Georgia

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Ex-Trump lawyer says ‘boss’ was not going to leave White House

      by

      An attorney for Donald Trump has told prosecutors in Georgia that one of the former president’s top aides told her in December 2020 that Trump was “not going to leave” the White House “under any circumstances”, despite having lost the election to Joe Biden.The revelation from Jenna Ellis came during an interview with the Georgia district attorney’s office in Fulton County. Ellis is cooperating as part of a plea agreement in the Georgia election interference case against Trump and various allies.Sections of the video recordings were published on Monday by ABC News and the Washington Post, along with excerpts from interviews with lawyer Sidney Powell and two other defendants who have reached plea agreements in the case in exchange for testifying.Ellis said the longtime Trump aide – his deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino – told her “the boss” would refuse to cede power. She also alluded to two other “relevant” instances for the case but did not disclose them in the video, apparently prevented from doing so by attorney-client privilege.Ellis described Scavino’s response to her scepticism that Trump had any more legal avenues left to challenge his election loss, saying: “And he said to me, you know, in a kind of excited tone: ‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.’”.The recordings of the four defendants’ statements were required under the terms of their plea deals, in order that their knowledge of events could be used in cases against other defendants.The Post also reviewed statements from Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall and lawyer Kenneth Chesebro. Chesebro claimed he gave Trump a summary of a memo in which he offered advice on the alternate slates of electors, which were created in a plot to cast fake ballots for Trump in states that Biden had legitimately won. The statements could provide evidence Trump knew of the plot.Powell also explained her sudden rise, and that of other previously lesser known lawyers, to becoming key advisers to Trump in the last days of his presidency: “Because we were the only ones willing to support his effort to sustain the White House. I mean, everybody else was telling him to pack up and go.”Trump faces a total 90 criminal charges in four separate indictments. He is accused of election subversion, retention of government secrets and illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also faces civil lawsuits over his business affairs, and a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true”. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and sought to portray himself as a victim of political persecution.He continues to hold commanding poll leads over the rest of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden faces calls not to seek re-election as shock poll rattles senior Democrats

      by

      Senior Democrats have sounded the alarm after an opinion poll showed Joe Biden trailing the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in five out of six battleground states exactly a year before the presidential election.Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, with Biden ahead in Wisconsin, according to a survey published on Sunday by the New York Times and Siena College. Biden beat Trump in all six states in 2020 but the former president now leads by an average of 48% to 44% across these states in a hypothetical rematch.Additional findings released on Monday, however, showed that if Trump were to be convicted of criminal charges against him, some of his support in some swing states would erode by about 6%, which could be enough to tip the electoral college in Biden’s favour.Even so, the survey is in line with a series of recent polls that show the race too close for comfort for many Trump foes as voters express doubts about Biden’s age – the oldest US president in history turns 81 later this month – and handling of the economy, prompting renewed debate over whether he should step aside to make way for a younger nominee.“It’s very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm,” David Axelrod, a former strategist for President Barack Obama, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “He’s defied CW [conventional wisdom] before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party – not ‘bed-wetting,’ but legitimate concern.”Bill Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation and a former Republican official, tweeted: “It’s time. President Biden has served our country well. I’m confident he’ll do so for the next year. But it’s time for an act of personal sacrifice and public spirit. It’s time to pass the torch to the next generation. It’s time for Biden to announce he won’t run in 2024.”Andrew Yang, who lost to Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, added: “If Joe Biden were to step aside, he would go down in history as an accomplished statesman who beat Trump and achieved a great deal. If he decides to run again it may go down as one of the great overreaches of all time that delivers us to a disastrous Trump second term.”The New York Times and Siena poll suggests that Biden’s multiracial and multigenerational coalition, critical to his success in 2020, is decaying. Voters under age 30 favour the president by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Trump’s edge in rural regions.Black voters – a core Biden demographic – are now registering 22% support in these states for Trump, a level that the New York Times reported was unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times. The president’s staunch support for Israel in the current Middle East crisis has also prompted criticism from young and progressive voters.Survey respondents in swing states say they trust Trump over Biden on the economy by a 22-point margin. Some 71% say Biden is “too old”, including 54% of his own supporters. Just 39% felt the same about Trump, who is himself 77 years old.Electability was central to Biden’s argument for the nomination three years ago but the poll found a generic, unnamed Democrat doing much better with an eight-point lead over Trump. Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota has launched a long-shot campaign against Biden in the Democratic primary, contending that the president’s anaemic poll numbers are cause for a dramatic change of course.Next year’s election could be further complicated by independent runs from the environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr and the leftwing academic Cornel West.Trump is dominating the Republican presidential primary and plans to skip Wednesday’s third debate in Miami, Florida, in favour of holding a campaign rally. He spent Monday taking the witness stand in a New York civil fraud trial. He is also facing 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions.The Biden campaign played down the concerns, drawing a comparison with Democratic incumbent Obama’s 2012 victory over Republican Mitt Romney. Biden’s spokesperson, Kevin Munoz, said in a statement: “Predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later. Don’t take our word for it: Gallup predicted an eight-point loss for President Obama only for him to win handedly a year later.”Munoz added that Biden’s campaign “is hard at work reaching and mobilizing our diverse, winning coalition of voters one year out on the choice between our winning, popular agenda and Maga [Make America great again] Republicans’ unpopular extremism. We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll.”The margin of sampling error for each state in the Sunday poll is between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points, which is greater than Trump’s reported advantage in Pennsylvania.Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast and a former conservative radio host, wrote on X: “Ultimately, 2024 is not about re-electing Joe Biden. It is about the urgent necessity of stopping the return of Donald J Trump to the presidency. The question is how.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Times/Siena College Polls: Methodology and How We Conducted Them

      by

      The Times/Siena College battleground polls released on Sunday and Monday were conducted over the past week in six swing states that are likely to decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Five of the states were won by Donald J. Trump in 2016 and then flipped by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. Nevada, which has always been a close state, came down to less than one percentage point in the 2022 U.S. Senate election.These states also contain some of the coalitions that will be crucial next fall: younger, more diverse voters in states like Arizona, Georgia and Nevada; and white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who helped swing the election to Trump in 2016, and were central to Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory. They also provide some geographic diversity.We interviewed 600 respondents in each state to ensure we had a large enough sample to speak to specific subgroups of voters within these states, including age, race and ethnicity, income, education level, and party affiliation. Taken together, these 3,600 respondents represent our largest sample size of swing state voters to date. This also includes more than 700 undecided voters, a group that will be even more consequential within these crucial states.This is not the first time we have focused on swing states this early in an election cycle. In 2019, the poll explored a similar set of states, reflecting the battleground at the time. The political moment was slightly different, with Democrats in the thick of a nominating contest that split the party between liberals like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and a moderate in Mr. Biden — and Mr. Trump was the incumbent president to beat.However, the goals of that poll were similar to this one. As Americans in key states across the political spectrum weigh their options, these polls shed light on the issues driving the election and voters’ appetites for the leading candidates. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might

      by

      For Donald J. Trump, a new set of New York Times/Siena College polls captures a stunning, seemingly contradictory picture.His 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions have not significantly hurt him among voters in battleground states. Yet he remains weaker than at least one of his Republican rivals, and if he’s convicted and sentenced in any of his cases, some voters appear ready to turn on him — to the point where he could lose the 2024 election.Mr. Trump leads President Biden in five key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to the Times/Siena polls. He has eaten significantly into Mr. Biden’s advantages among younger, Black and Hispanic voters, many of whom retain positive views of the policies Mr. Trump enacted as president. And Mr. Trump appears to have room to grow, as more voters say they are open to supporting the former president than they are to backing Mr. Biden, with large shares of voters saying they trust Mr. Trump on the economy and national security. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Ex-Trump lawyer scrambled for Georgia plea deal after key pair folded

      by

      Donald Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis scrambled to secure a plea deal for herself in the Georgia election subversion case after watching two other indicted lawyers fold, it was revealed on Wednesday.The haste in which her legal team acted to snag an advantageous agreement for their client was laid out by Ellis’s own attorney Frank Hogue in an exclusive interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.He said surprise guilty pleas by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, charged alongside Trump in Fulton county over the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, injected urgency into discussions with the prosecutor, Fani Willis.“I think what really accelerated it was Powell and Chesebro falling as they did, one right after the other. It looked like timing was of the essence for us,” Hogue told the Journal-Constitution.A tearful Ellis, 39, pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings last week, becoming the fourth of 19 defendants to admit a role in the plot by Trump and his allies to keep him in office.She avoided a trial and the possibility of up to a five-year prison sentence. Her cooperating with prosecutors could include her testifying against Trump in his upcoming trial on 13 charges including racketeering, forgery, perjury, filing false documents and false statements.Negotiations took place over a three-day period, Hogue said, although he did not say if they were initiated by the prosecution or defense. Originally, he said, Willis offered a deal in which Ellis would plead guilty to an offense under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) often used in mob prosecutions.“That was about a three-second conversation. Long enough to say, ‘No, we’re not doing Rico,’” he said.The final deal was struck on the afternoon of 23 October, and announced in court the following morning, he told the newspaper’s legal podcast Breakdown.Hogue said it was “a good deal” for Ellis, because it ensured she was able to keep her license to practice law or maintain a pathway to earning it back if it was surrendered.“To get out of it with five years’ probation, terminate in three, which I’m sure it will for her, and the restitution and the other conditions of probation, none of it’s onerous for her,” he said.“She’s already back in Florida and resuming her life and doesn’t have to face any of this any more. So for her, my feeling is it’s a good result.”Unlike Chesebro and Powell, Ellis chose to read out in court a personal apology. Wiping away tears, she said she looked back at her experience with “deep remorse”.“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information,” she said.“What I should have done, but did not do, was make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”In a radio appearance last month, Ellis said she also regretted ever becoming part of Trump’s team of lawyers. Instead, she switched allegiance to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.“Why I have chosen to distance is because of [Trump’s] frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong,” she said on her American Family Radio show.Ellis could be a star witness against Trump and the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, an alleged mastermind of the election plot who pleaded not guilty last month to 13 charges, including one of racketeering. Asked if Giuliani should be worried, Hogue said: “I think he should be. I think there’s enough for Mayor Giuliani to worry about that wouldn’t have anything to do with Jenna Ellis.“She wouldn’t be a help to him, I don’t think, if she was to be called as a witness,” he added. “But I think his troubles extend far beyond her.” More