Georgia

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Pro-Trump lawyer accepts plea deal in Georgia ‘fake electors’ case

      by

      Kenneth Chesebro, the attorney who allegedly devised the “fake electors” plan to prevent Joe Biden from winning the 2020 election, has accepted a plea deal and will avoid going to trial in the Fulton county racketeering case involving Donald Trump and 17 others.The last-minute plea deal marks the second major victory in as many days for prosecutors, who can now compel him to testify against his former allies in Trump’s inner circle to bolster their case.Chesebro appeared in court on Friday and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit filing false documents. His plea agreement is for five years of probation, $5,000 in restitution, 100 hours of community service and an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia. Most importantly, it requires that he turn over any evidence in his possession and truthfully testify at all hearings and trials involving the case’s co-defendants, including Trump.Attorney Sidney Powell, who was also set to stand trial beginning on Friday, accepted a plea deal on Thursday, potentially pressuring Chesebro into doing the same. ABC reported that two days ago he had rejected a plea offer from prosecutors to avoid jail time by pleading guilty to the conspiracy charge.Fifteen additional co-defendants, including Trump, are set to stand trial next year as a part of the racketeering case brought by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis. Both Powell and Chesebro’s cases had been severed from the larger racketeering case because they filed demands for a speedy trial.Chesebro played two key roles in Trump’s post-election efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He wrote a pair of early December memos laying out a strategy for fake pro-Trump electors to meet in the six states where Trump lost to preserve a path forward to challenge the election in court and potentially on 6 January in Congress, and he laid out the legal argument that the vice-president could reject states’ electors during the election certification – while suggesting that Vice-President Mike Pence should recuse himself to avoid a conflict of interest.His decision to flip on Trump and his allies is potentially the most damaging for the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Trump attorney John Eastman, with whom he worked closely to devise the legal plot to challenge the election.Chesebro had faced seven felony counts, including a conspiracy count and six additional charges related to a plan to create “alternate electors” to falsely certify that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election. His plea deal came shortly after jury selection for his trial had begun on Friday.Attorneys for Chesebro and representatives for the Fulton county district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe decisions by Chesebro and Powell to take plea agreements could significantly strengthen Willis’s case against Trump, since both attorneys played key roles in the former president’s attempts to cling to office. Both have significant knowledge of the inner workings of the plot, and could offer new information at trial. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s ex-lawyer Sidney Powell pleads guilty in Georgia election case

      by

      Former lawyer for then-president Donald Trump Sidney Powell has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case in Fulton county, just days before jury selection for her trial was scheduled to start.The plea agreement has Powell paying a $6,000 fine and $2,700 restitution to the state of Georgia as well as writing an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, testifying at trial, and serving six years of probation.More details soon … More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Sidney Powell Pleads Guilty in Georgia Trump Case

      by

      Ms. Powell, a lawyer who pushed baseless theories about ballot fraud in 2020, is the second defendant to accept a plea deal in the election interference case. Sidney Powell, the Trump-aligned lawyer and conspiracy theorist indicted in Georgia and accused of participating in a plot to overturn former President Donald J. Trump’s election loss in 2020, pleaded guilty on Thursday morning to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference of election duties.Ms. Powell, who appeared in a downtown Atlanta courtroom, was sentenced to six years of probation for the charges, a significantly less-severe outcome than she would have faced if found guilty of the charges for which she was originally indicted, which included a violation of the state racketeering law.She was also fined $6,000 and agreed to pay $2,700 restitution to the State of Georgia, as well as write an apology letter “to the citizens of the state of Georgia.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Sidney Powell Seeks Distance From Trump Ahead of Georgia Trial

      by

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

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Turnover of Election Officials in Swing States Adds Strain for 2024, Report Says

      by

      A tide of resignations and retirements by election officials in battleground states, who have increasingly faced threats, harassment and interference, could further strain the election system in 2024, a national voting rights group warned in a report released on Thursday.The group, the Voting Rights Lab, said that the departures of election officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania and other swing states had the potential to undermine the independence of those positions.The 28-page report reveals the scope of challenges to the election system and underscores the hostile climate facing election officials across the nation. Resignations have swept through election offices in Texas and Virginia, while Republicans in Wisconsin have voted to remove the state’s nonpartisan head of elections, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.In Pennsylvania, more than 50 top election officials at the county level have departed since the 2020 election, according to the report, which said that the loss of their expertise was particularly concerning.In Arizona, the top election officials in 13 of 15 counties left their posts during the same period, the report said. Some of the defections have taken place in counties where former President Donald J. Trump’s allies have sought to require the hand-counting of ballots and have spread misinformation about electronic voting equipment.“They are leaving primarily due to citing harassment and security concerns that are stemming from disproven conspiracy theories in the state,” said Liz Avore, a senior adviser for the Voting Rights Lab.The Justice Department has charged at least 14 people with trying to intimidate election officials since it created a task force in 2021 to focus on such threats, according to the agency. It has secured nine convictions, including two on Aug. 31 in Georgia and Arizona, both battleground states.“A functioning democracy requires that the public servants who administer our elections are able to do their jobs without fearing for their lives,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement at the time.Along with the departures, the Voting Rights Lab report examined a series of issues that it said could create obstacles for the 2024 election, including the approval of new rules in Georgia and North Carolina since 2020 that are likely to increase the number of voter eligibility challenges and stiffen identification requirements.In another area of concern for the group, it drew attention to the expiration of emergency rules for absentee voting in New Hampshire that were enacted during the pandemic.At the same time, some other battleground states have expanded voting access. Michigan will offer at least nine days of early voting in 2024, accept more forms of identification and allow voters to opt in to a permanent mail voting list, while Nevada made permanent the distribution of mail ballots to all voters, the report said. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump allies offered plea agreements in Georgia election interference case

      by

      Fulton county prosecutors in Georgia have approached several defendants about plea agreements in the sprawling criminal racketeering case dealing with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Tuesday.Plea agreements are common in such cases accusing defendants of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act, where prosecutors will often try and get individuals at the lower level of a criminal enterprise to “flip” and assist the prosecution in exchange for a lighter sentence or immunity. The district attorney’s office has already reached immunity plea agreements with at least half of the fake set of electors in Georgia.Michael Roman, the head of election day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020, rejected a plea agreement, a person involved in his defense told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. One of his lawyers told the paper that his legal team had sought to negotiate for dismissal of the charges against him in exchange for truthful testimony. An attorney for Roman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Several people who were involved in the breach of Coffee county election equipment as well as a scheme to harass the election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman have also been approached, the paper reported.The Fulton county district attorney’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.Scott Hall, a bail bondsman who was involved in efforts to breach voting equipment in Coffee county, became the first of the 19 defendants to plead guilty last week. He received five years of probation, a $5,000 fine and 200 hours community service, and he agreed to write a letter of apology after pleading guilty to five counts of intentional interference of performance of election duties, a misdemeanor. Before pleading guilty, he gave a recorded statement to prosecutors, which they are likely to use as they make a criminal case against Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s attorneys.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and 18 of his associates were charged earlier this year on 41 counts of various crimes in Georgia, including racketeering and forgery, for their efforts to overturn the election. Two of the defendants, Powell and Ken Chesebro, have successfully severed their cases from the others and will be tried together soon after requesting a swift timetable. Jury selection is expected to begin in that case on 20 October. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump official Jeffrey Clark loses bid to move Georgia trial to federal court

      by

      A federal judge on Friday denied a request from Jeffrey Clark, the former Trump justice department official, to transfer from state to federal court his criminal case for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, saying he had failed to prove he had been acting within the scope of his official duties.The ruling from the US district judge Steven Jones, which came a day after Donald Trump decided against making a similar request, means Clark will be tried in Fulton county superior court – with its mainly Democratic jury pool – unless the ruling is overturned by the 11th circuit appeals court.Clark was charged last month alongside Donald Trump and top allies in the sprawling Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act case brought by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, because he had drafted a letter in December 2020 falsely claiming the justice department was investigating supposed election fraud in Georgia.The letter was never sent to Georgia officials and Clark had argued he had been acting within the scope of his official duties as the acting US assistant attorney general for the civil division when he drafted the memo, making him immune from state prosecution under a special federal law.But the judge rejected his arguments in a 15-page opinion that concluded the available evidence cut against him and his efforts to try to show he had satisfied a three-part test to determine whether he was eligible to move his case to federal court.“The letter pertained to election fraud and election interference concerns that were outside the gamut of his federal office. Consequently, Clark has not shown the required nexus for federal officer removal,” Jones wrote.Clark made two specific arguments at an evidentiary hearing last week: first, that he had been permitted to draft legal memos as the top official in the civil division, and second, that as an assistant attorney general, he could do work for any of the justice department’s sub-sections.The judge concluded that Clark’s first argument failed because election-related matters have never been in the purview of the civil division, which is involved in defending lawsuits that are filed against the United States or officers of the federal executive branch.The only witness to testify at the hearing, Jody Hunt, Clark’s predecessor as head of the civil division, also disclaimed Clark’s argument and affirmed that anything with respect to election irregularities would be handled by the civil rights division or the criminal division.The judge wrote that deposition transcripts showed that even Clark’s own assistant who helped him draft the letter, Kenneth Klukowski, had recounted to prosecutors he had been “shocked” at the assignment because “election-related matters are not part of the civil’s portfolio”.Clark’s lawyer had responded at the hearing that Clark had been in a unique position in 2020 because he defended the vice-president, Mike Pence, in an election-related lawsuit. But the judge dismissed that notion, saying Clark had to defend that suit because Pence was being sued as an actual federal officer.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJones also entirely rejected Clark’s second argument – that he had been acting within the scope of his justice department role because Trump could have delegated him authority to write the December 2020 letter – because he had failed to show any evidence that had actually happened.The contention from Clark’s lawyer Harry MacDougal at the hearing was that Trump had “ratified” Clark to look at election fraud allegations because he had been summoned to discuss the matter at an Oval Office meeting on 3 January 2020.However, the judge noted it was unclear whether Trump had expressly given Clark authority to write the letter. “Other than his counsel’s own vague and uncertain assertions, the Court has no evidence that the President directed Clark to work on election-related matters,” Jones wrote.“Instead, the evidence before this Court does not show the President’s involvement in this letter specifically until the January 3 meeting where the President decided not to send it to the Georgia officials,” Jones wrote, adding: “Any such delegation … would have been outside the scope of DoJ more broadly.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump ally is first to plead guilty in Georgia elections case

      by

      Former Republican bail bondsman Scott Hall, one of the 19 people charged alongside Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia, entered into a plea agreement on Friday, becoming the first defendant to plead guilty in the sprawling criminal case.The surprise move from Hall came after he gave a recorded statement, it was revealed in court, to prosecutors who are almost certain to use that testimony against the former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell when she goes to trial in October accused of several of the same crimes.A live video of the court proceeding showed Hall pleading guilty to five counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties, a misdemeanor charge.Hall was sentenced to five years’ probation, a $5,000 fine, 200 hours of community service, and to write an apology letter to the state.The description of the plea agreement suggested prosecutors were interested in having Hall flip against Trump and the other co-defendants in the wider Rico case, but especially against people like Powell who had similar legal exposure to him and also had direct links to Trump.In addition to contacts with Powell, Hall also had a 63 minute phone call with former Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark on 2 January 2021 where they discussed the 2020 election results in Georgia, according to the indictment. Clark, another co-defendant, lost his bid to transfer his case to federal court on Monday.Hall was indicted by an Atlanta-area grand jury last month on charges, brought by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, that he had played a role in trying to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election in a brazen plot to access voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia.The scheme involved several Trump allies hiring a team of forensics experts that gained unauthorized access to the voting machines and copied virtually every part of the elections systems, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.A day after the Capitol attack in Washington, surveillance footage showed data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in “imaging”, or making exact copies, of electronic devices, arrive at the Coffee county election office and meeting with Hall as well as others.What happened inside the elections office is only partially captured on surveillance video, but records show the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives and flash memory cards.Hall was charged with multiple counts including engaging in the Rico plot, conspiring to commit election fraud, conspiring to commit computer theft, conspiring to commit computer trespass, conspiracy to commit computer invasion of privacy and conspiracy to defraud the state of Georgia.Powell, the former Trump lawyer who was charged with many of the same criminal violations, has argued that she did nothing wrong because it was only her non-profit company that paid the forensics experts and that there had been authorization from officials to access the voting machines.The exact nature of the recorded statement that Hall gave prosecutors remains unclear because it took place before he revealed he had taken the plea agreement and was not available on the case docket.But Melissa Redmon, a former deputy Fulton county district attorney and assistant professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, said Hall probably got the agreement because his testimony would undercut Powell’s defense arguments that the voting machine breaches were above board.The jury selection for Powell’s case, where she is being tried alongside another ex-Trump lawyer called Kenneth Chesebro, is scheduled to start on 23 October. Powell and Chesebro are going separately from the other co-defendants after they requested a speedy trial under Georgia state law. More