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      Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

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      Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”Ellis, 38, was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.Ellis was one of 18 Trump associates charged with him in Georgia over attempts to overturn Biden’s victory there. Charged with violating state anti-racketeering laws and solicitation of violation of an oath by a public officer, she was granted $100,000 bail and pleaded not guilty.Trump pleaded not guilty to 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges.Denying all wrongdoing and claiming political persecution, he also faces four federal counts related to election subversion; 40 federal counts related to retention of classified information; 34 state counts in New York over hush-money payments; and civil cases including a $250m lawsuit lodged by the New York attorney general over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”.Nonetheless, Trump leads polling regarding the 2024 Republican presidential primary by vast margins, in national and key state surveys.Ellis is a former counsel for the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic group, whose claims to be a constitutional lawyer have been widely doubted.Described by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “a lawyer whom Trump sought out after seeing her television commentary”, in 2020 Ellis rose from relative obscurity to become part of what she called an “elite strike force team” working to overturn Trump’s defeat by Biden.That effort failed. American Family Radio signed up Ellis in December last year. On her show on Thursday, she spoke to Steve Deace, another rightwing host.Deace said: “Before that man [Trump] needs to be president again … [to] escape the quote-unquote, ‘witch-hunts’, that man needs Jesus again because … his ambitions would be fueled by showing some self-awareness. And he won’t do it because he can’t admit, ‘I’m not God.’”Ellis said Deace had “perfectly articulated exactly how I as a voter feel”. She knew Trump well “as a friend, as a former boss”, she said, adding: “I have great love and respect for him personally.“But everything that you just said resonates with me as exactly why I simply can’t support him for elected office again. Why I have chosen to distance is because of that, frankly, malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.“And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling.“And I think that we do need to, as Americans and as conservatives and particularly as Christians, take this very seriously and understand where are we putting our vote.” More

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      Trump’s Georgia charges thrust Coffee county in to the spotlight. Its people seek accountability

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      The Coffee county board of elections in Georgia held its first meeting on Tuesday after being mentioned more than 50 times in Fulton county’s indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for allegedly participating in a criminal conspiracy to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Local residents, still frustrated over a lack of accountability for officials who may have known about the conspiracy, pressured the reluctant board for an independent investigation.The small, rural county 200 miles south-east of Atlanta made its way into the indictment – and global headlines – because Trump allegedly sent associates there to copy software and other digital information from the state’s elections system in early 2021. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, called it “the largest voting systems breach in US history”.The coalition is in the sixth year of a federal lawsuit over vulnerabilities in Georgia’s computerized voting system and is responsible for uncovering much of the information that Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis used in the parts of her indictment concerning the breach.Although Misty Hampton, the former Coffee county elections director, and Cathy Latham, the county’s former GOP chair, were both named in the indictment, local residents said many questions remain unanswered about how Trump’s associates were able to do what they did, and who knew what, when.Their concern is not just what happened in 2021, but that the digital information obtained is now in an unknown number of hands, meaning that future elections could be affected in Georgia and in other states that use Dominion Voting Systems and equipment made by partner companies.County residents wanted to know why board chairman Wendell Stone did not tell the board and the public about the breach when he learned about it from an email in 2022. Stone told the Guardian he was not sure if he ever saw the email.Several dozen members of the public filled a small room in a nondescript, low-slung building near railroad tracks in the county seat of Douglas, a city of about 12,000, seeking answers. What had been until recently a group of mostly Black residents concerned about the breach was nearly split between Black and white – a reflection of the population of Douglas.The brief, business part of the meeting was taken up by new elections director Christy Nipper announcing she would be certified later the same day to manage the state’s computerized elections system, and asking the board’s five members to buy a tape recorder for recording future meetings: “If we’re going to be under a microscope,” she said, “I want to make sure we get it right.”Jim Hudson, an 80-year-old retired attorney, pushed the board to initiate its own investigation into the multiple occasions various Trump associates entered the rural county’s elections office, copying digital information. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) is conducting an investigation, but has not released results.“I’m not a rabble rouser,” said Hudson. “But this deserves your attention. This thing reaches coast to coast – from California all the way to the east coast,” he said, naming some of the many national outlets that have covered the story.Judi Worrell, who said she moved to Coffee county 50 years ago, echoed Hudson, mentioning a nephew in British Columbia who had seen the news and asked her: “What’s going on down there?”“I can’t understand how people thought you could get away with this!” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHudson and Marks both noted that Stone likely knew about the breach as early as 2 May 2022, when Washington Post reporter Emma Brown sent him an email asking about it – and did nothing to engage the board or explain to the public what had happened. The email was also discovered through coalition open records requests.“You should have immediately contacted the board,” Hudson said.Asked after the meeting, Stone told the Guardian, “I don’t know if I ever read that email,” referring to Brown’s query, which had the subject, “Washington Post inquiry.”“You know how it is – you may see something, and not realize the significance of it,” he added.Asked about why he doesn’t back Hudson’s proposal for the board to hire independent counsel to investigate the breach, Stone said: “I simply feel it’s not an expense taxpayers should be paying.”Stone also pointed to the GBI’s investigation. “I feel certain that a detailed explanation will come out once [their] investigation has concluded,” he said. “The most important question is what’s being done to ensure that election results are … fair, transparent and correct in this county moving forward.”Sitting in the first row of the meeting was attorney Ben Perkins, who had been hired in recent months to help “properly conduct our meetings in a way that is appropriate and effective”, according to board minutes from a previous meeting. The county has paid Perkins nearly $15,000 in the last two months, according to a records request filed by the Guardian.After the meeting, several dozen members of the public, plus Nipper and board members Ernestine Thomas-Clark and Paula Scott, met at a nearby church, where Marks answered questions on the breach, drawing from the emails, video and other information the coalition has obtained.Thomas-Clark, the only Black board member and the only one to back the proposal for an independent counsel, repeated her support for a locally-run investigation. “I think there’s more to be uncovered,” she said. “Something is not being said.”Local resident Mary White explained that public expressions of concern about the breach to date had mostly involved Black residents, most of whom vote Democrat. “The majority of the people on the board and the county commission vote Republican, which goes with being white,” she said. Coffee county’s population is about 70% white, but slightly more than half of Douglas’ population is Black.At the same time, she said, a small but growing group of white residents was concerned about what happened at the county’s election office. Worrell suggested she would be glad to hold a meeting on the issue at her church, which is mostly attended by white residents of Douglas. “We’re the exception,” said White, about white neighbors of hers willing to get involved in seeking answers. “We all know who we are.”“But it’s not a Black versus white issue,” she added. “It’s a voting rights issue.”This article is part of US Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on 15 September, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org More

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      Georgia Judge Orders 2 Separate Trials for Defendants in Trump Election Case

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      Two defendants will get a speedy trial starting in October, but the others, including Donald J. Trump, can have more time to prepare, the judge ruled.A judge on Thursday granted former President Donald J. Trump and 16 others a separate trial from two of their co-defendants who will go to trial next month in the Georgia election interference case.The judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, has laid out an expedited trial schedule for Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, two lawyers who helped Mr. Trump try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. The two had invoked their right under Georgia law to seek a speedy trial, in part to avoid the high cost of a more protracted legal fight.Their trial is set to begin with jury selection on Oct. 23. Judge McAfee, in a seven-page order on Thursday, said that he hoped to have a jury seated by Nov. 3 to comply with the speedy trial law.A trial date for Mr. Trump and the other 16 co-defendants has not been set. In his order, Judge McAfee described what was to come as a “mega-trial.” But he also raised the possibility that those 17 might not all be tried together in the end, if some make successful arguments to break off their cases.“Additional divisions of these 17 defendants may well be required,” the judge wrote. “That is a decision for another day once the many anticipated pretrial motions have been resolved and a realistic trial date approaches.”All 19 defendants were charged in August in a wide-ranging state racketeering indictment after an investigation into election interference in Georgia, which Mr. Trump lost in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes. In the weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump made baseless claims that he was the victim of significant electoral fraud. The indictment says that he and the other 18 defendants were part of a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn his loss in Georgia in various ways.Questions about the size, shape and timing of trials for a case of such magnitude have yet to be fully resolved. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office, which is leading the prosecution, had wanted all 19 defendants to be tried together, arguing in a filing on Tuesday that “breaking this case up into multiple lengthy trials would create an enormous strain on the judicial resources.”But in his order on Thursday, Judge McAfee noted that some lawyers would need more time to prepare. He also noted that the Fulton County courthouse “simply contains no courtroom adequately large enough to hold all 19 defendants.”Further complicating matters is the fact that several defendants are seeking to move their cases to federal court. If just one of them succeeds, there is a possibility that the whole group could be forced into the federal system, although experts say the law on this issue is not clear.Regardless, the prospect of a federal judge presiding over a state trial dimmed somewhat last week, when Judge Steve C. Jones, a U.S. district court judge, rejected a removal request from Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff and a defendant.Mr. Meadows has appealed. Judge Jones is scheduled to hold hearings next week on similar requests from Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who sought to intervene after the Georgia election, and three other co-defendants who served as bogus electors on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s lawyer in Georgia, Steven H. Sadow, has indicated in court documents that the former president may also soon ask to have his case moved to federal court.On Thursday morning, as Judge McAfee held a hearing on a number of pretrial motions, tensions between the prosecution and defense were palpable. Brian T. Rafferty, a lawyer for Ms. Powell, accused the district attorney’s office of failing to respond to his request for certain documents as part of the discovery process.At another point, Scott Grubman, a lawyer for Mr. Chesebro, angrily accused Daysha D. Young, a Fulton County assistant district attorney, of engaging in a “personal attack” on Mr. Grubman’s co-counsel, Manny Arora, after Ms. Young mentioned a 2010 incident in which a judge barred Mr. Arora from contacting grand jurors in a separate case.Mr. Chesebro was indicted based on his role as an architect of the bogus electors scheme. His lawyers have called for his case to be dismissed, arguing that he was merely “researching and finding precedents in order to form a legal opinion, which was then supplied to his client, the Trump campaign.”Ms. Powell was indicted on charges relating to the copying of sensitive voter system data in rural Coffee County, Ga., by Trump allies seeking evidence of fraud. On Wednesday, her lawyer filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that county elections officials had allowed access to the elections system there in January 2021.“This means that no data was stolen, there was no fraud, and nothing was done without authorization,” the motion said. More

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      Georgia judge allows key pair be tried separately from Trump and 16 others

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      A Georgia judge has ruled that Donald Trump and 16 others will be tried separately from two defendants who are set to go to trial next month in the case accusing them of participating in an illegal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro had filed demands for a speedy trial, and the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee had set their trial to begin on 23 October. Trump and other defendants had asked to be tried separately from Powell and Chesebro, with some saying they could not be ready by the late October trial date.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, last month obtained an indictment against Trump and the 18 others, charging them under the state’s anti-racketeering law in their efforts to deny Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over the Republican incumbent.Willis had been pushing to try all 19 defendants together, arguing that it would be more efficient and fairer. McAfee cited the tight timetable, among other issues, as a factor in his decision to separate Trump and 16 others from Powell and Chesebro.“The precarious ability of the court to safeguard each defendant’s due process rights and ensure adequate pre-trial preparation on the current accelerated track weighs heavily, if not decisively, in favor of severance,” McAfee wrote. He added that it might be necessary to further divide them into smaller groups for trial.The development is likely to be welcome news to other defendants looking to avoid being tied by prosecutors to Powell, who perhaps more than anyone else in the Trump camp was vocal about publicly pushing baseless conspiracy theories linking foreign governments to election interferences.Another defendant in the Atlanta case, Rudy Giuliani, has sought to distance himself from Powell and spoke at length about her in an interview with special counsel Jack Smith’s team in Washington, according to a person familiar with his account who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.Also, Trump-aligned lawyer Eric Herschmann, who in 2020 tried to push back against efforts to undo the election, told the congressional committee investigating the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 that he regarded Powell’s ideas as “nuts”.Chesebro and Powell had sought to be tried separately from each other, but the judge denied that request.Chesebro is accused of working on the coordination and execution of a plan to have 16 Georgia Republicans sign a certificate declaring falsely that Trump won and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors. Powell is accused of participating in a breach of election equipment in rural Coffee county.The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of alleged acts by Trump or his allies to undo his 2020 loss in Georgia, including suggesting the secretary of state, a Republican, could help find enough votes for Trump to win the battleground state; harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favorable to Trump.Further explaining his decision to separate the others from Powell and Chesebro, McAfee said he was skeptical of prosecutors’ arguments that trying all 19 defendants together would be more efficient. He noted that the Fulton county courthouse does not have a courtroom big enough to hold 19 defendants, their lawyers and others who would need to be present, and relocating to a bigger venue could raise security concerns.Prosecutors also had argued that because each defendant is charged under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico Act, the state plans to call the same witnesses and present the same evidence for any trial in the case. They told the judge last week that they expect any trial would take four months, not including jury selection.But McAfee pointed out that each additional defendant increases the time needed for opening statements and closing arguments, cross-examination and evidentiary objections. “Thus, even if the state’s case remains identical in length, and the aggregate time invested by the court is increased, the burden on the jurors for each individual trial is lessened through shorter separate trials,” he wrote.The judge also noted that to satisfy the demands by Powell and Chesebro for a speedy trial, he will try to have a jury seated by 3 November. “With each additional defendant involved in the voir dire process, an already Herculean task becomes more unlikely,” he wrote.McAfee also pointed to the fact that five defendants are currently seeking to move their cases to federal court and litigation on that issue is ongoing. If they were to succeed midway through a trial in the state court, it is not clear what the impact would be, McAfee wrote. More

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      Trump Moves to Quash Most Charges Against Him in Georgia

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      The motion essentially piggybacked off another filed by one of the former president’s co-defendants, which gave a detailed critique of the sprawling indictment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Monday to throw out most of the 13 charges against him in the wide-ranging election interference indictment handed up by a grand jury last month in Georgia.The one-page motion from Mr. Trump’s Georgia lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, refers to a more expansive motion also filed on Monday by one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, the lawyer Ray Smith III. That motion gives a detailed critique of the 98-page indictment, arguing that its “defects” are “voluminous,” and that it is legally unsound.Among other things, Mr. Smith’s motion says that the charge of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — which all 19 defendants face — seeks to “punish protected First Amendment activity” and fails to “sufficiently allege the existence” of a racketeering enterprise whose goal was to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow 2020 election loss in the state.The Smith filing argues that the racketeering conspiracy laid out by the prosecution was actually “comprised of millions of people throughout the country” who believed election fraud had taken place and were working toward the same goal as the defendants.To illustrate the point, the motion stated that there were probably thousands of bank robbers in the United States, “but the mere fact that they all rob banks and have the same goal and many of the same methods of operation, does not mean that all American bank robbers constitute one RICO enterprise, despite the fact that they are people who commit the same crime, for the same reason.”Mr. Smith’s legal team includes Donald F. Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer.The office of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who is leading the prosecution, declined to comment on Monday evening ahead of an official response to the motion in court. Mr. Sadow also declined to comment.The filing was the latest legal volley in the case, which Mr. Trump sought to quash even before his indictment in mid-August. It came as little surprise to legal analysts watching the case, who had expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive defense long before the start of a trial.The former president’s lawyers have already moved to sever his case from two co-defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who have demanded a speedy trial. Their joint trial is set to start on Oct. 23.Mr. Smith, a lawyer based in Atlanta who helped Mr. Trump’s team challenge his loss in Georgia after the election, faces a dozen charges in the case. He advanced false claims about the election at a legislative hearing, according to the indictment. And, prosecutors charge, he took part in the efforts to get fake Trump electors to cast votes and sign documents that falsely claimed that he had won the election. Mr. Smith has pleaded not guilty.“He never advocated violence; he never cried ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” his lawyers argued in the motion. “If advocacy in court or the legislature is a crime — if it merits being branded a ‘racketeer’ — there are very few people who will have the courage to risk engaging in such advocacy. ”Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in the Atlanta area, said on Monday that the motion was unlikely to succeed in court, describing the racketeering enterprise defined in the indictment as “pretty tightly drawn.” But he noted that defense lawyers sometimes filed motions directed more at the court of public opinion, with an eye toward influencing a potential jury pool.Notably, the Smith motion does not excuse all the activity that took place.“If, as the Fulton prosecutors claim, somebody threatened physical harm to an election worker, that might (or should) be prosecuted as a crime,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers write. “The same for stealing computers or information from a computer.”Some defendants in the case were charged with conspiracy to commit computer theft in a breach of a rural Georgia county’s voting system, while others were accused of threatening a poll worker.Mr. Trump may soon follow the lead of several other defendants and ask to have his case moved to federal court, where the jury pool would be somewhat more supportive of him. But on Friday, a U.S. District Court judge rejected such a request from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, dimming the prospects that others would succeed with the strategy. More

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      US judge rejects Mark Meadows’ request to move Georgia case to federal court

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      A federal judge denied a request from former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to transfer his Georgia 2020 election interference case from state to federal court on the basis that some of the charged conduct was within the scope of his official duties.The ruling from US district judge Steve Jones on Friday means the prosecution of Meadows brought by the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis stays in superior court in Atlanta, unless Meadows appeals and the decision is reversed by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.“The Court finds insufficient evidence to establish that the gravamen, or a heavy majority of overt acts alleged against Meadows relate to his role as White House Chief of Staff,” the judge wrote in an unusually detailed and extensive 49-page decision.“Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role,” the judge wrote, “he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the indictment are related to any of his official acts.”Last month, the Atlanta-area grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment against Donald Trump and 18 others, including Meadows, alleging that they violated Georgia’s state Rico statute in their efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.Meadows had sought to remove the case to federal court arguing that the sprawling racketeering charges related to his normal work undertaken as a White House chief of staff, which gave him immunity from prosecution and prevented him from being prosecuted at the state level.But the judge rejected his arguments in a detailed 49-page decision, determining that Meadows did not meet his burden to show that he was acting within his job description when he undertook efforts to benefit Trump as a political candidate rather than Trump as president.“The color of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff did not include working with or working for the Trump campaign,” the judge wrote, “except for simply coordinating the President’s schedule, traveling with the President to his campaign events, and redirecting communications to the campaign.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.Trump has weighed for weeks whether to file a similar removal motion, and the Guardian has previously reported that the Trump legal team was watching to see how Meadows fared before deciding whether to make a request before their statutory deadline at the end of September.Meadows’s defeat compounds his legal difficulties in Fulton county because his value as a cooperating witness has now diminished, legal experts said. The ruling is also ominous for Trump, who is seen as having a weaker case for removal compared to his former chief of staff.A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBroadly speaking, Jones determined that Meadows could not have undertaken any political actions as part of his official duties because the US constitution does not provide any basis for the executive branch to involve itself in state election and post-election procedures.To determine Meadows’s scope, the judge used the Hatch Act, which plainly prohibits executive branch officials like Meadows from using their official authority to influence or interfere with the results of an election through partisan political activity.The indictment described Meadows as having participated in several so-called overt acts in furtherance of the racket and Meadows had argued that even if one of those acts fell under the scope of his chief of staff role, the case should be transferred to federal court.But the judge interpreted the removal statute differently and he decided that Meadows having a single overt act come under his duties was not enough for the federal court to assume jurisdiction.The more important question was what activities were at the “heart” of Meadows’s participation in the racket and whether those activities as a whole related to the scope of his federal office, the judge wrote, before concluding that they were not.And even if the remaining overt acts were characterized as everyday chief of staff duties like making phone calls or preparing meetings for the purpose of advising the president, the underlying substance of the actions were political in nature and therefore outside his official duties, the judge wrote. More

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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