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      Georgia special grand jury recommended charges against Lindsey Graham and former senators – live

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      From 1h agoThe special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.All told, the special grand jurors in Georgia recommended charges against 39 people for trying to overturn the state’s elections, but Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s indictment only targeted 19 people, Donald Trump among them.Among those who were named in the report, but not charged:David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were Georgia’s Republican senators, until both were ousted from office by the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in elections held the day before the January 6 insurrection.The special grand jury in Fulton county recommended that Perdue be charged “over the persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees between November of 2020 and January of 2021” – the period when Donald Trump was trying to overturn his election loss. The vote was 16 jurors in favor, one against, and one abstention.The jurors also recommended charges against both Loeffler and Perdue for “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”. However there was more dissent on this count. For Perdue, the vote was 17 in favor and four against, while for Loeffler, the vote was 14 in favor, 6 against, and one abstention.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis ultimately did not indict either of the former lawmakers.Lindsey Graham’s name appeared early as Donald Trump’s attempts to stay in the White House began shortly after his re-election defeat in November 2020.Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger told the press that the South Carolina senator had called him to ask if it was possible to throw away mail-in ballots in counties crucial to Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. From the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino’s report at the time:
      Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.
      In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.
      Raffensperger was reportedly “stunned” by the question, in which Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.
      “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
      Graham confirmed the conversation to reporters on Capitol Hill but said it was “ridiculous” to suggest that he pressured Raffensperger to throw out legally cast absentee ballots. According to Graham, he only wanted to learn more about the process for verifying signatures, because what happens in Georgia “affects the whole nation”.
      “I thought it was a good conversation,” Graham said on Monday after the interview was published. “I’m surprised to hear he characterized it that way.”
      Trump has refused to accept results showing Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, falsely blaming rampant fraud and irregularities that election officials in both parties have dismissed as meritless.
      The special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.The full report of the special grand jury whose investigation led to the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result has been released.We’re digging into it and will let you know what it says.The special grand jury report that was used in the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others in Georgia for trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results is expected to be released any minute now.While parts of it have already been unsealed, we will finally be getting a look at the full report by the jurors empaneled by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis. There are two main pieces of news expected from the report:
      Whether the grand jurors recommended charges be brought against people who Willis ultimately opted not to pursue.
      The vote counts for each person the jurors said should be indicted, and whether there were any significant splits within the panel.
      Yesterday, Ron DeSantis had a testy exchange with an audience member who accused the Republican governor of backing policies in Florida that enabled violence against Black people – such as last month’s shooting by a racist gunman in Jacksonville:Clearly smarting over the exchange, DeSantis later went on Fox News to call the questioner a “nutjob”:While Joe Biden is in India for a meeting of G20 leaders, Republicans angling to replace him next year are continuing their campaigns, including Ron DeSantis – who may have done himself more harm than good by skipping a meeting with the president after a hurricane struck Florida. Here’s the story, from the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe:One reality of Florida politics is that a bad hurricane for the state traditionally blows good fortune for its governor. It was true for Rick Scott, elected a senator in November 2018, one month after guiding Florida through Category 5 Hurricane Michael; and again for Ron DeSantis, whose landslide re-election last year followed his much-praised handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.This year, however, DeSantis is struggling to shake the dark clouds of Hurricane Idalia, as his return to the national stage to try to rescue his flailing presidential campaign after an 11-day break has been further scarred by his “petty and small” snub of Joe Biden’s visit to Florida last weekend to survey the storm’s damage.Opponents seized on it as a partisan politicization of a climate disaster, contrasting the Republican Florida governor’s approach to a year ago after Ian, when DeSantis and Biden put their differences aside to praise each other and tour the worst-affected areas with their respective first ladies.“Your job as governor is to be the tour guide for the president, to make sure the president sees your people, sees the damage, sees the suffering, what’s going on and what needs to be done to rebuild it,” Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade.“You’re doing your job. And unfortunately, he put politics ahead of his job,” added Christie, who was applauded by Democrats and savaged by Republicans for working closely with Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy mauled his state in 2012.The Twitter/X account of Joe Biden, who is currently flying on Air Force One to New Delhi for a summit of G20 nations, just released video showing him touring the renovated situation room.That’s the space in the White House where the president goes to handle emergencies or highly sensitive operations:Perhaps the most famous appearance of a president in the situation room is Barack Obama’s from 1 May 2011, as he watched US soldiers kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. His photographer Pete Souza captured the scene:Yesterday, Donald Trump indicated he may ask that his trial in the Georgia election subversion case be moved to federal court, which the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported could have a number of advantages for the former president:Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.The Georgia special grand jury report that is expected to be released at 10am ET today could reveal whether the investigative panel thought anyone else besides Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants should face charges for meddling in the state’s election result three years ago.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis convened the panel and used its subpoena power to compel witness testimony, and portions of its final report have already been released. The special grand jury did not indict Trump – that was done by one of the regular grand juries she convened in August.Good morning, US politics live blog readers. It’s going to be another big Friday in one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump, while US president Joe Biden is in India for G20 and a crucial bilateral with the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Here’s some of what’s ahead:
      The report of the special grand jury in Georgia that investigated Trump in the election subversion case – where the now-former president attempted to overturn the 2020 election in the swing state – is expected to be unsealed today.
      Biden is due to touch down in New Delhi, India, in under two hours, a day before the start of the G20 summit there. He and Modi will hold a bilateral meeting shortly after the US president arrives. The specter of Russia’s war in Ukraine looms over the event.
      Speaking of criminal cases against former US presidents, on this day 49 years ago Republican president Gerald Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon” to former president Richard Nixon covering his entire term in office, the AP notes.
      Trump will attend a rally tonight in South Dakota and the state’s rightwing governor Kristi Noem is expected to endorse his run for the 2024 Republican nomination for the White House. Noem is considered a vice-presidential hopeful. More

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      Georgia report reveals jury called for criminal charges against Lindsey Graham and others

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      A special purpose grand jury in Georgia that investigated Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election for nearly two years recommended bringing criminal charges against several people who ultimately were not charged, including US senator Lindsey Graham, former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as the influential conservative figure Cleta Mitchell.Those recommendations were revealed Friday when the special purpose grand jury’s final report was unsealed. A regular grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election last month. Those charged include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and former Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer.The special purpose grand jury recommended bringing charges against Graham, Perdue and Loefller “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election with efforts focused on Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia”.Graham, a key Trump ally in the senate, called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger after the election and inquired about tossing aside legally cast mail-in ballots. Perdue reportedly pushed Georgia governor Brian Kemp to call a special session of the Georgia legislature in order to overturn the election results. Loeffler initially said she would vote against certification of Biden’s win in the US Senate before reversing course after the January 6 riot and voting in favor of certification.Mitchell, who remains an influential figure on the right today, was on the infamous January 2021 phone call in which Trump asked Raffensperger to find votes in his favor. The special purpose grand jury unanimously recommended indicting her under several Georgia statutes.The special purpose grand jury also recommended indicting Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Boris Epshteyn, who remains a top Trump aide.It also recommended charges against Burt Jones, who served as a fake elector and is now lieutenant governor of Georgia. A special prosecutor is handling an investigation of Jones after Willis was barred from investigating him after hosting a fundraiser for a political rival. More

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      Special Grand Jury in Georgia Recommended Charging Lindsey Graham in Trump Case

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      A special grand jury made the recommendation last year after hearing from dozens of witnesses on whether Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election.A special grand jury that investigated election interference allegations in Georgia recommended indicting a number of Trump allies who were not charged, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser.In its final report, which a judge unsealed on Friday, the panel also recommended charges against Boris Epshteyn, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s main lawyers, as well as a number of other Trump-aligned lawyers, including Cleta Mitchell and Lin Wood.Mr. Trump and 18 allies were charged in a racketeering indictment that was handed up last month by a regular grand jury in Fulton County, Ga.The special grand jury, which Fulton County prosecutors convened to help with the investigation, met at an Atlanta courthouse from June to December of last year. It spent much of that time hearing testimony from 75 witnesses on the question of whether Mr. Trump or any of his allies had sought to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.Under Georgia law, the panel could not issue indictments itself. In the Trump case, that task fell to a regular grand jury that was seated over the summer. The regular grand jury heard evidence from prosecutors for one day in early August before voting to indict all 19 defendants whom prosecutors had sought to charge.The special grand jury’s mandate was to write a report with recommendations on whether indictments were warranted in the investigation, which was led by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Ms. Willis asked to convene a special grand jury because such panels have subpoena powers, and she was concerned that some witnesses would not cooperate without being subpoenaed.Portions of the report were publicly released in February, but those excerpts did not indicate who had been recommended for indictment, or on what charges. The release of the full nine-page report this week was ordered by Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court.Read the Report by the Special Grand Jury in Georgia That Investigated President TrumpThe special grand jury investigated whether Mr. Trump interfered in the 2020 election in the state. Their report included recommendations on whether indictments were warranted, and for whom.Read DocumentMr. Epshteyn declined on Friday to comment about the report. Others whom the advisory panel recommended for indictment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.After the special grand jury recommended indictments of about 40 people, the district attorney had to weigh which prosecutions would be the most likely to succeed in court. A potential case against Mr. Graham, for example, would have been hampered by the fact that there were conflicting accounts of telephone calls he made to a top Georgia official. Mr. Graham has repeatedly said that he did nothing wrong.Fulton County prosecutors indicated in court filings last year that they were interested in those calls by Mr. Graham, a onetime critic of Mr. Trump who became a staunch supporter. They were made shortly after the November 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.Mr. Raffensperger has said that in those calls, Mr. Graham suggested the rejection of all mail-in votes from Georgia counties with high rates of questionable signatures, a step that would have excluded many more Democratic votes than Republican ones. But the phone calls are not known to have been recorded, and recollections differ about exactly what was said — factors that probably figured in the decision not to charge Mr. Graham.In a filing seeking Mr. Graham’s testimony, prosecutors said that he “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about re-examining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” and “made reference to allegations of widespread voter fraud” during those calls.A few weeks after the calls, Mr. Trump followed up with a call of his own to Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, saying that he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes, enough to reverse his loss in Georgia. Mr. Trump’s call, which was recorded, is the basis for a number of charges in the 98-page indictment.Mr. Graham has characterized as “ridiculous” the idea that he had suggested to Mr. Raffensperger that he throw out legally cast votes, and the senator’s lawyers have argued that he was carrying out a legitimate investigative function as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a bid to avoid testifying before the special grand jury last year, Mr. Graham waged a legal battle that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately, he was forced to testify.Afterward, he said that he had spent two hours giving testimony behind closed doors, where he said he “answered all questions.”Mr. Graham has been critical of prosecutors in the Georgia case and the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump, characterizing them as liberals who were “weaponizing the law” to unfairly target the former president.After the Georgia indictment, Mr. Graham told reporters in South Carolina that he was not cooperating with the Fulton County prosecutors, dismissing the idea as “crazy stuff.”“I went, had my time, and I haven’t heard from them since,” he said. More

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      Trump may seek to transfer Georgia 2020 election charges to federal court

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      Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.There is no obligation for a defendant to inform a judge about a hypothetical motion and so, in that sense, Trump’s filing was aimed more at giving notice to the judge who is deliberating on whether all the defendants in the case should be tried at the same time.A spokesperson for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.Last month, the Atlanta-area grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment against Trump and 18 others, alleging that the former president violated Georgia’s state Rico statute in pursuing a multi-pronged effort to throw out the results of a fair election.For the moment, two of the defendants, the former Trump election litigation lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, are scheduled for trial on 23 October after they both sought a speedy trial. But it remains unclear whether everyone else will also go to trial on that date.The removal question has major and complicated implications: if Trump or Meadows manages to transfer to federal court, that could upend any trial in Fulton county superior court that had started or finished because of potential jurisdictional issues.Trump can wait until 30 days after his arraignment – or in this case, his arraignment waiver and not-guilty plea filed on 31 August – to decide whether to seek removal to federal court.The Trump legal team is almost certain to wait until the last moment to file, the people said, given Trump’s overarching legal strategy with all of his criminal cases is to delay, potentially even beyond the 2024 election for which he is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. More

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      Fani Willis Sharply Rebukes House Republican Investigating Her

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      The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, accused Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio of trying to obstruct her prosecution of the racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies.The district attorney leading a criminal case against Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia accused Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio of trying to obstruct her prosecution of the case in a sharply worded letter she sent on Thursday.Soon after the district attorney, Fani T. Willis, a Democrat, announced last month that she was bringing a racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 other defendants for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, Mr. Jordan, a Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that he was going to investigate Ms. Willis over whether her prosecution of Mr. Trump was politically motivated.In her letter, Ms. Willis accused Mr. Jordan of trying “to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous partisan misrepresentations,” and of not understanding how the state’s racketeering law works.“Your attempt to invoke congressional authority to intrude upon and interfere with an active criminal case in Georgia is flagrantly at odds with the Constitution,” she added. “The defendants in this case have been charged under state law with committing state crimes. There is absolutely no support for Congress purporting to second guess or somehow supervise an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation and prosecution.”The letter came as the defendants and the prosecution continued sparring in legal filings over where and when the trial would take place. In a new filing, Mark Meadows, a defendant, who served as the White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump, was seeking a stay of the proceedings in state court until a judge ruled on his motion to move his case to federal court.The Georgia case is one of four criminal indictments that have been brought against Mr. Trump this year; Mr. Jordan’s investigation of Ms. Willis is the latest example of House Republicans using their power in Congress to try to derail efforts to prosecute the former president.When he announced his inquiry last month, Mr. Jordan, a close Trump ally, said it would look for any evidence of communication between Ms. Willis and the Biden administration and examine her office’s use of federal grant money.While Mr. Jordan expressed concerns that former federal officials were being unfairly targeted in a state prosecution, some of the issues he raised had little to do with the underlying facts of the investigation. For example, in a letter to Ms. Willis, he said her new campaign website had included a reference to a New York Times article that mentioned the Trump investigation.Ms. Willis’s response is the latest sign that she will not take attacks on her office and the investigation quietly — a striking difference in style from that of Jack Smith, the more reserved and laconic special prosecutor handling the two federal criminal cases against Mr. Trump.She has a track record as a pugnacious, law-and-order prosecutor, and is pursuing racketeering cases not only against the former president and his allies, but a number of high-profile Atlanta rappers accused of operating a criminal gang.In a heated email exchange in July over the terms of Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, providing testimony in her investigation, Ms. Willis called the governor’s lawyer, Brian McEvoy, “wrong and confused” and “rude,” after Mr. McEvoy expressed frustration over mixed signals he said he had received from her office, and asserted that there had been “leaks” associated with her investigation.“You have taken my kindness as weakness,” she wrote, adding: “Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”On Thursday, scores of Trump supporters gathered near the State Capitol for a news conference and rally, demanding that the state legislature call a special session to defund Ms. Willis’s office. The effort, led by Colton Moore, a freshman state senator, has little support among Mr. Moore’s fellow lawmakers and is almost certain to fail.Mr. Moore, who has drawn attention and praise in recent weeks from news outlets supportive of Mr. Trump, said that Ms. Willis was engaged in “politicization” of the justice system. His constituents, he said, “don’t want their tax dollars funding this type of corrupt government power.”In her letter to Mr. Jordan, Ms. Willis invited him to purchase a book about racketeering statutes written by one her fellow prosecutors on the Trump case, John Floyd, titled “RICO State by State.”“As a non-member of the bar,” she wrote, “you can purchase a copy for two hundred forty-nine dollars.” More

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      First hearing held in Georgia for 2020 election interference case

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      A Fulton county judge said that he hoped to decide on trial schedules in the Georgia election interference case next week, a case for which a joint trial will take approximately four months, according to state prosecutors.On Wednesday, the judge Scott McAfee held the first hearing in the Georgia election interference case involving 19 co-defendants including ex-president Donald Trump, who have been charged with interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.During the hearing, a prosecutor from the Fulton county district attorney’s office said that a joint trial involving all 19 defendants will take approximately four months.The prosecutor Nathan Wade also said that the trial will involve approximately 150 witnesses and that the timeline does not account for jury selection.McAfee also denied the request of Kenneth Chesebro to sever his case from his co-defendant Sidney Powell and ordered the two defendants to stand trial on 23 October together.McAfee disagreed with requests from Chesebro and Powell – both attorneys who worked alongside the Trump campaign in 2020 – who wanted their cases to be handled separately from other defendants. Both Chesebro and Powell have also filed motions for a speedy trial.Chesebro’s attorney Scott Grubman argued that while Chesebro’s case surrounds the fake electors scheme, Powell’s case revolves primarily around Coffee county’s voting systems breach.“You’re going to have two cases in one. You’re going to have days, if not weeks, God forbid months, of testimony just related to the Coffee county allegations,” Grubman argued.Manubir “Manny” Arora, another attorney of Chesebro’s, echoed similar sentiments, saying that Powell’s charges have “nothing to do with Mr Chesebro”.Meanwhile, state prosecutor Wade argued that even if Chesebro and Powell’s cases were severed, the Fulton county district attorney’s office would “absolutely” still require the same amount of time and witnesses to try the case.Nevertheless, McAfee disagreed, saying: “Based on what’s been presented today, I am not finding the severance from Mr Chesbro or Ms Powell is necessary to achieve a fair determination of the guilt or innocence for either defendant in this case.”McAfee, who decided to adhere to Chesebro and Powell’s request for a speedy trial, has yet to issue a final ruling on whether the remaining 17 co-defendants will also be tried in October.“It sounds like the state is still sticking to the position that all these defendants should remain and they want to address some of these removal issues,” McAfee said on Wednesday. “I’m willing to hear that. I remain very skeptical, but we can – I’m willing to hear what you have to say on it,” he added.McAfee gave prosecutors until Tuesday to submit a brief on whether the 23 October trial will include only Chesebro and Powell or all of the defendants. More

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      Trump Georgia Case: Defendants Powell and Chesebro to Get Early Trial Together

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      Sidney Powell followed Kenneth Chesebro in demanding a speedy trial, but neither defendant in the election interference case wanted to be tried with the other.Two of Donald J. Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case will go to trial together on Oct. 23, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, had asked to be tried separately from one another.The ruling from Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, however, is contingent on the case remaining in state court — a situation that could change if other defendants succeed at moving the case into a federal courtroom.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is still holding out hope that all 19 defendants in the racketeering case can be tried together. One of her prosecutors said during a hearing on Wednesday that the state would take approximately four months to present its case, calling roughly 150 witnesses. That estimate does not include the time it would take to pick the jury.But during the hearing, Judge McAfee said he remained “very skeptical” that a single trial for all 19 defendants could work. For one thing, some of the accused, including Ms. Powell and Mr. Chesebro, have invoked their right to a speedy trial while others have not.The questions raised at the hearing underscore the tremendous logistical challenges prosecutors face in the racketeering case charging the former president and his allies with a multipronged effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It is one of four criminal trials looming for Mr. Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election.So far, since his indictment in the Georgia case, Mr. Trump’s only request has been to sever his case from those of his co-defendants who are seeking a speedy trial.A federal judge is mulling requests from five defendants to move their cases to federal court. Mr. Chesebro demanded a speedy trial in state court.Ms. Powell made a similar demand soon after, but neither defendant wanted to be tried with the other. Both asked the judge to sever their cases from each other’s.Lawyers for Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell noted that even though their clients were charged with participating in a conspiracy to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss in Georgia, the two were charged with very different roles in it.Prosecutors say that Mr. Chesebro, a lawyer, took part in a sweeping plot to create slates of fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in several key swing states that he had lost. The charges against Ms. Powell, also a lawyer, stem from her involvement in a data breach by Trump supporters in an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.In court filings, Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers argued that the allegations against Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell were “akin to oil and water; wholly separate and impossible to mix (into one conspiracy).” One of the lawyers, Scott Grubman, raised the possibility that the same jury hearing his client’s case would be subjected to weeks, if not months, of testimony about the data breach that he was not involved in.Attorney Brian T. Rafferty, who is defending Sidney Powell, argues before Judge McAfee on Wednesday,Pool photo by Jason GetzBrian T. Rafferty, a lawyer for Ms. Powell, sounded a similar theme, arguing that Ms. Powell’s defense was “going to get washed away” by lengthy discussions about the fake electors scheme.But Will Wooten, a deputy district attorney, argued that Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell were part of the same overarching racketeering conspiracy. “The conspiracy evolved: One thing didn’t work, so we move on to the next thing,” he said. “That thing didn’t work, so we move on to the next thing.”Judge McAfee, in the end, decided that Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell would get a fair trial if tried together. He also noted that it would save time and money to combine them. Still, when or where all 19 defendants will ultimately face trial remains uncertain. The efforts to move the case to federal court have been led by Mark Meadows, a defendant who served as White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump. Such a move would expand the jury pool into suburban counties that are somewhat more supportive of Mr. Trump, and it would increase the likelihood of the United States Supreme Court, a third of whose members were appointed by Mr. Trump, getting involved in potential appeals.Defendants would still be tried under state laws, however, and the case would not be subject to a president’s power to pardon federal crimes.While typically only federal officials can get their cases moved to federal court, it is possible that if even one defendant succeeds at it, the others will come with him or her.Some defendants who were not federal employees at the time the alleged crimes took place are claiming that their role as bogus Trump electors qualifies them for a move to federal court. A lawyer for Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator, argued last month in a legal filing that Mr. Still was acting “in his capacity as a contingent United States presidential elector” and thus “was, or was acting under, an officer of the United States.”Ms. Willis’s office scoffed at that assertion, arguing in a motion filed Tuesday that Mr. Still “and his fellow fraudulent electors conspired in a scheme to impersonate true Georgia presidential electors; their fiction is not entitled to recognition by this Court.”Mr. Trump, like the other defendants, has pleaded not guilty, waiving an arraignment that was supposed to have taken place on Wednesday. He continues to use the Georgia investigation as an opportunity to raise money.“Today was supposed to be my scheduled arraignment in Atlanta,” he wrote to potential donors on Wednesday, adding that, “Instead, I want to make today a massive grassroots fundraising day.” More

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      Mark Meadows pleads not guilty in Georgia 2020 election indictment

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      Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff, has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of participating in an illegal scheme to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and will not appear in court in Atlanta this week.Scott McAfee, the Fulton county superior court judge, had scheduled arraignment hearings for Wednesday for Meadows, Donald Trump and the other 17 people charged last month in a sprawling indictment. By midday Tuesday, all of the defendants had filed paperwork pleading not guilty in filings with the court and waived their rights to an arraignment hearing.During an arraignment hearing, defendants have the right to have the charges against them read and to enter a formal plea. Trump pleaded not guilty in a court filing Thursday and Rudy Giuliani entered his plea Friday, with the rest of the pleas trickling in over several days.While all of the defendants had filed the paperwork by Tuesday, some of them did not file 48 hours ahead of the scheduled arraignments as required by the judge. And, while the judge requires the waiver to be “personally signed by the defendant”, a lawyer for Misty Hampton, a former elections director in Coffee county, filed the waiver without getting Hampton to sign it herself. It was not immediately clear whether the judge would reject any of the waivers as a result.Meadows and four others are seeking to move the charges against them to federal court. But during a hearing last week called on Meadows’ request, US district judge Steve Jones made clear that if he had not ruled by the arraignment date or if the case was not moved to federal court, Meadows would not be excused from arraignment.Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, former Trump lawyers, each have filed demands for a speedy trial, meaning their trials would have to start by early November, and have asked to be tried alone. The judge scheduled a hearing on Wednesday about their motions to sever themselves from the others.After Chesebro filed his speedy trial demand, Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, asked McAfee to set a 23 October trial date for all defendants. The judge set a trial to begin that date for Chesebro alone.Trump’s lawyer has filed a motion asking that he be tried separately from any defendant who asks for a speedy trial.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring Wednesday’s hearing, McAfee wrote that he intends to ask prosecutors how long they expect it will take to present their case against all 19 defendants together or for any groupings of defendants, including the number of witnesses they plan to call and the number and size of exhibits they will likely introduce. More