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    Collector Sues to Block Investigators From Seizing Roman Bronze

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    Lawyers for the collector, based in California, said the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not have the jurisdiction or the evidence to support seizing the ancient statue.A California collector has gone to court to block efforts by New York investigators to seize an ancient Roman bronze statue that they assert was looted from Turkey in the 1960s.In a federal court filing last week in California, lawyers for the collector, Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, disputed the evidence they said investigators had presented indicating that the ancient statue of a man was stolen from an archaeological site in Turkey. The lawyers said that investigators had no jurisdiction to seize items in California and so were overstepping their authority.It was the latest in a series of recent challenges to efforts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to seize artifacts believed to have been looted. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago are also engaged in legal challenges with the investigators over items with disputed histories.In Mr. Mendelsohn’s case, his lawyers have accused the investigators of using the threat of prosecution to pressure their client into giving up the statue. In addition, they have argued that by pursuing the statue in a potential criminal proceeding, the investigators can avoid the fuller disclosure and access to evidence that would have been required in civil court.The district attorney’s office “has invoked New York criminal process in an effort to intimidate Mr. Mendelsohn into relinquishing the Bronze Male, without affording Mr. Mendelsohn a legitimate opportunity to fully explore the evidence that DANY claims casts doubt on Mr. Mendelsohn’s ownership or to litigate its true ownership,” Marcus A. Asner, a lawyer for Mr. Mendelsohn, wrote in court papers filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.The Manhattan district attorney’s office responded with a statement that said: “Our Antiquities Trafficking Unit has successfully recovered thousands of stolen antiquities that came through Manhattan from galleries, homes, and museums around the country. We will respond to this filing in court.”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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      Trump Tries to Move Hush-Money Case to Federal Court Before Sentencing

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      The long-shot request, which the former president made Thursday night, is an attempt to avoid sentencing in his criminal case, scheduled for Sept. 18.Former President Donald J. Trump sought to move his Manhattan criminal case into federal court on Thursday, filing the unusual request three months after he was convicted in state court.The long-shot bid marks Mr. Trump’s latest effort to stave off his sentencing in state court in his hush-money trial, in which he was convicted of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal.He is scheduled to receive his punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when he will square off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.“The ongoing proceedings will continue to cause direct and irreparable harm to President Trump — the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election — and voters located far beyond Manhattan,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, wrote in the filing.Their filing came even as the Trump legal team is awaiting the result of a separate effort to postpone the sentencing; it opened a second front that could complicate the first.On Aug. 15, Mr. Trump asked the state court judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan, to delay the sentencing until after Election Day. Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that they needed more time to challenge his conviction on the basis of a recent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity for official acts.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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      Parts of Biden’s Student Loan Repayment Plan Blocked by Judges

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      A part of the SAVE plan that would have cut monthly bills for millions of borrowers starting on July 1 was put on hold.Two federal judges in Kansas and Missouri temporarily blocked pieces of the Biden administration’s new student loan repayment plan on Monday in rulings that will have implications for millions of federal borrowers.Borrowers enrolled in the income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE, are expected to continue to make payments. But those with undergraduate debt will no longer see their payments cut in half starting on July 1, a huge disappointment for borrowers who may have been counting on that relief.The separate preliminary injunctions on Monday are tied to lawsuits filed this year by two groups of Republican-led states seeking to upend the SAVE program, a centerpiece of President Biden’s agenda to provide relief to student borrowers. Many of the program’s challengers are the same ones that filed suit against Mr. Biden’s $400 million debt-cancellation plan, which the Supreme Court struck down last June.“All of this is an absolute mess for borrowers, and it’s pretty shocking that state public officials asked the courts to prevent the Biden administration from offering more affordable loan payments to their residents at time when so many Americans are struggling with high prices,” said Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center. “It’s a pretty cynical ploy in an election year to stop the current president from being able to lower prices for working and middle-class Americans.”Eleven states led by Kansas filed a lawsuit challenging the SAVE program in late March in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The next month, Missouri and six other states sued in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Both suits argued that the administration had again exceeded its authority, and that the repayment plan was a backhanded attempt to wipe debts clean.The SAVE program, which has enrolled eight million borrowers since it opened in August, isn’t a new idea. It’s based on a roughly 30-year-old design that ties monthly payments to a borrower’s income and household size. But SAVE has more generous terms than previous plans and a heftier price tag. More than four million borrowers qualify for a $0 monthly payment.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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      Opposition to Muslim Judicial Nominee Leaves Biden With a Tough Choice

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      Adeel Mangi would be the first Muslim American to be a federal appeals court judge, but has faced vitriolic attacks from the G.O.P. The president could run out of time to fill the seat.The nomination of the first Muslim American to a federal appeals court judgeship is in deep trouble in the Senate, leaving President Biden with a painful choice between withdrawing the name of Adeel Mangi or trying to overcome the opposition at the risk of losing the chance to fill the crucial post before the November elections.Three Democrats have said they intend to oppose the confirmation of Mr. Mangi to the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in response to objections from local law enforcement groups. He has also faced what his backers label an unfounded bigoted assault from Republicans who have accused him of antisemitism and sympathy with terrorists.If Republicans remain united against him, as expected, and the Democrats cannot be persuaded to change their position, Mr. Mangi would lack the votes to be confirmed.The showdown is a new obstacle for the Biden administration and Senate Democrats as they try to fill as many federal court openings as they can before November. It has also angered Democrats who believe Mr. Mangi, a litigator from New Jersey and partner in a New York law firm, has been subjected to a baseless and ugly assault by Republicans because of his religion.“This has been the most brutal attack I have ever seen on anyone — and that is saying something,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He dismissed any notion of antisemitism on the part of Mr. Mangi, saying, “There is no basis whatsoever for even suggesting he has that point of view.”The seat that Mr. Mangi was nominated for is notable since the court, which hears matters from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands, is currently divided 7-6 in favor of judges nominated by Republican presidents. Mr. Biden could even the court’s makeup by filling the vacancy.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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      Democrats Need to Pick Up the Pace of Putting Judges on the Bench

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      With the outcome of the 2024 elections for the president and control of the Senate very much up in the air, Democrats must make a concerted effort to fill federal judicial vacancies before next November.Republicans did this very effectively before the end of the Trump presidency, leaving few vacancies for President Biden to fill when he took office. Now the Democrats must emulate that approach. And they must do so now.At the moment, there are two vacancies without nominees on appeals courts and 37 on district courts. Because the evaluation process of nominees takes time, it is imperative that the Biden administration quickly name nominees to those and future vacancies. The Senate then must work expeditiously to confirm those deemed suitable for the lifetime appointments.Mr. Biden has nominated 186 people to Article III judgeships, which include the Supreme Court and the federal appeals and district courts, according to the White House. At this point in their tenures, George W. Bush had nominated 211, followed by Mr. Trump’s 206, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Judicial Appointment Tracker. There have been inexplicable and troubling delays in this process. For example, two years ago, Judge Diana Motz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., announced that she would take senior status, a form of semiretirement, when a successor was confirmed. She took senior status last year, though no replacement had been named at that time. And still no one has been nominated for this important judgeship.Time may be running out for the Biden administration.It is critical for federal judges who would like to be replaced by a Democratic president to take senior status so that Mr. Biden can appoint their successors with sufficient time to allow them to be confirmed by the current Senate. A federal judge or justice may take senior status after meeting the age and service requirements of the “Rule of 80” — the judge must be at least 65 years old, and the judge’s age and years of service must add up to 80. A total of 121 federal judges are now eligible for senior status but have not announced their plans, according to the group Balls and Strikes, which tracks that information. Of those, 44 were appointed by Democratic presidents. By Jan. 20, 2025, the date of the next presidential inauguration, that number could rise to 69.There is little reason for judges not to take senior status. They can continue to hear cases, even carry a full load of cases. And taking senior status allows the president to fill that seat on the bench. The judge can condition taking senior status on the confirmation of a successor. A senior judge typically is not allowed to participate in en banc decisions, where all (or a significant number) of the judges on the court review a matter that is particularly significant or complex. But that is the main restriction on what a senior judge may do.We are long past the time when it could be said that judges appointed by Republican and by Democratic presidents were indistinguishable. This was made clear in an analysis of Supreme Court rulings published in July 2022 by the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, which found the partisan divide among the current justices “is deeper than it’s been in the modern era.”And this partisan divide is not confined to the Supreme Court. There are often huge differences between how judges in the lower courts who were appointed by Democratic and by Republican presidents decide cases. For example, a federal appeals court recently upheld Tennessee and Kentucky laws prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors, with the two Republican-appointed judges siding with the states and a judge initially nominated by President Bill Clinton dissenting. Whether it is reproductive rights or gun rights or employee rights, or in countless other areas, the outcome often depends on which president appointed the judge or judges hearing the case.For that reason, I wrote an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times in March 2014 urging Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 81, to retire so that President Barack Obama could replace her while there was a Democratic Senate and someone with progressive values would take her seat. She took offense at the suggestion, also raised by others, and remained on the bench until she died in September 2020, when President Trump replaced her with the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Ginsburg gambled, and America lost.Likewise, I think of the liberal federal court of appeals judges who did not take senior status, though they were eligible during the Obama presidency. For example, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit declined to take senior status; when he died at age 87 in 2017 President Trump replaced him with a conservative judge. By the time another liberal Ninth Circuit judge, Harry Pregerson, decided to take senior status in late 2015, he was 92, and though Mr. Obama quickly nominated a replacement, it was late in his term and got caught up in politics and President Trump ended up appointing another conservative to the seat.Creating vacancies will matter only if Mr. Biden quickly names replacements and the Senate confirms the nominees. If the president is not re-elected, the Republican president will fill any vacancies that exist upon taking office. And regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, if the Republicans take control of the Senate, the confirmation of judicial candidates nominated by a Democratic president will be far more difficult. That is why immediate action is imperative.A president’s most long-lasting legacy is arguably the judges he appoints. Many will serve for decades after the president leaves office. Republicans have tended to recognize this much more than Democrats. That needs to change, and quickly.Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.Source photographs by John Slater and SergeyChayko/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Mark Meadows Is a Warning About a Second Trump Term

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      On Monday, Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, testified in an effort to move the Georgia racketeering case against his former boss Donald Trump and co-defendants to federal court. On the stand, he said that he believed his actions regarding the 2020 election fell within the scope of his job as a federal official.The courts will sort out his legal fate in this and other matters. If convicted and sentenced to prison, Mr. Meadows would be the second White House chief of staff, after Richard Nixon’s infamous H.R. Haldeman, to serve jail time.But as a cautionary tale for American democracy and the conduct of its executive branch, Mr. Meadows is in a league of his own. By the standards of previous chiefs of staff, he was a uniquely dangerous failure — and he embodies a warning about the perils of a potential second Trump term.Historically, a White House chief of staff is many things: the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, honest broker of information, “javelin catcher” and the person who oversees the execution of his agenda.But the chief’s most important duty is to tell the president hard truths.President Dwight Eisenhower’s Sherman Adams, a gruff, no-nonsense gatekeeper, was so famous for giving unvarnished advice that he was known as the “Abominable No Man.” In sharp contrast, when it came to Mr. Trump’s myriad schemes, Mr. Meadows was the Abominable Yes Man.It was Mr. Meadows’s critical failure to tell the president what he didn’t want to hear that helped lead to the country’s greatest political scandal, and his own precipitous fall.Donald Rumsfeld, who served as a chief of staff to Gerald Ford, understood the importance of talking to the boss “with the bark off.” The White House chief of staff “is the one person besides his wife,” he explained, “who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘this is not right. You simply can’t go down that road. Believe me, it’s not going to work.’” A good chief is on guard for even the appearance of impropriety. Mr. Rumsfeld once forbade President Ford to attend a birthday party for the Democratic majority leader Tip O’Neill because it was being hosted by a foreign lobbyist with a checkered reputation.There used to be stiff competition for the title of history’s worst White House chief of staff. Mr. Eisenhower’s chief Adams was driven from the job by a scandal involving a vicuna coat; Mr. Nixon’s Haldeman served 18 months in prison for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal; and George H.W. Bush’s John Sununu resigned under fire after using government transportation on personal trips.But the crimes Mr. Meadows is accused of are orders of magnitude greater than those of his predecessors. Even Mr. Haldeman’s transgressions pale in comparison. Mr. Nixon’s chief covered up a botched attempt to bug the headquarters of the political opposition. Mr. Meadows is charged with racketeering — for his participation in a shakedown of a state official for nonexistent votes — and soliciting a violation of an oath by a public officer.Mr. Meadows didn’t just act as a doormat to President Trump; he seemed to let everyone have his or her way. Even as he tried to help Mr. Trump remain in office, Mr. Meadows agreed to give a deputy chief of staff, Chris Liddell, the go-ahead to carry out a stealth transition of power to Joe Biden. This made no sense, but it was just the way Mr. Meadows rolled. Mr. Trump’s chief is a world-class glad-hander and charmer.As part of the efforts to subvert the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows paraded a cast of incompetent bootlickers into the Oval Office. This culminated in a wild meeting on the night of Dec. 18, 2020 — when Mr. Trump apparently considered ordering the U.S. military to seize state voting machines before backing down. (Even his servile sidekick Rudy Giuliani objected.) A few days later, Mr. Meadows traveled to Cobb County, Ga., where he tried to talk his way into an election audit meeting he had no right to attend, only to be barred at the door.All the while, the indictment shows that Mr. Meadows was sharing lighthearted remarks about claims of widespread voter fraud. In an exchange of texts, Mr. Meadows told the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that his son had been unable to find more than “12 obituaries and 6 other possibles” (dead Biden voters). Referring to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Herschmann replied sarcastically: “That sounds more like it. Maybe he can help Rudy find the other 10k?” Mr. Meadows responded: “LOL.”Mr. Meadows’s testimony this week that his actions were just part of his duties as White House chief of staff is a total misrepresentation of the position. In fact, an empowered chief can reel in a president when he’s headed toward the cliff — even a powerful, charismatic president like Ronald Reagan. One day in 1983, James A. Baker III, Mr. Reagan’s quintessential chief, got word that the president, enraged by a damaging leak, had ordered everyone who’d attended a national security meeting to undergo a lie-detector test. Mr. Baker barged into the Oval Office. “Mr. President,” he said, “this would be a terrible thing in my view for your administration. You can’t strap up to a polygraph the vice president of the United States. He was elected. He’s a constitutional officer.” Mr. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, who was dining with the president, chimed in, saying he’d take a polygraph but would then resign. Mr. Reagan rescinded the order that same day.Why did Mr. Meadows squander his career, his reputation and possibly his liberty by casting his lot with Mr. Trump? He once seemed an unlikely casualty of Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball — he was a savvy politician who knew his way around the corridors of power. In fairness to Mr. Meadows, three of his predecessors also failed as Mr. Trump’s chief. “Anyone who goes into the orbit of the former president is virtually doomed,” said Jack Watson, Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff. “Because saying no to Trump is like spitting into a raging headwind. It was not just Mission Impossible; it was Mission Self-Destruction. I don’t know why he chose to do it.”In their motion to remove the Fulton County case to federal court, the lawyers for Mr. Meadows addressed Mr. Trump’s now infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — during which Mr. Meadows rode shotgun as the president cut to the chase: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes ….” Addressing Mr. Meadows’s role, his lawyers wrote: “One would expect a Chief of Staff to the President of the United States to do these sorts of things.”Actually, any competent White House chief of staff would have thrown his body in front of that call. Any chief worth his salt would have said: “Mr. President, we’re not going to do that. And if you insist, you’re going to make that call yourself. And when you’re through, you’ll find my resignation letter on your desk.”Mr. Meadows failed as Mr. Trump’s chief because he was unable to check the president’s worst impulses. But the bigger problem for our country is that his failure is a template for the inevitable disasters in a potential second Trump administration.Mr. Trump’s final days as president could be a preview. He ran the White House his way — right off the rails. He fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper, replacing him with his counterterrorism chief, Chris Miller, and tried but failed to install lackeys in other positions of power: an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, as attorney general and a partisan apparatchik, Kash Patel, as deputy C.I.A. director.Mr. Trump has already signaled that in a second term, his department heads and cabinet officers would be expected to blindly obey orders. His director of national intelligence would tell him only what he wants to hear, and his attorney general would prosecute Mr. Trump’s political foes.For Mr. Meadows, his place in history is secure as a primary enabler of a president who tried to overthrow democracy. But his example should serve as a warning of what will happen if Mr. Trump regains the White House. All guardrails will be gone.Chris Whipple is the author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency” and, most recently, “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Mark Meadows Testifies in Bid to Move Georgia Trump Case to Federal Court

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      Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, told a judge he believed his actions regarding the 2020 election fell within the scope of his job as a federal official.A battle over whether to move the Georgia racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies to federal court began in earnest on Monday, when Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, testified in favor of such a move before a federal judge in Atlanta.Under questioning by his own lawyers and by prosecutors, Mr. Meadows stated emphatically that he believed that his actions detailed in the indictment fell within the scope of his duties as chief of staff. But he also appeared unsure of himself at times, saying often that he could not recall details of events in late 2020 and early 2021. “My wife will tell you sometimes that I forget to take out the trash,” he told Judge Steve C. Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.At another point during the daylong hearing, he asked whether he was properly complying with the judge’s instructions, saying, “I’m in enough trouble as it is.”The effort to shift the case to federal court is the first major legal fight since the indictment of Mr. Trump, Mr. Meadows and 17 others was filed by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga. The indictment charges Mr. Trump and his allies with interfering in the 2020 presidential election in the state. Mr. Meadows is one of several defendants who are trying to move the case; any ruling on the issue could apply to all 19 defendants.Mr. Meadows testified that Mr. Trump directed him to set up the now-famous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. During the call — a focus of the case — Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Raffensperger and said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 more Trump votes, enough to reverse his defeat in Georgia.Mr. Meadows said Mr. Trump wanted to make the call because he believed that fraud had occurred, and wanted to resolve questions about the ballot signature verification process. “We all want accurate elections,” Mr. Meadows said at one point.Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican who is the state’s top elections official, also testified after being subpoenaed by the prosecution. He recounted how he had ignored earlier calls from Mr. Meadows — he said he “didn’t think it was appropriate” to talk to him while Mr. Trump was contesting the state’s results — and initially tried to avoid the Jan. 2 call with Mr. Trump. Under questioning by the prosecution, he characterized it as “a campaign call.”“Outreach to this extent was extraordinary,” he said of the calls from Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump.Monday’s hearing marked a dramatic inflection point in the case: Mr. Meadows, one of the highest-profile defendants, faced Fulton County prosecutors for the first time. Mr. Raffensperger recounted the threats against him, his wife and election workers after Mr. Trump made unfounded allegations about Georgia voter fraud. And Mr. Trump’s distinctive voice filled the courtroom as prosecutors played snippets of the Jan. 2 call.“We won the state,” Mr. Trump said.If the effort to move the case to federal court succeeds, it could benefit the Trump side by broadening the jury pool beyond Fulton County into outlying counties where the former president has somewhat more support.It could also slow down at least some of the proceedings. If the case remains in state court, three of the defendants are likely to face trial starting in October. Kenneth Chesebro has already been granted an early trial, and Sidney Powell has sought the same. A lawyer for John Eastman, another defendant, has said he, too, will seek a speedy trial.Removing a case to federal court requires persuading a judge that the actions under scrutiny were carried out by federal officers as part of their official business. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump failed in his attempt to move a New York State criminal case against him to federal court; his argument in that case was seen as particularly tenuous.Mr. Meadows was cross-examined by Anna Cross, a veteran prosecutor who has worked for district attorneys in three Atlanta area counties. She continually pressed him on what kind of federal policy or interest he was advancing in carrying out what prosecutors have described in court documents as political acts in service of the Trump campaign — and thus not grounds for removal to federal court.Mr. Meadows and his lawyers argue that the job of chief of staff sometimes seeps into the realm of politics by its very nature, and that the local district attorney is essentially operating beyond her power by seeking to delineate what a powerful federal official’s job should and should not be.Ms. Cross noted to Mr. Meadows that he had visited suburban Cobb County, Ga., where a ballot audit was taking place, after a meeting with William P. Barr, who was then the U.S. attorney general. During the meeting, Mr. Barr dismissed election fraud claims as unsupported by facts. Mr. Meadows replied that in his mind, there were still allegations worthy of investigation.The arguments echoed those made in filings before the hearing by the prosecution and Mr. Meadows’s lawyers. Mr. Meadows, along with all 18 other defendants, is charged with racketeering. Along with Mr. Trump, he is also accused of soliciting Mr. Raffensperger to violate his oath of office. (Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, has written that he felt he was being pressured to “fudge the numbers.”)During his testimony, Mr. Meadows discussed the trip he made to Cobb County during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots. He was turned away after trying to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. Mr. Meadows said he had been in the area visiting his children who live there, and went to the auditing location because he was “anticipating” that Mr. Trump would eventually bring up the Cobb County review. He said what he found was “a very professional operation.”The case continues to move forward in state court. On Monday, the judge, Scott McAfee, scheduled arraignments of Mr. Trump and the other defendants for Sept. 6. It is possible that some or all of the arraignments will not be conducted in person, given the heightened security requirements involving a former president.For the next few weeks at least, the case will be wrangled by two different judges working in courthouses a few blocks apart in downtown Atlanta. Judge McAfee, of Fulton County Superior Court, is an appointee of Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, though he also once worked for Ms. Willis and is well regarded by many lawyers on both sides of the case.Judge Jones, an Obama appointee, has been moving quickly regarding the removal question. In 2019, he upheld Georgia’s purge of nearly 100,000 names from its voter rolls, over the objections of liberal activists. In 2020, he blocked a six-week abortion ban from taking effect in the state.The Georgia case is the fourth criminal indictment of Mr. Trump this year. If Mr. Trump is elected president again, he could theoretically try to pardon himself for any federal convictions. But regardless of whether the Georgia case is tried in state or federal court, it concerns state crimes, which are beyond the pardon power of presidents.Christian Boone More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Seek April 2026 Start to Jan. 6 Trial

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      The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed given the historic nature of the case and the volume of discovery materials they will have to sort through in the coming months.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Thursday to reject the government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election and to instead push back the proceeding until April 2026 — nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election.The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed because of the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case.In a bit of legal showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the brief, included a graph that showed how 11.5 million pages of documents stacked atop one another would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”That, Mr. Singer pointed out, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington — a strategy he has pursued in all of the criminal cases he is facing — followed an equally ambitious proposal made last week by prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in front of a jury by the first week of 2024.Now that Mr. Trump has been indicted four times in four separate cases — most recently, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have started jockeying with one another to determine when the trials will be held. Complicating matters, Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule is set to pick up significantly this winter and spring with a series of primary elections just as he will be obliged to be in various courthouses in various cities as a criminal defendant.The judge in the other federal case that Mr. Trump is facing — one in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after he left office — has slated the matter to go to trial on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, proposed starting the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on charges of tampering with Georgia’s state election on March 4.And that was only three weeks before the March 25 start date for Mr. Trump’s fourth trial — one that will take place in Manhattan on charges related to hush money payments made to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.If the prosecutors all get their way — and there is no assurance they will — Mr. Trump could be on trial more or less nonstop, with a few weeks’ hiatus here and there, from early January through perhaps mid-June at a time when his campaign advisers will surely want him out on the trail holding rallies and meeting with voters.Some of the former president’s advisers have made no secret of the fact that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his legal problems. If Mr. Trump, who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push the federal trials until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matter altogether.To that end, his lawyers have sought various ways to slow prosecutors in their race to get to trial and have tried to delay the proceedings where they can.Last month, for example, they asked the judge in the documents case, Aileen M. Cannon, to postpone that trial indefinitely, arguing that it should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided. At a subsequent hearing, they told Judge Cannon that she should push back the trial until after the 2024 election because, among other reasons, Mr. Trump could never get a fair jury in the maelstrom of news media attention surrounding the race.The lawyers tried that gambit again on Thursday with Judge Chutkan.Mr. Singer noted in his filing that not only were the discovery materials expansive, but the case also involved several novel aspects that made it, as he put it, “terra incognita.”“No person in the history of our country has ever been charged with conspiracies related to the Electoral Count Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil War era law that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral College.“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” he continued. “No major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign — and certainly not by a Justice Department serving his opponent.”Mr. Singer also mentioned Mr. Trump’s increasingly crowded legal calendar, noting that the government’s proposal to go to trial in January “presents numerous conflicts” with what he genially described as “other pending matters.”As an example, Mr. Singer pointed out that the judge in the Florida-based classified documents case has scheduled a pretrial hearing for Dec. 11 — the same day the special counsel’s office has proposed starting jury selection in the Washington-based election interference case.Echoing Mr. Singer’s complaints, Christopher M. Kise, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the Florida case, alerted Judge Cannon about the conflicting proceedings on Dec. 11 in court papers filed on Thursday night.Mr. Kise noted that he could “only speculate about the special counsel’s motive for offering dates in the newly indicted case that directly conflict with dates” in the Florida case, but seemed interested in making certain that Judge Cannon was aware of what was going on.“The special counsel’s strategy asking for a schedule in the D.C. case that culminates in a proposed trial date of Jan. 2, 2024, is not merely gamesmanship by a partisan Department of Justice,” he wrote. “It is a miscarriage of justice.” More

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      Trump Criminal Case Likely to Remain in N.Y. State Court, Judge Says

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      The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, said he was not inclined to move the Manhattan district attorney’s case against the former president to federal court.A judge on Tuesday indicated that he was likely to deny a request from lawyers for Donald J. Trump to move a New York State criminal case against the former president to federal court.The federal judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, said that he would issue a written ruling within two weeks, but was inclined not to transfer the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office which stems from a hush-money payment before the 2016 presidential election.“There is no reason to believe that an equal measure of justice couldn’t be rendered by the state court,” Judge Hellerstein said, after calling a central argument made by one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers “far-fetched.”After the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, unveiled the 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump in March, lawyers for the former president argued that the proper venue was federal court, in part because the conduct had occurred while Mr. Trump was in office.The payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, was made on Mr. Trump’s behalf by his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, to buy her silence about a tryst she said she had with Mr. Trump. Once Mr. Trump was elected, he reimbursed Mr. Cohen. Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have accused Mr. Trump of falsifying business records to disguise the purpose of the reimbursements.Mr. Trump’s lawyers would have had to convince Judge Hellerstein, who sits in Manhattan, that the accusations were related in some way to Mr. Trump’s official duties as president.Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, argued that any work that Mr. Cohen did would have been related to Mr. Trump’s presidency: He said that Mr. Trump hired Mr. Cohen — who had been his longtime fixer — as a personal lawyer to ensure that he was fulfilling his constitutional duties.Matthew Colangelo, a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office, argued that Mr. Cohen’s hiring demonstrated the opposite. “These are personal payments to a personal lawyer handling his personal affairs.”Judge Hellerstein appeared to agree, saying that it was “very clear” that the act for which Mr. Trump had been indicted did not relate to the presidency. At one point, in a phrase that echoed Mr. Colangelo, the judge said of Mr. Cohen that “he was hired as a private matter to take care of private matters.”The judge said that his closing remarks from the bench were not binding, but that they would “presage” his ruling. If he rules as he suggested he would, the case would proceed as expected in state court, where a trial has been scheduled for March 25.A preview of how that trial might play out came during the hearing when Mr. Blanche unexpectedly called a witness to testify about Mr. Cohen’s role when he worked as a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump. He was trying to show how that role related to the official duties of the presidency.The witness, Alan Garten, the chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, was then cross-examined by Susan Hoffinger, the head of investigations at the district attorney’s office.Ms. Hoffinger tried to show that the arrangement with Mr. Cohen — without a retainer and with payments whose purpose was recorded without any description of the work involved in Mr. Trump’s ledger — was atypical. Mr. Garten acknowledged that it was irregular, but said that such arrangements did happen “from time to time.” More