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      Georgia Judge Weighs Revoking Bail for a Trump Co-Defendant, Harrison Floyd

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      Prosecutors say the defendant, Harrison Floyd, has been intimidating potential witnesses in the racketeering case with his social media posts.In a fiery courtroom presentation, the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump argued on Tuesday that one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants had intimidated potential witnesses on social media and should be sent to jail.But Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court chose not to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, the co-defendant. Instead, he signed off on modified terms prohibiting Mr. Floyd from posting further comments about witnesses in the case.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., took the unusual step of personally arguing on behalf of the prosecution, a few days after she filed a motion accusing Mr. Floyd of intimidating an elections worker and other witnesses for the state — including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — through his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers noted that Mr. Trump himself had issued provocative social media posts about the Georgia case, and that no action had been taken against him. That, they argued, made “the state’s decision to go after Harrison Floyd hard to justify.”They also argued that Mr. Floyd had not been trying to intimidate or threaten anyone with his posts. But they acknowledged by the end of Tuesday’s hearing that he had “walked up close to the line” of violating the terms of his bond.Mr. Floyd, once the head of a group called Black Voices for Trump, was paid by the 2020 Trump campaign. He is one of 19 people, including the former president, who were named as defendants in a 98-page racketeering indictment in August.The indictment charges them with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with prosecutors.In addition to a state racketeering charge, Mr. Floyd faces two other felony counts in the case, for his role in what the indictment describes as a scheme to intimidate Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County elections worker, and pressure her to falsely claim that she had committed electoral fraud.Ms. Freeman and her daughter were part of a team processing votes in Fulton County on election night in November 2020. Soon after, video images of the two women handling ballots were posted online, and Trump supporters falsely claimed that the video showed them entering bogus votes to skew the election in President Biden’s favor.Ms. Freeman became the target of so many threats that she was forced to leave her home.Her lawyer was a witness for the prosecution at Tuesday’s hearing, producing a report that he said showed a recent “spike” in online mentions of Ms. Freeman. That spike led her to adopt a fresh set of security measures, her lawyer said.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers, John Morrison and Chris Kachouroff, called the effort to revoke his bond “a retaliatory measure” — in part, they said, because Mr. Floyd recently turned down a plea agreement offered by the state. They argued that “tagging” people in posts did not constitute contact with witnesses, and was no different from yelling “a message to someone else sitting on the opposite side of a packed Mercedes-Benz stadium during the middle of an Atlanta Falcons football game.” Ms. Willis responded that “this notion that tagging someone doesn’t get a message to them is really lunacy,” She also called Mr. Floyd’s posts “disgusting,” adding that “what he really did is spit on the court.”And she was explicit about the stakes as she saw them: Election workers, she said, should not be intimidated for doing their jobs.Judge McAfee said that it appeared that Mr. Floyd had committed a “technical violation” of his bond by communicating with witnesses in the case, but seemed reluctant to take the step of jailing Mr. Floyd. “Not every violation compels revocation,” he said.Ms. Willis’s forceful stance on Mr. Floyd’s posts could have repercussions for Mr. Trump, who is enmeshed in battles over gag orders in other civil and criminal cases against him. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement in Georgia specifies that he “shall perform no act,” including social media posts, “to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”Mr. Floyd was the only one of the original 19 co-defendants in Georgia to spend days in jail in August while waiting to make bond. At Tuesday’s hearing, he cut a colorful figure at the defense table, wearing a green blazer adorned with polo horses. Before the hearing began, he appeared to be reading a book about the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.As the two sides worked out the new terms of the bond agreement, Ms. Willis made a reference to “Trump,” prompting Mr. Floyd to interject, “President Trump.”The judge told Mr. Floyd that it was not his place to talk. More

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      The Formidable Rosalynn Carter

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      I saw Rosalynn Carter angry only twice. Both occasions involved Ronald Reagan, who had crushed Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, and both reflected her passion and decency.The first concerned a free public swimming pool in the Carters’ hometown, Plains, Ga., that they built in the 1950s. She recounted to me during an interview that when Mr. Reagan was president, local conservatives turned it into a whites-only private club. Mr. Reagan made people “comfortable with their prejudices,” she snapped.The second related to the landmark Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, a major investment in community mental health centers that Mrs. Carter spearheaded with the help of her husband’s other archrival, Senator Edward Kennedy. Sitting in her office at the Carter Center in 2015, she grew upset as she described how Mr. Reagan had defunded the ambitious program, leaving tens of thousands of people untreated. It took 30 years — until Obamacare — before ​​federal funding for community mental health treatment centers was fully resurrected with her help.Perhaps in death Mrs. Carter will finally be properly appreciated for her role as this country’s premier champion of mental health. It’s only one of the many unheralded accomplishments of a formidable and gracious woman who belongs in the first rank of influential first ladies.Over nearly 80 years, the Carters forged the longest, closest and arguably most productive high-level political partnership in American history — more seamless than those between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt or Bill and Hillary Clinton because it lacked the personal drama of those marriages.Although each agreed that the secret to a long, happy marriage was to spend some time apart, they did almost everything together — from learning to read the Bible in Spanish before bed to dodging gunfire in Africa after the presidency and fly-fishing in Siberia when he was 90 and she was 88.The Carters were married for 77 years, a distinction enjoyed by an estimated 1,000 or so American couples. But they knew each other for an astonishing 96 years, first meeting a few days after Rosalynn Smith was born in 1927 when Jimmy’s mother, the nurse who delivered Rosalynn, brought her toddler over to see the new baby.On their first date in 1945, when Jimmy was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, they went to a movie neither remembered. Nearly half a century later, Jimmy wrote a poem entitled “Rosalynn”:I’d pay to sit behind her, blind to whatwas on the screen, and watch the image flickerupon her hair.I’d glow when her diminished voice would clearmy muddled thoughts, like lightning flashing ina gloomy sky.Mr. Carter said he would not have won his long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency without her charm, hard work and smart advice. Spending an astonishing 75 days campaigning in Florida, she proved instrumental in helping him prevail in a historic primary there. His victory in Florida over George Wallace all but assured his nomination and marked the end of the racist wing of the Democratic Party.Inside the White House, Mrs. Carter was the first presidential spouse with her own professional policy staff. In 1977 she assumed an unprecedented role as her husband’s personal envoy and forcefully confronted authoritarian heads of state in Latin America on their human rights abuses. She took action to combat age discrimination by working closely with the congressman Claude Pepper to loosen rules on mandatory retirement, which affected the careers of millions. And touched by the plight of the Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing Communist Vietnam, she helped persuade her husband to more than double the number of refugees admitted from Southeast Asia.Mr. Carter described their relationship as “like one person acting in concert.” Asked about his decision-making on foreign policy, he said that he confirmed his judgment with “Rosalynn, Cy” (Cyrus Vance, his secretary of state), “Zbig” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser) “and Ham” (Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff). As the Time correspondent Hugh Sidey wrote in 1979, “Note the order.” On the domestic side, Mrs. Carter pushed her husband hard to appoint more women to important positions, and he did, naming five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined.Known as the Steel Magnolia, a nickname she liked, Mrs. Carter set off controversy when she sat in (silently) on cabinet meetings. But she was enthusiastically welcomed there as a critical part of the policy process. While most presidential aides view first ladies warily, the senior staff in the Carter White House often wished the stubborn president listened even more to his impressive wife, especially on politics, where, as Mr. Carter acknowledged, her instincts were better than his.One achievement with contemporary resonance: Mrs. Carter, along with Betty Bumpers, the wife of Senator Dale Bumpers, traveled around the country and persuaded 33 state legislatures to change their laws to require proof of vaccination for children to enter school. This led to a joke in the late 1970s: Everywhere the first lady goes, kids cry — for fear of getting a shot.In 1980, Mrs. Carter thought her husband was “seemingly pompous” in explaining why he wouldn’t make politically expedient decisions. As she recounted in her memoirs, he would say something like, “I’ll never do anything to hurt my country.” And she’d reply, “The thing you can do to hurt your country most is not get re-elected.”When Mr. Carter lost, Mrs. Carter grew depressed and wanted her husband to run for president again against Mr. Reagan. When Mr. Carter rejected that idea out of hand, she helped him reinvent the post-presidency by establishing the Carter Center. They traveled the globe together, “waging peace,” as they put it, supervising elections, starting impressive global health initiatives and building houses for the poor. On the road, Mrs. Carter served as note-taker in important peace talks; at home, she established fellowships for journalists covering mental health issues and, as the founder of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers, did as much as anyone to popularize a concept that barely had a name until the 1980s.The Carters’ eight-decade love affair was one for the ages. When I was at work on my biography, Mrs. Carter shared with me her husband’s letters from sea. One of them from 1949 read:When I have been away from you this long … I feel lonely and lost, and it seems that I am not really living but just waiting to live again when you are with me.Rosalynn Carter kept those letters in a drawer close by until the day she died.Jonathan Alter is a journalist and the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”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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      Rosalynn Carter: a life in pictures

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      Former US ambassador to Thailand Morton Abramowitz (left) and former US first lady Rosalynn Carter, a baby in her arms, speak to the child’s mother at the Sa Kaeo refugee camp, Prachinburi Province (later Sa Kaeo), Thailand, on 9 November, 1979.

      Photograph: Diana Walker/Getty Images More

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      Rosalynn Carter, First Lady and a Political Partner, Dies at 96

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      She helped propel Jimmy Carter from rural Georgia to the White House and became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor RooseveltRosalynn Carter, a true life partner to Jimmy Carter who helped propel him from rural Georgia to the White House in a single decade and became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, died on Sunday in Plains, Ga. She was 96. The Carter Center in Atlanta announced her death. It had disclosed on May 30 that Mrs. Carter had dementia. “She continues to live happily at home with her husband, enjoying spring in Plains and visits with loved ones,” a statement by the center said at the time. On Friday, the center said she had entered hospice care at home.Mr. Carter, 99, the longest-living president in American history, has also been in hospice care at their home, but so far he has defied expectations. The Carter Center had announced in February that he was stopping full-scale medical care “after a series of short hospital stays,” and his family was preparing for the end. But he has hung on — and celebrated his most recent birthday on Oct. 1.Mrs. Carter was the second longest-lived first lady; Bess Truman, the widow of President Harry S. Truman, was 97 when she died in 1982.Over their nearly eight decades together, Mr. and Mrs. Carter forged the closest of bonds, developing a personal and professional symbiosis remarkable for its sheer longevity.Their extraordinary union began formally with their marriage in 1946, but, in a manner of speaking, it began long before that, with a touch of kismet, just after Rosalynn (pronounced ROSE-a-lynn) was born in Plains in 1927.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter and former first lady, dies aged 96

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      Rosalynn Carter, wife of the 39th president Jimmy Carter, has died at the couple’s Georgia home aged 96.Carter, who became one of the nation’s leading mental health advocates during and after her husband’s time in the White House, was diagnosed with dementia in May.On Friday, her family announced she had entered hospice care at home, joining her 99-year-old husband in end-of-life treatment in the Plains one-story residence they shared since before Jimmy Carter was elected a Georgia state senator in 1962.The former president has been in hospice care there since February after declining further medical intervention for his own health issues.“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released Sunday afternoon by the Carter Center.“She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”The statement said Mrs Carter “died peacefully, with family by her side” at 2.10pm ET. An online tribute book is open at www.rosalynncartertribute.org.Chip Carter, the couple’s middle son, said: “Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary first lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right. Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans.“She will be sorely missed not only by our family but by the many people who have better mental health care and access to resources for caregiving today.”The former first lady was born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in August 1927, in Plains, a small rural town of fewer than 600 people where her husband was also born and raised.She was a fiercely loyal ally throughout his political career, both in the White House and during his years as a respected international diplomat after his single term in office ended in 1981. But she also forged her own identity for her mental health advocacy and as a social justice activist.She founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in 1987, and remained active in the organization into her later years.The Carter Center, a human rights non-profit founded by the couple, paid tribute to her work in its statement earlier this year announcing her dementia diagnosis.“Mrs Carter has been the nation’s leading mental health advocate for much of her life. We recognize, as she did more than half a century ago, that stigma is often a barrier that keeps individuals and their families from seeking and getting much-needed support,” it said.“We hope sharing our family’s news will increase important conversations at kitchen tables and in doctor’s offices around the country.”Rosalynn Carter and her husband were also supporters of Habitat for Humanity, raising awareness and funds for the Carter Work Project named for them, and frequently tackling projects themselves as “some of our best hands-on construction volunteers”.One of the couple’s final public appearances was at the Plains Peanut Festival in September, days before Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday, when they rode the parade together in the back of an SUV.Their families were already known to each other when they met while Jimmy Carter was at the US naval academy in Maryland during the second world war. They married in 1946, and helped run the Carter family’s peanut farm together until his political career took off.She wore the same gown to Carter’s 1977 presidential inauguration as she had when he was elected Georgia governor in 1970.The couple, who celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021, had four children, Jack, Chip, James and Amy. Their sons were adults by the time Carter was elected president, but Amy, aged nine, was the subject of massive media attention and became one of the most famous child residents of the White House. More

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      Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter, joins husband in hospice care

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      Jimmy Carter’s wife Rosalynn has entered hospice treatment at home, the former first lady joining the 99-year-old ex-president in end-of-life care at the couple’s Georgia residence, her family said on Friday.The news came in a brief statement released by the human rights non-profit Carter Center, on behalf of Jason Carter, the grandson of the 39th president and his 96-year-old wife.“Former first lady Rosalynn Carter has entered hospice care at home,” the statement said. “She and President Carter are spending time with each other and their family. The Carter family continues to ask for privacy and remains grateful for the outpouring of love and support.”Rosalynn Carter – who married her husband in 1946, more than three decades before they entered the White House after the Democrat won the 1976 general election – was diagnosed with dementia in May, the Carter Center announced at the time.Jimmy Carter, a one-term president and former Georgia governor who became a respected international diplomat after leaving office, himself entered home hospice care in February after declining further medical intervention for a number of health issues.He had a mass removed from his liver in 2015, later declaring he had melanoma that had also spread to his brain. He announced he was cancer-free later that year after radiation and immunotherapy but suffered a series of falls, resulting in hospital care for bleeding on the brain, and had a hip replacement aged 94.Carter – a keen painter and peanut farmer before his political career took off – had three younger siblings, two sisters and a brother, who all died of pancreatic cancer between 1983 and 1990.Their father, James Earl Carter Sr, died of the same disease in 1953. And their mother, Bessie, died of breast cancer in 1983.Jason Carter paid tribute to his grandparents’ longevity and accomplishments at Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday party last month, at the same one-story house in Plains the couple lived in since before he was elected to the Georgia senate in 1962.“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of south Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” he said.Political allies were also complimentary. “If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be a towering, old southern oak. He’s as good and tough as they come,” Donna Brazile, a former Democratic party national chair, said.The Carter Center has been silent on Rosalynn Carter’s health since its May statement, in which it paid tribute to her renowned mental health advocacy.“Mrs Carter has been the nation’s leading mental health advocate for much of her life. We recognize, as she did more than half a century ago, that stigma is often a barrier that keeps individuals and their families from seeking and getting much-needed support,” it said.“We hope sharing our family’s news will increase important conversations at kitchen tables and in doctor’s offices around the country.”As the founder of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers, the May statement added, she “often noted that there are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers; those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.“The universality of caregiving is clear in our family, and we are experiencing the joy and the challenges of this journey. We do not expect to comment further and ask for understanding for our family and for everyone across the country serving in a caregiver role.” More

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      Trump’s Georgia election trial could stretch into 2025, says prosecutor

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      The trial in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump and 14 other defendants relating to an alleged conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election could stretch into early 2025, the Fulton county prosecutor, Fani Willis, has said.In an interview at a global women’s summit held on Tuesday by the Washington Post, Willis said that though she expected the case to be on appeal “for years”, the trial itself would probably take “many months”. She envisioned it ending in “the winter or the very early part of 2025”.The timeframe laid out by the Atlanta-area district attorney raises the prospect of Trump remaining on criminal trial through the critical stages of next year’s presidential election, including election day on 5 November 2024. Trump is the current frontrunner in the Republican primary race.The tentative calendar also opens up the prospect, should Trump secure the Republican nomination and go on to win the election, of him still being on trial on his inauguration day, 20 January 2025. The former president faces racketeering charges that carry a sentence under state guidelines of up to 20 years in prison.Willis said that she did not take election timing into account when pursuing cases. “I don’t, when making decisions about cases to bring, consider any election cycle or election season, it does not go into the calculus,” she said.She added that it would be a “really sad day if, when you’re under investigation for this shoplifting charge, you could go run for city council and then the investigation would stop. That’s foolishness.”Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Trump’s co-defendant in the Georgia case Rudy Giuliani, criticized Willis for making the comments. In a statement to Politico, he said that the possibility of stretching out the trial beyond the 2024 election “further demonstrates how this entire fraudulent case is part of the Democrat Party and permanent Washington political class’s attempt to keep Donald Trump out of the White House”.The scheduling of the multiple trials that Trump now faces is likely to pose major challenges for his presidential campaign. He is now on trial in New York for a civil fraud case involving the financial statements of his business, the Trump Organization.He is also facing 91 felony charges in four separate criminal cases – the Fulton county election subversion case, a New York criminal indictment over an alleged hush money payment to an adult film actor, and two federal cases. The federal prosecutions involve his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified government documents in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.The two federal trials are scheduled to begin in March and May respectively – in the thick of Republican primary voting.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNineteen defendants were initially included in the sprawling racketeering prosecution in Georgia. That number has been reduced after four defendants accepted plea deals in the case.They include three of Trump’s lawyers during his attempt to avoid defeat in the 2020 election – Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell. Videos of interviews conducted with them during the plea agreement were leaked this week to ABC News and the Washington Post.Willis said the source of the leaks was “absolutely not my office”. She said the disclosure of the confidential recordings was “clearly intended to intimidate witnesses in this case, subjecting them to harassment and threats prior to trial”.Her office has requested an emergency protective order over discovery materials in the Fulton county case. More

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      Georgia prosecutors seek protective order after leak of videos in Trump case

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      Fulton county prosecutors have asked the judge overseeing the 2020 election subversion case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants in Georgia to immediately impose an “emergency” protective order over the discovery materials to prevent potential future leaks of evidence.The request came after several media outlets published details of videotaped statements that former Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro gave as part of plea deals to avoid being tried as racketeering co-defendants with the former president.The Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis had previously asked for a protective order for the discovery materials in the case. But citing the leak of several of the “proffer” interviews, Willis renewed the request on Tuesday to Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee.“The release of these confidential video recordings is clearly intended to intimidate witnesses,” the filing said, “subjecting them to harassment and threats prior to trial, constitutes indirect communication about the facts of this case with co-defendants and witnesses”.Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges that he and 18 co-defendants engaged in racketeering activity and conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia. To date, three of Trump’s ex-lawyers and a local Republican operative have taken plea deals.The actual motivation for the leaks were unclear. Ellis’s testimony, for instance, was widely seen as damaging to Trump – and the move to seek a protective order amounted to an aggressive play by prosecutors to suppress discussion of the proffers leading up to trial.Willis also said in the filing that she would take the unusual step of refusing to send copies of the video recordings to defense lawyers, and that they would instead have to watch the recordings at her office in downtown Atlanta, where they could only take notes.In the separate federal 2020 election subversion case brought against Trump in Washington, the discovery materials were subject to a protective order almost as soon as Trump was charged. But special counsel prosecutors have not forced Trump’s lawyers to only view the discovery in person.The prosecutors disclosed in their submission to the judge some back-and-forth communications they had with a couple defense lawyers over the leaks, including with Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow, who had asked the district attorney’s office to state they had not leaked the material.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The state had nothing to do with leaking any information to the media!” replied Nathan Wade, one of the top prosecutors on the case.But then a lawyer for Harrison Floyd, a Trump ally charged with harassing Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, replied to the email chain on Tuesday morning, writing, “It was Harrison Floyd’s team.” The lawyer later said the statement was a typo and that they were not the leak.Willis first requested a protective order on 27 September. The delay with the protective order, according to a person familiar with the matter, has been over a protracted negotiation between the district attorney’s office and all 19 co-defendants over the language in the order. More