More stories

  • in

    Judge in Trump case sets hearing over Fani Willis conflict-of-interest claims

    The Georgia judge overseeing the racketeering case charging Donald Trump and allies with attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in the state has scheduled a hearing for February to weigh whether the Fulton county district attorney should be disqualified from prosecuting the charges.In a one-page order, the Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee set an evidentiary hearing for 15 February to address allegations raised by Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman that the district attorney Fani Willis had an improper romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors.The judge also ordered the district attorney to file a response to the allegations by 2 February. Earlier this week, Willis’s office had privately told at least two lawyers involved in the case that they intended to submit their written response by that date, people familiar with the matter said.The case is unlikely to be dismissed outright even if the allegations are proven true. But that could result in the disqualification of Willis, which, under Georgia caselaw, would necessitate the disqualification of the entire Fulton county district attorney’s office, as well.At issue is an explosive complaint from Roman – director of Trump’s 2020 election-day operations – that Willis should be relieved of bringing the case because of conflicts of interests arising from her ongoing relationship with a lawyer named Nathan Wade, whom she hired as a special prosecutor.The filing claimed Willis personally profited from the contract. Wade was paid at least $653,000 and potentially as much as $1m for legal fees as one of the lead prosecutors on the Trump case, and the filing alleged Wade then paid for trips he took with Willis to Napa Valley and the Caribbean.The filing included no proof of the allegations. Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, a respected local attorney who publicly endorsed Wade when he ran to be a Cobb county superior judge 2016, has said the claims were based on sources and records from Wade’s divorce proceeding that remains under seal.Wade started divorce proceedings the day after he was hired as a special prosecutor on the Trump case. According to court records, the divorce case has been contentious, and Joycelyn Mayfield Wade wrote that her husband had failed to disclose his finances, including from his Fulton county work.For his part, Wade has repeatedly insisted in court filings that he had complied with the discovery obligations and accused his wife of being “stubbornly litigious and dragging the matter out for no stated reasons”.Three days after Trump was indicted in Atlanta last August, the presiding Cobb county superior court judge Henry Thompson held Wade in contempt for failing to disclose financial statements, including bank and credit card statements.Weeks later, Joycelyn Mayfield Wade said in a filing in September that she would be forced to subpoena records to obtain her husband’s earnings from legal work done for the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Fulton county in November and December respectively.Willis herself was subpoenaed for testimony on 8 January, just hours before Roman filed his motion seeking dismissal of the charges and disqualification. The subpoena ordered her to appear for a 23 January video-taped deposition.Willis has not directly addressed the allegations, and a spokesperson has said it would all be addressed in court filings.Roman’s allegations threaten to upend one of the most consequential criminal cases against Trump, who pleaded not guilty to charges that he and his co-defendants violated the Georgia Rico statute through his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat.Whether Willis, and therefore the district attorney’s office, can be disqualified from prosecuting the Trump case turns less on Wade’s credentials and more on the extent of a potential conflict of interest, legal experts said.The standard for disqualification does not turn on whether Willis made prosecutorial decisions to benefit Wade, the experts said, but whether she made decisions to extend a criminal investigation actually benefited Wade, who was also paying for travel and vacations.In 2022, the chief Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney disqualified the Fulton county district attorney’s office from prosecuting the Republican lieutenant governor Burt Jones after Willis endorsed his political opponent, Charlie Bailey.The order from McBurney found that there was an “actual” conflict of interest because even though Jones might not have had definitive proof that “an investigative decision was made to benefit Bailey … any public criminal investigation into Jones plainly benefits Bailey’s campaign”.Should McAfee ultimately decide to disqualify Fulton county, the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia would be tasked with deciding where the case would be transferred to. It could pursue the case itself, or give it to another district attorney’s office, which could choose to drop the charges. More

  • in

    ‘He’d been through the fire’: John Lewis, civil rights giant, remembered

    When he was a Ku Klux Klansman in South Carolina, Elwin Wilson helped carry out a vicious assault that left John Lewis with bruised ribs, cuts to his face and a deep gash on the back of his head. Half a century later, Wilson sought and received Lewis’s forgiveness. Then both men appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show.Wilson looked overwhelmed, panicked by the bright lights of the studio, where nearly 180 of Lewis’s fellow civil rights activists had gathered. But then Lewis smiled, leaned over, gently held Wilson’s hand and insisted: “He’s my brother.” There was not a dry eye in the house.Raymond Arsenault, author of the first full-length biography of Lewis, the late congressman from Georgia, describes this act of compassion and reconciliation as a quintessential moment.“For him, it was all about forgiveness,” Arsenault says. “That’s the central theme of his life. He believed that you couldn’t let your enemies pull you down into the ditch with them, that you had to love your enemies as much as you loved your friends and your loved ones.”It was the secret weapon, the way to catch enemies off-guard. Bernard Lafayette, a Freedom Rider and close friend of Lewis, a key source for Arsenault, calls it moral jujitsu.Arsenault adds: “They’re expecting you to react like a normal human being. When you don’t, when you don’t hate them, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. The case of Mr Wilson was classic. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime, for sure.”Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, has written books about the Freedom Riders – civil rights activists who rode buses across the south in 1961 to challenge segregation in transportation – and two African American cultural giants: contralto Marian Anderson and tennis player Arthur Ashe.He first met Lewis in 2000, in Lewis’s congressional office in Washington DC, a mini museum of books, photos and civil rights memorabilia.“The first day I met him, I called him ‘Congressman Lewis’ and he said: ‘Get that out of here. I’m John. Everybody calls me John.’ It wasn’t an affectation. He meant it. He seemed to value human beings in such an equalitarian way.”Lewis asked for Arsenault’s help tracking down Freedom Riders for a 40th anniversary reunion. It was the start of a friendship that would last until Lewis’s death, at 80 from pancreatic cancer, in 2020.“From the very start I saw that he was an absolutely extraordinary human being,” Arsenault says. “I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite like him – absolutely without ego, selfless. People have called him saintly and that’s probably fairly accurate.”Arsenault was approached to write a biography by the historian David Blight, who with Henry Louis Gates Jr and Jacqueline Goldsby sits on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Black Lives series. The resulting book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, examines a rare journey from protest leader to career politician, buffeted by the winds of Black nationalism, debates over the acceptability of violence and perennial tensions between purity and pragmatism.Arsenault says Lewis “was certainly more complicated than I thought he would be when I started. He tried to keep his balance, but it was not easy because a lot of people wanted him to be what is sometimes called in the movement a ‘race man’ and he wasn’t a race man, even though he was proud of being African American and very connected to where he came from. He was always more of a human rights person than a civil rights person.“If he had to choose between racial loyalty or solidarity and his deeper values about the Beloved Community [Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of a just and compassionate society], he always chose the Beloved Community and it got him in hot water. He, for example, was criticised for attacking Clarence Thomas during the [1991 supreme court nomination] hearings and of course he proved to be absolutely right on that one.“There were other cases where if there was a good white candidate running and a Black man who wasn’t so good, he’d choose the white candidate and he didn’t apologise for it. He took a lot of heat for that. Now he’s such a beloved figure sometimes people forget that he marched to his own drummer.”Lewis’s philosophy represented a confluence of Black Christianity and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Arsenault says. “He had this broader vision. There’s not a progressive cause that you can mention that he wasn’t involved with in some way or another.“He was a major environmentalist. There was a lot of homophobia in the Black community in those years but not even a hint [in Lewis]. He was also a philosemite: he associated Jews as being people of the Old Testament and he was so attracted to them as natural allies. Never even a moment of antisemitism or anything like that. He was totally ahead of his time in so many ways.”‘A man of action’Lewis was born in 1940, outside Troy in Pike county, Alabama, one of 10 children. He grew up on his family’s farm, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and attended segregated public schools in the era of Jim Crow. As a boy, he wanted to be a minister.Arsenault says: “I have a picture of him in the book when he was 11; they actually ran something in the newspaper about this boy preacher. He had something of a speech impediment but preached to the chickens on the farm. They were like his children or his congregation, his flock, and he loved to tell those stories.“But he was always bookish, different from his big brothers and sisters. He loved school. He loved to read. In fact his first protesting was to try to get a library card at the all-white library.”Denied a library card, Lewis became an avid reader anyway. He was a teenager when he first heard King preach, on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at the segregated Troy State University.“He was a good student and a conscientious student but he realised that he was a man of action, as he liked to say. He loved words but was always putting his body on the line. It’s a miracle he survived, frankly, more than 40 beatings, more than 40 arrests and jailings, far more than any other major figure. You could add all the others up and they wouldn’t equal the times that John was behind bars.”Lewis began organising sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming its chair in 1963. That year, he was among the “Big Six” organisers of the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, where at the last minute he agreed to tone down his speech. Still, Lewis made his point, with what Arsenault calls “far and away the most radical speech given that day”.In 1965, after extensive training in non-violent protest, Lewis, still only 25, and the Rev Hosea Williams led hundreds of demonstrators on a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. In Selma, police blocked their way off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers wielded truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. Walking with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat, Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten, suffering a fractured skull. Televised images of such state violence forced a reckoning with southern racial oppression.Lewis returned to and crossed the bridge every year and never tired of talking about it, Arsenault says: “He wasn’t one to talk about himself so much, but he was a good storyteller and Bloody Sunday was a huge deal for him. He said later he thought he was going to die, that this was it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He passed through an incredible rite of passage as a non-violent activist and nothing could ever be as bad again. He’d been through the fire and so it made him tougher and more resilient. It’s origins of the legend. He was well considered as a Freedom Rider, certainly, and already had a reputation but that solidified it and extended it in a way that made him a folk hero within the movement.”Lewis turned to politics. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta city council. Five years later he won a seat in Congress. He would serve 17 terms. After Democrats won the House in 2006, Lewis became senior deputy whip, widely revered as the “conscience of the Congress”. Once a young SNCC firebrand, sceptical of politics, he became a national institution and a party man – up to a point.“That tension was always there,” Arsenault reflects. “He tried to be as practical and pragmatic as he needed to be but that wasn’t his bent.“He was much more in it for the long haul in terms of an almost utopian attitude about the Beloved Community. He probably enjoyed it more when he was a protest leader, when he was kind of a rebel. Maybe it’s not right to say he didn’t feel comfortable in Washington, but his heart was back in Atlanta and in Pike county. As his chief of staff once said, wherever he went in the world, he took Pike county with him.”The fire never dimmed. Even in his 70s, Lewis led a sit-in protest in the House chamber, demanding tougher gun controls. As a congressman, he was arrested five times.“He was absolutely determined and, as he once said: ‘I’m not a showboat, I’m a tugboat.’ He loved that line. Nothing fancy. Just a person who did the hard work and was always willing to put his body on the line,” Arsenault says.‘If he hated anyone, it was probably Trump’Lewis endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but switched to Barack Obama, who became the first Black president. Obama honoured Lewis with the presidential medal of freedom and in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, they marched hand in hand in Selma. Lewis backed Clinton again in 2016 but was thwarted by Donald Trump.Arsenault says: “He was thrilled by the idea of an Obama presidency and thought the world was heading in the right direction. He worked hard for Hillary in 2016 and thought for sure she was going to win, so it was just a devastating thing, as it was for a lot of us. He tried not to hate anyone and never would vocalise it but, if he hated anyone, it was probably Trump. He had contempt for him. He thought he was an awful man.“That was something I had to deal with in writing the book, because you like to think it’s going to be an ascending arc of hopefulness and things are going to get better over time, but in John Lewis’s life, the last three years were probably the worst in many respects because he thought that American democracy itself was on the line.”When Lewis died, Washington united in mourning – with a notable exception. Trump said: “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And, again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have.”Arsenault says: “They were almost like antithetical figures. Lewis was the anti-Trump in every conceivable way, but when he died in July 2020 he probably thought Trump was going to win re-election. Within the limits of his physical strength, which wasn’t great at that point, he did what he could, but the pancreatic cancer was so devastating from December 2019 until he died.“It was tough to deal with that part of the story but, in some ways, maybe it’s not all that surprising for someone whose whole life was beating the odds and going against the grain. He had suffered plenty of disappointments before that. It just made him more determined, tougher, and he was absolutely defiant of Trump.”Lewis enjoyed positive relationships with Republicans. “He was such a saintly person that whenever there were votes about the most admired person in Congress, it was always John Lewis. Even Republicans who didn’t agree with his politics but realised he was something special as a human being, as a man.“He had always been able to work across the aisle, probably better than most Democratic congressmen. He didn’t demonise the Republicans. It was Trumpism, this new form of politics, in some ways a throwback to the southern demagoguery of the early 20th century, this politics of persecution and thinly veiled racism. He passed without much sense that we were any closer to the Beloved Community.”Lewis did live to see the flowering of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He was inspired, a day before he went into hospital, to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House.“For him it was the most incredible outpouring of non-violent spirit in the streets that he’d ever seen, that anybody had ever seen,” Arsenault says. “That was enormously gratifying for him. He thought that in some sense his message had gotten through and people were acting on these ideals of Dr King and Gandhi.“That was hugely important to him and to reinforcing his values and his beliefs and his hopes. I don’t think he was despondent at all because of that. If that had not happened, who knows? But he’d weathered the storms before and that’s what helped him to weather this storm, because it was it was so important to him.”Lewis enjoyed fishing, African American quilts, sweet potato pie, listening to music and, as deathless videos testify, dancing with joy. Above all, Arsenault hopes readers of his book will be moved by Lewis’s fidelity to the promise of non-violence.“When you think about what’s happening in Gaza and the Middle East and Ukraine right now, it’s horrible violence – and more than ever we need these lessons of the power of non-violence. [Lewis] was the epitome of it. You can’t help but come away with an admiration for what he was able to do in his lifetime, how far he travelled. He had no advantages in any way.“The idea that he was able to have this life and career and the American people and the world would be exposed to a man like this – in some ways he is like Nelson Mandela. He didn’t spend nearly 30 years in prison, but I think of them as similar in many ways. I hope people will be inspired to think about making the kind of sacrifices that he made. He gave everybody the benefit of the doubt.”
    John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press More

  • in

    Fani Willis subpoenaed in divorce case involving Trump prosecutor

    Fani Willis, Georgia’s Fulton county district attorney who brought election interference charges against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, has been subpoenaed in a divorce case involving a special prosecutor she hired in the Trump case.A process server delivered the subpoena to Willis’s office on Monday, according to a court filing reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the subpoena. The subpoena requests Willis to testify in the divorce case involving her top prosecutor Nathan Wade and his wife Joycelyn Wade.The Wades filed for divorce in Cobb county, just outside Atlanta, in November 2021, according to a county court docket. The filings in the case have been sealed since February 2022.Earlier this week, Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant in the election interference case who is facing seven criminal charges, filed a motion accusing Willis and Nathan Wade of an “improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case”. The filing offered no proof of the relationship or of any wrongdoing.The motion claimed that the alleged relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade resulted in “the special prosecutor, and, in turn, the district attorney, profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers”.“Willis has benefited substantially and directly, and continues to benefit, from this litigation because Wade is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute this case on her behalf,” the motion states.“He will continue to be incentivized to prosecute this case based on his personal and financial motives, so he has acquired a unique and personal interest or stake in Mr Roman’s continued prosecution. That is, he is motivated to prosecute Mr Roman for as long as possible because he will continue to make exorbitant sums of money,” the motion added.According to county records reviewed by the Hill, Nathan Wade was paid nearly $654,000 in legal fees in 2022 and 2023 as he worked on the election interference case.The motion further claimed – without evidence – that Willis and Nathan Wade traveled together to vacation destinations including Florida, Napa Valley and the Caribbean.The Guardian has contacted Willis and Nathan Wade for comment. Neither have yet spoken publicly on the subpoena. More

  • in

    In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

    Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.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?  More

  • in

    Conservative Group Wins Legal Victory Over 2020 Voting Challenges in Georgia

    The group, True the Vote, had been accused by the liberal organization Fair Fight of violating the Voting Rights Act by intimidating voters. A judge rejected the claims.A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that a conservative group’s efforts to challenge the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in the Senate runoff elections in Georgia in early 2021 did not violate the Voting Rights Act under a clause outlawing voter suppression.In a 145-page opinion, the judge, Steve C. Jones of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, wrote that the court “maintains its prior concerns” regarding how the group, True the Vote, sought to challenge voters’ eligibility. But he said that Fair Fight, the liberal voting rights group that brought the lawsuit against True the Vote, had failed to show that the efforts were illegal.The decision was relatively narrow, applying only to Judge Jones’s district in northern Georgia, and will do little to change the status quo: Right-wing election groups have already tried to help bring thousands of challenges to voter registrations in states across the country.But the opinion is likely to encourage conservative activists hunting for voter fraud during the 2024 presidential election. Election officials and voting rights groups have expressed worries about these efforts, warning that an expanded campaign to challenge voters en masse could intimidate people away from the ballot box. True the Vote and similar groups, taking a cue from former President Donald J. Trump, have often spread false theories about election fraud.“Any of these decisions that allows these kinds of mass challenges to go forward embolden that movement,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U.In his opinion, Judge Jones wrote that evidence from Fair Fight and individual voters in the trial did not amount to intimidation under an important section of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 11(b), which outlaws any attempt to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate” any voter or act of voting.“While the court believes that actions increasing the difficulty to vote if paired with other conduct might give rise to a Section 11(b) violation in some circumstances, increased difficulty alone does not constitute voter intimidation,” Judge Jones wrote.Voting rights experts said the ruling could raise the bar of what constitutes voter intimidation under the Voting Rights Act, and said it was yet another court decision that chipped away at the protections in the landmark law.“He took a very narrow view of what constitutes intimidation,” Ms. Lakin said. “But raising the bar of what you need to show altogether will make demonstrating voter intimidation claims more difficult, at least in the Northern District of Georgia.”In a footnote in the decision, Judge Jones, who was appointed to his post by President Barack Obama, was careful not to give a blessing to tactics like True the Vote’s.“In making this conclusion, the court, in no way, is condoning TTV’s actions in facilitating a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges,” he wrote. He added: “TTV’s list utterly lacked reliability. Indeed, it verges on recklessness.”Fair Fight sued True the Vote three years ago, after the conservative group organized challenges in December 2020 questioning the eligibility of more than 250,000 registered Georgia voters. To spur right-wing activists to help challenge voters, True the Vote created a $1 million reward fund and offered bounties for evidence of “election malfeasance.”Fair Fight argued in its lawsuit that finding actual fraud or ineligible voters was only a secondary concern for True the Vote, and that the real intention was to frighten Democratic-leaning voters from turning out in what were expected to be razor-thin runoff elections that would determine control of the United States Senate.Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of True the Vote, celebrated the ruling as “an answer to the prayers of faithful patriots across America.”“Today’s ruling sends a clear message to those who would attempt to control the course of our nation through lawfare and intimidation,” Ms. Engelbrecht wrote in a statement. “American citizens will not be silenced.”Fair Fight, in a lengthy statement, said that federal courts were not adequately protecting Americans from ramped-up attacks on voting rights.“While there is much to make of the court’s 145-page opinion, Fair Fight is disappointed that Georgians and voters nationwide must continue to wait for our federal courts to impose accountability in the face of widespread and mounting voter intimidation efforts,” Cianti Stewart-Reid, the executive director of Fair Fight, said in the statement.It was unclear whether the group planned to appeal the decision. More

  • in

    Voting Rights Act faces new wave of dire threats in 2024

    As 2023 comes to a close, the Voting Rights Act is facing a series of dire threats that could significantly weaken the landmark civil rights law.A suite of three different pending cases could gut the ability of private plaintiffs to challenge the Voting Rights Act, make it harder to challenge discriminatory election systems, and limit the Voting Rights Act’s protections in areas where a single racial minority doesn’t constitute a majority.“It’s a shock to the system,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.The new wave of attacks come after the supreme court unexpectedly issued a decision in June that upheld a critical provision of the law.In a 5-4 decision, the justices beat back an effort by Alabama that would have made it much harder to use the Voting Rights Act to challenge voting districts that weaken the influence of Black voters. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts sent a strong signal the court wasn’t interested in reconsidering its jurisprudence around Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the most powerful tool voting rights litigators have to challenge districts. It was a full-throated defense of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law the court has aggressively weakened in recent years.“The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our [section] 2 jurisprudence anew,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion in the case, Allen v Milligan, that was joined by his fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices. “We find Alabama’s new approach to [section] 2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our [section] 2 case law as Alabama requests.”The rulings was a sigh of relief for voting rights lawyers. Over the last decade, the court has ruled against voting rights at nearly every turn. It gutted the pre-clearance requirement at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, greenlit aggressively removing people from voter rolls, made it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws, and made it nearly impossible to challenge a voting rule as long as an election is near.There’s nothing new about an onslaught of threats facing the Voting Rights Act, which has faced efforts to weaken it virtually since the moment it was enacted. But those attacks appear to be finding a more receptive audience in a supreme court and federal judiciary reshaped by Donald Trump that are willing to entertain fringe legal ideas.“The Voting Rights Act, in 2023, in some ways is on more stable footing than it was last year. And in other ways feels like it’s poised to undergo a whole new set of threats,” said Danielle Lang, a voting rights attorney at the Campaign Legal Center.ArkansasThe most significant threat is a case from Arkansas that could block the ability of private litigants – voters, civil rights groups, political parties – from bringing cases to enforce the Voting Rights Act. No “private right of action” exists under the law, the US court of appeals for the eighth circuit said in a novel ruling earlier this month.It was a decision invited by the supreme court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. In 2021, they issued a separate opinion musing that the court had never definitively said whether or not private parties could bring section 2 cases – a surefire invitation to litigants to try and get the question before the court.If private parties can’t sue under the Voting Rights Act, it would make it virtually impossible the enforce the law. Non-governmental groups, which have more resources than the justice department and can move much more quickly, have brought the vast majority of cases in the six decades since the Voting Rights Act was enacted. If enforcement were only up to the government, priorities could change from administration to administration (the justice department filed very few voting rights cases under Donald Trump).“It would completely eviscerate the last remaining power behind the Voting Rights Act in any way real way,” said Lakin, the ACLU attorney, who represents the plaintiffs in the Arkansas case.The issue has created even more uncertainty for voting rights litigators in an environment in which they already have a reduced toolkit to combat voting discrimination after the Shelby county decision.“It is certainly frustrating,” Lang said. “When you look at all the work that’s yet to be done in the voting rights space. And instead of getting that work done, lawyers get sidetracked having to fight old battles over them.”GeorgiaThe Arkansas case isn’t the only serious threat to the Voting Rights Act. In Georgia, an appellate court recently ruled the Voting Rights Act couldn’t be used to challenge the way the state had chosen to elect the five members of its public service commission (PSC), which oversees utilities. Under state law, each of the five members are elected by the entire state, a method that “unlawfully dilutes the votes of Black citizens under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act”, the US district judge Steven Grimberg ruled last year. A district system would better ensure that Black voters could elect the candidate of their choosing to the PSC.But the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit overturned that decision in November. The Voting Rights Act couldn’t be used to change the way the PSC was elected, a three-judge panel said, because the Georgia legislature had chosen to elect its commissioners that way. “Georgia chose this electoral format to protect critical policy interests and there is no evidence, or allegation, that race was a motivating factor in this decision,” the judge Elizabeth Branch, who was nominated by Trump for the bench, wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.The decision could have far-reaching consequences. It could be read to prohibit Voting Rights Act challenges in Georgia to the state assembly school boards or county commissions – bodies of government where civil rights litigators have long turned to the law to combat voting discrimination.TexasAnother threat to the Voting Rights Act is fast emerging from Texas. Earlier this year, a district judge struck down the city of Galveston’s four county commission districts. When Republicans redrew the districts in 2021, they got rid of the sole district in which Black and Latino voters were able to elect the candidate of their choice. Striking down the districts in the case, the US district judge Jeffrey Brown called the effort “stark and jarring”.A three-judge panel for the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit upheld that ruling. It noted that neither Black people nor Hispanic people constituted a majority on their own in the district at issue, but that precedent allowed them to be considered together for purposes of a Voting Rights Act claim.But then the panel did something unusual. It went on to say it believed that precedent was wrong. And in a highly unusual step, it urged the full court to review the case and overrule it. The full fifth circuit has since agreed to hear the case, and paused redrawing the Galveston district in December, a signal it is skeptical that the Voting Rights Act protects so-called “coalition districts”.Whether or not the Voting Rights Act applies in areas where no minority group makes up a majority, but a coalition of minorities votes cohesively as one, is a question that has not been definitively answered by the supreme court. A ruling saying that those areas are not protected under the Voting Rights Act would make it harder to challenge districts in diverse multi-racial areas.The issue is already playing out in litigation outside of Texas. In Georgia, a federal district judge ordered Republicans to redraw their congressional map to include an additional majority-Black congressional district in west Atlanta. Republicans did that, but they dismantled another district in which a coalition of minority voters formed a majority and had been electing the candidate of their choice. It’s a strategy that is betting courts will embrace the idea that coalition districts aren’t protected.If the supreme court applies its precedent on the Voting Rights Act consistently, it should uphold coalition districts, experts say.“Prohibiting these coalition claims amount to a kind of racial essentialism that the conservatives on the court have been railing against for a long time,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “It’s actually … weird to assert that Blacks and Latinos experience is just different. And different enough that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t care.”The emergence of all three attacks has created even more uncertainty in voting rights litigation. But while there’s plenty of reasons to be disturbed by the recent rulings, voting rights experts aren’t warning of a five-alarm fire just yet.They say there are reasons to be somewhat optimistic. First, there is a different section of federal law independent of the Voting Rights Act that gives private parties the ability to bring federal lawsuits to protect civil rights.Second, outside of the eighth circuit, no other court has said that a private right of action doesn’t exist. The ultra-conservative fifth circuit even affirmed that one existed earlier this year, and the panel rejected a request to reconsider in December.Beyond Gorsuch and Thomas, it’s also not clear that a majority on the supreme court will embrace the idea that no private right of action exists.While the eighth circuit ruled no private right of action exists, no other court has issued similar rulings. “It is important for us to kind of wait. This could be a big challenge. If so, we’re gonna meet it head on. It could be a blip,” Lang said.“The crazier claims and the crazier holdings and the crazier findings don’t speak for all of the judicial system. And they certainly haven’t found purchase with the supreme court,” Levitt said.And while the spate of recent cases represents a new level of threats against the Voting Rights Act, lawyers note that the law has long faced efforts to dismantle it and it has survived largely intact.“The challenges to the Voting Rights Act and efforts to dismantle it are going to exist as long as the voting rights act exist. Based on what the supreme court said this year, I expect the Voting Rights Act to exist for a while,” Lang said. “The fact that people are still coming at it with everything they’ve got I think is because it’s maintaining its power.” More

  • in

    Win for Republicans as US judge upholds Georgia congressional map

    A federal judge in Georgia on Thursday upheld a Republican-drawn congressional map, a ruling branded “a disgrace” by voting rights advocates who claim that the latest district lines illegally dilute the voting power of minority residents.The decision from Steve Jones set the stage for next year’s elections, with Republicans now likely to maintain their 9-5 advantage among the swing state’s 14 seats in the US House of Representatives.In three separate but similarly worded orders, Jones rejected claims that the new maps do not do enough to help Black voters. “The court finds that the general assembly fully complied with this court’s order requiring the creation of Black-majority districts in the regions of the state where vote dilution was found,” the judge wrote.The case is one of several pending lawsuits whose outcomes could determine which party controls the House after November’s vote. Democrats need to capture a net of five Republican seats nationally to win back a majority.The maps were redrawn in a recent special legislative session after Jones in October ruled that a prior set of maps illegally harmed Black voters. In a 516-page order, the judge, appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, a Democrat, told legislators to create a new map that included an additional district with a Black majority or near-majority.While the state filed an appeal, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, also scheduled a special legislative session to comply with the order.In early December, the Republican-controlled legislature approved a map that adds Black-majority districts, including one in Congress, two in the state senate and five in the state house.But in doing so, Republicans also dismantled Georgia’s seventh district, held by the gun-control advocate Lucy McBath, a Black woman. Situated in a suburb north-east of Atlanta, it is composed mostly of minority voters, including Black, Latino and Asian residents.The court’s decision means that McBath is likely to have to seek to run in a new district for the second election in a row, after Republicans drew her out of the district she originally won. She wrote in a fundraising email on Thursday: “I won’t let Republicans decide when my time in Congress is over.”Democrats and voting rights groups had argued that the revised map violated Jones’s ruling, which had said the state could not remedy the problem “by eliminating minority districts elsewhere”. Republicans asserted that their effort complied with the decision because McBath’s district was not majority Black.But LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter fund, suggested Republicans and the gun lobby intentionally targeted a district where McBath has been able to build a multiracial coalition. She said of Thursday’s ruling: “It’s a disgrace. It is reflective of how politicised the courts are.“It amplifies the reason why we need a strong federal voting rights law. We need something that is ironclad and even holds the bench accountable. They’ve weakened the law in such a way that the judges are in many ways not even interpreting what the law is saying.”Brown added: “Georgia is a purple state, but those in power, the Republicans, have gone through extraordinary measures on every level of government – from the county level to the governor’s office – to suppress the Black vote and this indicative of that.”The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said he was not involved in the issue and would not comment. “While the secretary is the named defendant, as with all political issues, our office isn’t involved in the maps, thus we won’t be commenting,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.The plaintiffs are represented by the law firm WilmerHale and the American Civil Liberties Union. A lawyer for the plaintiffs, the law firm and the ACLU did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the order.Georgia is expected to be a key battleground again in 2024, with suburban voters and Black voters playing a crucial part. Once a Republican stronghold, the conservative southern state has elected a Democratic president and two Democratic senators in recent years, although the governor and secretary of state are Republicans.With the control of the House closely fought in a partisan era, redistricting battles around the country can make all the difference. In Alabama, Democrats are hopeful of picking up another seat after challenging Republicans’ maps all the way to the supreme court.Democrats have also enjoyed some legal wins in New York but Republicans stand to gain in North Carolina, where they openly admit their maps are politically motivated. More

  • in

    Marjorie Taylor Greene among US public figures hit by threats and swatting

    The political became personal over the Christmas holiday as the homes of politicos and judges were targeted by threats, protests and “swatting” hoaxes by pranksters who call in fake emergencies to authorities in the hopes of prompting a forceful police response.A swatting hoax targeted the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Authorities said they were investigating threats against the Colorado supreme court justices who ruled that Trump could not appear on the state’s ballots in the 2024 presidential election because he incited an insurrection on the day of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.And protesters staged demonstrations outside the home of two Joe Biden White House military advisers as the Israel-Gaza war continued.On Tuesday, police in Rome, Georgia, said a man in New York called a suicide hotline claiming that he had shot his girlfriend at the home of Greene and was going to kill himself next.Authorities said they contacted Greene’s security detail to confirm she was safe and that there was no emergency. Police also confirmed that Greene had been the target of about eight such “swatting” attempts.The Rome police department said it quickly verified that the call was a hoax and did not send officers to the house.In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Greene said: “I was swatted this morning on Christmas Day and a few days ago – Thursday Dec 21st. We received this death threat where this man is saying I will be shot in the head and skinned to make a ‘parasol’.”She said the person was making a reference to Ed Gein, “a psychopath killer who would make things out of his victims’ skin”.Greene added that the person also said “he would like to smash” the heads of her and her boyfriend, the far-right television broadcaster Brian Glenn, “on a curb”. Greene published the text of the threat, which named the purported sender of the message.Meanwhile, in Denver, local police as well as the FBI said they were investigating threats to the Colorado supreme court justices after they ruled that the January 6 attack made Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s ballots as he seeks a second presidency in 2024.A spokesperson at the FBI’s field office in Denver told the Guardian and other outlets that the agency “is aware of the situation and working with local law enforcement”.“We will vigorously pursue investigations of any threat or use of violence committed by someone who uses extremist views to justify their actions regardless of motivation,” the FBI’s statement said.A Denver police department spokesperson told Axios it was “investigating incidents directed at Colorado supreme court justices”. The spokesperson also said police “would thoroughly investigate any reports of threats or harassment”, and officers were “providing extra patrols around justices’ residences”.Separately, CNN reported that the names of the four Colorado supreme court justices who ruled to disqualify Trump from the ballot had since appeared in “incendiary” posts on online forums.In an apparent reference to the justices, a correspondent on a pro-Trump site posted: “All … robed rats must … hang.”According to CNN, analysis by a non-partisan research group working for US law enforcement said that the justices had not been specifically targeted, but “there remains a risk of lone actor or small group violence or other illegal activities in response to the ruling”.The intensifying political climate has given rise to increasing threats to government, judicial and public officials, according to experts. Bloomberg Law reported that the US Marshals Service – which is assigned to keep federal judges safe – cannot fully assess the security risks they face because of failures in its tracking system to cross-reference information.The number of substantiated threats against federal judges climbed in recent years – from 178 in 2019 to 311 in 2022, according to the marshals service. In the first three months of 2023, there were more than 280 threats.The marshal’s service, Bloomberg noted, attempts to distinguish between a “hunter” – someone who attacks a judge – and a “howler”, who threatens but does not act.“It’s not tenable for a democracy to have people expressing their grievances and lacing that discontent with threats of violence at this volume,” Peter Simi at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha, told the outlet, adding that the behaviour suggested “a certain lawlessness is acceptable and is becoming normalized”.Elsewhere on Monday, pro-Palestinian protesters staged a demonstration near the homes of the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.Near Austin’s home, they held signs calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel has been waging war since Hamas attacked it on 7 October.The protesters chanted: “Austin, Austin, rise and shine – no sleep during genocide.”A crowd of protesters later adopted a similar tactic outside the home of Sullivan.Posting on X, the activist group named the People’s Forum said it “woke up … Lloyd Austin as he tried to go on with his [Christmas] while arming & supporting zionist genocide against the Palestinian people. Now, we disrupt ANOTHER war criminal: [Jake Sullivan]. The people say NO XMAS AS USUAL!” More