democrat who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in Texas and Virginia before establishing her own defense practice. In 2014, she wrote a book, “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.” She billed it as an exposé of a department riddled with prosecutors who used “strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics” in their “narcissistic pursuit of power.”Ms. Powell appeared on Mr. Trump’s radar when she represented his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. He later tried to withdraw the plea.Ms. Powell, appearing on Fox News, argued that the case should never have been brought and that the F.B.I. and prosecutors “broke all the rules.” Mr. Trump would go on to pardon Mr. Flynn a few weeks after losing the 2020 election.On election night itself, Ms. Powell was at the White House watching the returns come in, according to her testimony to House investigators. When they asked what her relationship with Mr. Trump had been, she declined to answer, she said, because of “attorney-client privilege.”By Nov. 14, Mr. Trump, in a tweet, specifically referred to Ms. Powell as a member of his “truly great team.” Ms. Powell’s lawyer has pointed out that she was not paid by the Trump campaign. But the Trump connection helped her raise millions of dollars for Defending the Republic, her nonprofit group that is dedicated in part to fighting election fraud.Around that time, Ms. Powell, Mr. Flynn and other conspiracy-minded Trump supporters began meeting at a South Carolina plantation owned by L. Lin Wood, a well-known plaintiff’s attorney. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file, it was decided there that an Atlanta-based technology firm, SullivanStrickler, “would be used to capture forensic images from voting machines across the nation to support litigation” and that “Powell funded SullivanStrickler’s efforts.”By late November, the Trump team grew exasperated with Ms. Powell’s wild claims and publicly cut ties. But the schism was short-lived; she would make several trips to the White House in the weeks that followed.On Dec. 18, Ms. Powell attended a heated Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani that the Georgia indictment lists as an “overt act” in furtherance of the election interference conspiracy. According to the Georgia indictment, they discussed “seizing voting machines” as well as possibly naming Ms. Powell a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud, though the appointment was never made.Sidney Powell appeared on a screen during a July 2022 hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Jan. 7, a number of Trump allies, along with SullivanStrickler employees, traveled to Coffee County. “We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman who made the trip, recalled in a recorded phone conversation at the time. He pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors last month and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.Misty Hampton, a defendant in the racketeering case who was the Coffee County elections administrator, welcomed the Trump-aligned team into the building. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file makes clear that the county election board did not officially approve the visit and that local officials lacked authority over the voting equipment. (Ms. Hampton, Ms. Powell and other Fulton County defendants are among the subjects of the state investigation listed in the G.B.I. file, as is Katherine Friess, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Giuliani after the election.)While SullivanStrickler didn’t deal exclusively with Ms. Powell, a number of the firm’s employees have asserted that Ms. Powell was the client for its work copying the Coffee County election data, according to the G.B.I. investigation.“The defense’s stance that Sidney Powell was not aware of the Coffee County breaches is preposterous,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in civil litigation over Georgia’s voting security that unearthed much of what happened in Coffee County.According to the racketeering indictment, the data copied that day included “ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information.” SullivanStrickler invoiced Ms. Powell more than $26,000 for its work, and her organization, Defending the Republic, paid the bill.Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state, subsequently replaced Coffee County’s voting machines and said that “the unauthorized access to the equipment” had violated Georgia law. 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      Prosecutors Ask if Trump Will Blame His Lawyers as Defense in Election Case

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      The special counsel asked a judge to require the former president to disclose whether he would blame poor legal advice for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Tuesday to force former President Donald J. Trump to tell them months before he goes to trial on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election whether he intends to defend himself by blaming the stable of lawyers around him at the time for giving him poor legal advice.In a motion filed to the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, the prosecutors sought an order that would compel Mr. Trump to tell them by Dec. 18 if he plans to pursue the blame-the-lawyers strategy — known as an advice of counsel defense — at his federal election interference trial, which is now set to begin in March in Federal District Court in Washington.Both Mr. Trump and his current team of lawyers have “repeatedly and publicly announced” that they were going to use such arguments as “a central component of his defense,” prosecutors told Judge Chutkan in their filing. They said they wanted a formal order forcing Mr. Trump to tell them his plans by mid-December “to prevent disruption of the pretrial schedule and delay of the trial.”The early notification could also give prosecutors a tactical edge in the case. Defendants who pursue advice of counsel arguments waive the shield of attorney-client privilege that would normally protect their dealings with their lawyers. And, as prosecutors reminded Judge Chutkan, if Mr. Trump heads in this direction, he would have to give them not only all of the “communications or evidence” concerning the lawyers he plans to use as part of his defense, but also any “otherwise-privileged communications” that might be used to undermine his claims.Lawyers have been at the heart of the election interference case almost from the moment prosecutors first began issuing grand jury subpoenas to witnesses in the spring of 2022. Many of the subpoenas sought information about lawyers like John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, who entered Mr. Trump’s orbit around the time of the election and were instrumental in advising him about a scheme to create false slates of electors that declared him the winner of key swing states that had actually been won by his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.The subpoenas also sought information about other lawyers, like Jenna Ellis and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had not only advised Mr. Trump on the false elector plan, but had helped him advance claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud.Moreover, lawyers from both Mr. Trump’s administration and his presidential campaign proved to be key witnesses in the investigation that began under the Justice Department and then was handed off to prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith.And when charges were finally filed against Mr. Trump, accusing him of three overlapping conspiracies to remain in power despite the will of the voters, the indictment identified six unnamed co-conspirators — most, if not all, of whom were lawyers as well.In their motion to Judge Chutkan, prosecutors noted that at least 25 witnesses in their sprawling investigation had withheld information based on assertions of attorney-client privilege. Those people, the prosecutors said, included Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators, some of his former campaign employees, some “outside attorneys” and “even a family member of the defendant,” who was not further identified.While prosecutors acknowledged that they were not entirely sure if Mr. Trump intended to raise an advice of counsel defense — or whether he was even legally entitled to do so — they did take note of the public statements that he and his current legal team have made suggesting that such arguments might be used at trial.The prosecutors pointed out that three days after Mr. Trump was arraigned in the case, one of his lawyers, John F. Lauro, made the rounds of the Sunday TV news shows, describing how Mr. Trump had been charged for “following legal advice” from Mr. Eastman, whom he described as “an esteemed scholar.”Weeks later, in an online interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, prosecutors said, Mr. Trump himself made similar claims. In their filing, they wrote that Mr. Trump claimed he had “some lawyers” who had advised him “that a particular course of action described in the indictment was appropriate.”In a separate filing on Tuesday, prosecutors sought to get a jump on what is certain to be the difficult process of picking a jury for the trial.Citing Mr. Trump’s “continued use of social media as a weapon of intimidation” — an issue that has come up in the government’s request for a gag order to be placed on the former president — the prosecutors asked Judge Chutkan to impose restrictions on information about potential jurors and those who are ultimately picked to serve.The prosecutors asked that no one involved in the case be allowed to publicly disclose information about the jurors gleaned during the selection process, in order to protect them “from intimidation and fear.”They also asked Judge Chutkan to consider arranging “for jurors to gain discreet entry into and out of the courthouse” once the trial begins. 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      Clarence Thomas Recuses as Supreme Court Rejects Trump Lawyer’s Appeal

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      John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who had advised President Donald J. Trump, had sought to wipe out a decision that he said had harmed his reputation and that of his client.Justice Clarence Thomas, in a break from his practices in earlier cases involving the 2020 election, recused himself on Monday when the Supreme Court turned down an appeal from an architect of a plan to subvert the 2020 election.As is its custom, the court gave no reasons for denying review in the appeal, which was filed by John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who had advised President Donald J. Trump. Justice Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman had served as a law clerk, offered no explanation for his decision to disqualify himself from the case. The justice’s wife, Virginia Thomas, known as Ginni, had participated in efforts to overturn the election.Mr. Eastman’s petition was viewed as a long shot. It elicited no response from any other party, and Mr. Trump did not file a brief in the case.Justice Thomas took part in a ruling last year on an emergency application from Mr. Trump asking the court to block the release of White House records concerning the Capitol attack. The court rejected the request. Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons.He also participated in the court’s consideration of whether to hear a related appeal. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, without noted dissent. There was no indication that Justice Thomas had recused himself.In December 2020, Justice Thomas participated in a ruling on an audacious lawsuit by Texas asking the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states. The court rejected the request, with Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting down the case.In the case the court rejected on Monday, Mr. Eastman had asked the justices to wipe out a lower-court ruling that allowed a now disbanded House committee to see emails that he said were protected by attorney-client privilege. A federal trial judge said the privilege did not apply, citing an exemption to it for crimes and fraud.The committee, which investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, obtained and disclosed the contested emails.The case was thus in important ways moot, but Mr. Eastman said the rulings had damaged his reputation and that of Mr. Trump.“The crime-fraud ruling of the district court imposes a stigma not only on petitioner,” the petition said, “but also on his former client, the former president of the United States and current candidate for the presidency in 2024.”In a ruling last year in a lawsuit over whether the committee could obtain the emails, Judge David O. Carter ruled that it was more likely than not that the communications involved crimes, prompting the exception to the attorney-client privilege.“The illegality of the plan was obvious,” he wrote. “Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the vice president to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election.”The judge added, “Based on the evidence, the court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.” More

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      Trump Will Not Seek to Move Georgia Election Case to Federal Court

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      His decision comes after Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, tried unsuccessfully to move his own case from state to federal court.Former President Donald J. Trump will not seek to move the criminal racketeering case against him in Atlanta to federal court, according to a legal filing from his lawyer on Thursday.Mr. Trump was indicted by a grand jury in August, along with 18 of his advisers and allies, after a two-and-a-half year investigation into election interference by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. Keeping the case in state court means that any trial for Mr. Trump would be televised, unlike in federal court.“This decision is based on his well-founded confidence that this honorable court intends to fully and completely protect his constitutional right to a fair trial,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, wrote in the filing, referring to Fulton County Superior Court, “and guarantee him due process of law throughout the prosecution of his case.”The move comes a few weeks after a federal judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his own case to federal court. That decision has been appealed, but it dimmed the chances for successful removal efforts by other defendants, including Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, and three Georgia Republicans who submitted bogus Electoral College votes for the former president in December 2020.Removal is a longstanding practice meant to protect federal officials from state-level prosecution that could impede them from conducting federal business. It is rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.But Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia decided this month that the actions ascribed to Mr. Meadows in the indictment were not within the scope of his federal duties as White House chief of staff. The evidence, he ruled, “establishes that the actions at the heart of the state’s charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures.”Removal to federal court would have provided some advantages for Mr. Trump, including a jury pool somewhat more favorable to him. But he would have faced the same state felony charges.In the Georgia case, all 19 defendants are facing a racketeering charge for their role in what prosecutors have described as a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. Each defendant also faces at least one other charge; Mr. Trump and his former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, face the most — 13 each.If Mr. Trump ends up going to trial in Fulton County Superior Court, as now seems increasingly likely, the presiding judge will be Scott McAfee, who was recently appointed to the bench.While attending law school at the University of Georgia, Mr. McAfee was a vice president of the school’s chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. He later worked for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where his supervisor was Ms. Willis.Thus far, Judge McAfee has been moving the court proceedings along briskly, but he has not had the opportunity to make many substantive rulings.When Mr. Trump will actually face trial remains uncertain. Two of the lawyers who worked to keep him in power, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, are set to go to trial on Oct. 23. The two defendants had requested an early trial date, which is their right under Georgia law, though both have been filing a flurry of motions over the last few weeks to dismiss the case, or parts of it.Another lawyer who faces charges, John Eastman, said in a filing on Thursday that he might still invoke his right to a speedy trial. Those not seeking the option may not face trial until the second half of next year, or even later. More

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      Why Trial Dates for Trump’s Georgia Case Are So Uncertain

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      Some defendants have already sought to move the case to federal court, while others are seeking speedy or separate trials.Even as former President Donald J. Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case turned themselves in one by one at an Atlanta jail this week, their lawyers began working to change how the case will play out.They are already at odds over when they will have their day in court, but also, crucially, where. Should enough of them succeed, the case could split into several smaller cases, perhaps overseen by different judges in different courtrooms, running on different timelines.Five defendants have already sought to move the state case to federal court, citing their ties to the federal government. The first one to file — Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff during the 2020 election — will make the argument for removal on Monday, in a hearing before a federal judge in Atlanta.Federal officials charged with state crimes can move their cases to federal court if they can convince a judge that they are being charged for actions connected to their official duties, among other things.In the Georgia case, the question of whether to change the venue — a legal maneuver known as removal — matters because it would affect the composition of a jury. If the case stays in Fulton County, Ga., the jury will come from a bastion of Democratic politics where Mr. Trump was trounced in 2020. If the case is removed to federal court, the jury will be drawn from a 10-county region of Georgia that is more suburban and rural — and somewhat more Trump-friendly. Because it takes only one not-guilty vote to hang a jury, this modest advantage could prove to be a very big deal.The coming fights over the proper venue for the case are only one strand of a complicated tangle of efforts being launched by a gaggle of defense lawyers now representing Mr. Trump and the 18 others named in the 98-page racketeering indictment. This week, the lawyers clogged both state and federal court dockets with motions that will also determine when the case begins.Already, one defendant’s case is splitting off as a result. Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after the 2020 election, has asked for a speedy trial, and the presiding state judge has agreed to it. His trial is now set to begin on Oct. 23. Another defendant, Sidney Powell, filed a similar motion on Friday, and a third, John Eastman, also plans to invoke his right to an early trial, according to one of his lawyers.Soon after Mr. Chesebro set in motion the possibility of an October trial, Mr. Trump, obviously uncomfortable with the idea of going to court so soon, informed the court that he intended to sever his case from the rest of the defendants. Ordering separate trials for defendants in a large racketeering indictment can occur for any number of reasons, and the judge, Scott McAfee, has made clear the early trial date applied only to Mr. Chesebro.Mr. Trump’s move came as no surprise. As the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he is in no hurry to see the Georgia matter, or the other three criminal cases against him, go to trial. In the separate federal election interference case Mr. Trump faces in Washington, D.C., his lawyers have asked that the trial start safely beyond the November 2024 general election — in April 2026.In Georgia, the possibility that even a portion of the sprawling case may go to trial in October remains up in the air. The removal efforts have much to do with that.There is a possibility that if one of the five defendants seeking removal is successful, then all 19 will be forced into federal court. Many legal scholars have noted that the question is unsettled.“We are heading for uncharted territory at this point, and nobody knows for sure what is in this novel frontier,” Donald Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense attorney who represents one of the defendants in the Trump case, Ray Smith III, wrote in an email. “Maybe a trip to the Supreme Court.”The dizzying legal gamesmanship reflects the unique nature of a case that has swept up a former president, a number of relatively obscure Georgia Republican activists, a former publicist for Kanye West and lawyer-defendants of varying prominence. All bring their own agendas, financial concerns and opinions about their chances at trial.And of course, one of them seeks to regain the title of leader of the free world.Some of the defendants seeking a speedy trial may believe that the case against them is weak. They may also hope to catch prosecutors unprepared, although in this case, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney, has been investigating for two and a half years and has had plenty of time to get ready.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney, has been investigating the case for two and a half years. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAnother reason that some may desire a speedy trial is money.Ms. Willis had originally sought to start a trial in March, but even that seemed ambitious given the complexity of the case. Harvey Silverglate, the lawyer for Mr. Eastman, said he could imagine a scenario in which a verdict might not come for three years.“And Eastman is not a wealthy man,” he said.Mr. Silverglate added that his client “doesn’t have the contributors” that Mr. Trump has. “We are going to seek a severance and a speedy trial. If we have a severance, the trial will take three weeks,” he predicted.How long would a regular racketeering trial take? Brian Tevis, an Atlanta lawyer who negotiated the bond agreement for Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, said that “the defense side would probably want potentially a year or so to catch up.”“You have to realize that the state had a two-year head start,” he said. “They know what they have, no one else knows what they have. No discovery has been turned over, we haven’t even had arraignment yet.”In addition to Mr. Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, is already seeking removal, as is David Shafer, the former head of the Georgia Republican Party; Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator; and Cathy Latham, the former chair of the Republican Party in Coffee County, Ga. Mr. Trump is almost certain to follow, having already tried and failed to have a state criminal case against him in New York moved to federal court.Former President Donald J. Trump informed the court that he intended to sever his case from the rest of the defendants.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe indictment charges Mr. Meadows with racketeering and “solicitation of violation of oath by public officer” for his participation in the Jan. 2, 2021 call in which Mr. Trump told the Georgia secretary of state that he wanted to “find” enough votes to win Georgia. The indictment also describes other efforts by Mr. Meadows that prosecutors say were part of the illegal scheme to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Meadows’s lawyers argue that all of the actions in question were what “one would expect” of a White House chief of staff — “arranging Oval Office meetings, contacting state officials on the president’s behalf, visiting a state government building, and setting up a phone call for the president” — and that removal is therefore justified.Prosecutors contend that Mr. Meadows was in fact engaging in political activity that was not part of a chief of staff’s job.The issue is likely to be at the heart of Mr. Trump’s removal effort as well: In calling the secretary of state and other Georgia officials after he lost the election, was he working on his own behalf, or in his capacity as president, to ensure that the election had run properly?Anthony Michael Kreis, an assistant law professor at Georgia State University, said that the indictment may contain an Easter egg that could spoil Mr. Trump’s argument that he was intervening in the Georgia election as part of his duty as a federal official.The indictment says that the election-reversal scheme lasted through September 2021, when Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Georgia’s secretary of state asking him to take steps to decertify the election.Mr. Trump, by that point, had been out of federal office for months.“By showing the racketeering enterprise continued well beyond his time in office,” Mr. Kreis said in a text message, “it undercuts any argument that Trump was acting in a governmental capacity to ensure the election was free, fair and accurate.” More

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      Trump’s Bail Set at $200,000 in Georgia Election Interference Case

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      Mr. Trump, who said he would turn himself in on Thursday, was told not to intimidate or threaten any witnesses or co-defendants in the case.A judge in Atlanta set bail for former President Donald J. Trump at $200,000 on Monday in the new election interference case against him, warning Mr. Trump not to intimidate or threaten witnesses or any of his 18 co-defendants as a condition of the bond agreement.Mr. Trump, who posted on Truth Social that he would surrender to the authorities in Atlanta on Thursday, is also sorting out logistical details in three other criminal cases that have been filed against him this year. Earlier in the day, federal prosecutors pushed back on a request from his lawyers to postpone a separate election interference trial in Washington, D.C., until at least April 2026.Under his bond agreement in Georgia, Mr. Trump cannot communicate with any co-defendants in the case except through his lawyers. He was also directed to “make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community,” including “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual.”The terms were more extensive than those set for other defendants in the case so far, which did not specifically mention social media. In the past, Mr. Trump has made inflammatory and sometimes false personal attacks on Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, who is leading the case.Bond was set at $100,000 for John Eastman, one of the architects of a plan to use fake electors to keep Mr. Trump in power. according to court filings; a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, who also developed that plan, said the same amount was set for Mr. Chesebro.Mr. Trump’s attacks continued on Monday ahead of his bond being set. In a post on Truth Social, he called Ms. Willis “crooked, incompetent, & highly partisan” and wrote that she “has allowed Murder and other Violent Crime to MASSIVELY ESCALATE.” In fact, homicides have fallen sharply in Atlanta in the first half of the year.From front left, Donald Trump’s lawyers Marissa Goldberg, Jennifer Little and Drew Findling outside the Fulton County Government Center in Atlanta.Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesWhile Mr. Trump did not have to pay bail in the other criminal cases against him, the agreements posted for him and several of his co-defendants in Georgia on Monday require five- and six-figure sums. The defendants have to come up with only 10 percent of the bail amount, but even that could prove difficult for some, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, who is running out of money because of an array of legal entanglements.Racketeering cases like this one can be particularly long and costly for defendants — in another racketeering case in the same court, involving a number of high-profile rappers, jury selection alone has gone on for seven months.The costs clearly worry some of the defendants in the Trump case; one of them, Cathy Latham, a former Republican Party official in Georgia who acted as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in 2020, has set up a legal-defense fund, describing herself as “a retired public-school teacher living on a teacher’s pension.” The $3,645 she has initially raised is well short of a $500,000 goal.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who assisted Mr. Giuliani in his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost in 2020, expressed frustration over the looming legal costs a few days after her indictment in the case. “Why isn’t MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?” she asked last week on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Trump and the other defendants were indicted last week on charges that they were part of a conspiracy to subvert the election results in Georgia, where Mr. Trump narrowly lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The Fulton County jail in Atlanta, where Mr. Trump will be booked.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe indictment laid out eight ways the defendants were accused of trying to reverse the election results as part of a “criminal enterprise”: by lying to the Georgia legislature, lying to state officials, creating fake pro-Trump electors to circumvent the popular vote, harassing election workers, soliciting Justice Department officials, soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, breaching voting machines and engaging in a cover-up.Mr. Trump has not been required to pay cash bail in the three other criminal cases he has been charged in this year — one in Manhattan and two federal cases brought by the special counsel, Jack Smith, in Miami and Washington, D.C.In Atlanta, prosecutors and law enforcement officials have emphasized a desire to treat the defendants as other accused felons would typically be treated in the city’s criminal justice system, with mug shots, fingerprinting and cash bails. But the Secret Service is sure to have security demands regarding the booking of a former president.On Monday, lawyers for a number of the defendants were seen walking in and out of a complex of connected government buildings, including the Fulton County courthouse and a government office building, where they met with representatives from the district attorney’s office. The lawyers had little to say, including about when Mr. Trump might surrender.“You’ll find out everything soon enough,” Drew Findling, Mr. Trump’s lead local lawyer, told reporters. “Patience is a virtue.”The lawyer Scott Grubman, left, who is representing Kenneth Chesebro, outside the Fulton County Courthouse on Monday.Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesMs. Ellis worked with Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the election, traveling with him to various states to push claims of widespread fraud that were quickly debunked. But she has been a target of online attacks by allies of Mr. Trump for months, as she has been critical of the former president and has made supportive statements about his closest competitor in the Republican presidential primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“I was reliably informed Trump isn’t funding any of us who are indicted,” Ms. Ellis posted on X last week. “Would this change if he becomes the nominee? Why then, not now?”Asked about her post, Ms. Ellis replied in a text message, “Mounting a defense in these circumstances is exorbitantly expensive. I don’t have great personal wealth and am doing this on my own. I have been overwhelmed and blessed with the generosity and support of Christians and conservatives across the nation who want to help me.”A person briefed on the matter said that Ms. Ellis had not asked for help from a legal-defense fund formed recently by Mr. Trump’s advisers but that she had sought help earlier and had been denied.Mr. Trump has used a political action committee that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election, to pay the legal bills of a number of allies, as well as his own.But other defendants have been denied help with mounting legal bills long before they were charged. Among those asking for help are Mr. Giuliani; Mr. Trump’s political action committee, which has spent roughly $21 million on legal fees primarily for Mr. Trump but also for others connected to investigations into him, has so far covered only $340,000 for Mr. Giuliani.All 19 defendants are required to turn themselves in by noon on Friday.“The order said it had to be by Friday, I believe, and he plans to follow the order,” Mr. Grubman said of Mr. Chesebro.Sean Keenan contributed reporting from Atlanta. More