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      A young woman’s killing in Georgia stokes a familiar rightwing war

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      All murders are not treated equally.The killing of the 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on the campus of the University of Georgia on 22 February has drawn national media interest and political activity in ways that other homicide cases do not, in part because it provides an easy target for rightwing election sloganeering.Homicide rates fell by historic amounts last year after a spike in violence during the pandemic. Early estimates suggest that across the country violence has returned to near-60-year lows.Despite the data, most Americans believe violence is increasing because violence increasingly drives media attention. And the murder of any young woman by a stranger is bound to draw additional news coverage simply because these killings are rare. FBI statistics show 3,653 women were murdered in 2022 – comprising fewer than one in four victims – and according to data tracked by the Violence Policy Center, about 92% of women who are murdered know their attacker. The murder of Laken Riley by a stranger is statistically one in a million.Where Riley died adds to the attention.The campus of the University of Georgia holds particular social and political significance among Georgians. A murder on campus is, for many, a desecration of hallowed ground. UGA is a dominant force in Georgia sports culture. Three out of four college students in Georgia attend a state school, and the flagship university is a top goal for almost all of them. About a quarter of state legislators are University of Georgia alumni, as are five of Georgia’s 14 Congress members and Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp.But the main reason we know Riley’s name, and not the names of the other 300-350 women killed by a stranger in the last year, or the names of the other eight people being held on a murder charge at the Clarke county jail, is because the suspect – 26-year-old Jose Ibarra – is an undocumented migrant who has been previously charged with a crime without being deported, and the victim is young, female and white. Of such things are press conferences born.“It is an understatement to say that this is a major crisis,” Kemp said on Monday morning during a news conference, attacking the Biden administration on its immigration enforcement policies. “Because of the White House’s failures, every state is now a border state. Laken Riley’s murder is just the latest proof of that.”Georgia’s state penitentiaries hold about 50,000 prisoners, and according to the Georgia department of corrections, about 1,600 prisoners had ICE detention orders at the end of January, up by about 100 since the start of Biden’s term as a result of increased enforcement activity. Of all Georgia’s prisoners, about 9,100 have been imprisoned for killing someone – murder, manslaughter or other homicides. Of the 7,050 murderers, 182 are subject to deportation.Estimates from the Pew Research Center suggest that Georgia’s undocumented population fell between 2011 and 2021 by more than 10%, to about 350,000, or about 3.2% of Georgia’s residents. Immigrants – legal and illegal – are less likely to be charged with an act of violence than the native-born US population.View image in fullscreen“There’s a long and unfortunate history of politicizing immigrants and suggesting that they commit crimes at higher rates,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs for the Migration Policy Institute, and a UGA alumna. “As we’ve seen in US context … they see anecdotal reporting of individual, sad tragedies that they somehow extrapolate that this, therefore, means that a whole class of people are more likely to commit crime.”The media amplification of stories about an innocent female victim killed by a person of color is a historical trope in southern politics that harkens back to Reconstruction-era politics. Conservatives have made immigration central to their political messaging today, often disregarding the ugly history of this commentary when a case like the Riley murder presents itself.Enter Donald Trump.“Crooked Joe Biden’s Border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened! The monster who took her life illegally entered our Country in 2022 … and then was released AGAIN by Radical Democrats in New York after injuring a CHILD!!”Trump has habitually amplified murder cases when the victim is an American citizen and the accused is not. Laken Riley’s death has provided him another opportunity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2016, the Trump campaign rallied around the prosecution of Jose Ines Garcia-Zarate, who was charged with fatally shooting Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco. Garcia-Zarate, a homeless undocumented migrant who had been repeatedly deported, was ultimately acquitted of murder in 2017 and subsequently pleaded guilty to a weapon possession charge.Legislators have begun agitating for changes to Georgia law in response to the Riley case.“There are certainly also questions surrounding the administration of justice at the local level, and house leadership will be pressing for answers over the coming days as to why exactly the suspect and his brother continued to roam freely in the Athens area,” wrote the Georgia House speaker, Jon Burns, the day after Ibarra’s arrest. Three bills are advancing quickly through the legislative process, one mandating that police and sheriff’s departments help identify, arrest and detain undocumented immigrants for deportation.The high-profile death in Athens, Georgia, intensified the spotlight on the county’s district attorney, Deborah Gonzalez, long a target for conservative lawmakers for progressive policies. Gonzalez has called for a special prosecutor for Ibarra’s case, and declared she would not pursue the death penalty.Congressman Mike Collins, who represents Athens in Congress, sent a letter to Athens’ mayor, Kelly Girtz, and the Clarke county sheriff, John Q Williams, yesterday demanding they end “sanctuary” policies for undocumented migrants. Collins cited the sheriff’s policy of refusing to comply with immigration detainers for 48-hour holds, and an Athens-Clarke county resolution “to foster a community where individuals and families of all statuses feel safe, are able to prosper, and can breathe free”.Georgia state law expressly forbids Georgia cities from adopting “sanctuary city” policies of noncompliance with federal immigration policies, but Collins suggested in the letter that Athens had become one “in word and deed”, citing the Center for Immigrations Studies’ listing the county as a sanctuary city.The Center for Immigration Studies was founded by the avowed white supremacist John Tanton and is itself listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.Leaders among Georgia’s immigrant-oriented organizations met on Wednesday to formulate a response to the politicization of the Riley murder. “I have a 21-year-old daughter that goes to college in Nashville, you know, and I worry about her constantly. And so my first reaction was as a father, as a human being – it was heartbreaking, you know, devastating,” said Santiago Marquez, CEO of the Latin American Association in Georgia.“My second reaction was one of great disappointment, because, you know, I just couldn’t anticipate what was going to come and … you know, there will be a lot of backlash in our community.” More

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      Suspect in UGA Killing Is Denied Bond as a Shaken Campus Mourns

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      As more details emerged about the suspect in the death of a nursing student, the community remained in shock of the first homicide on the campus in decades.A 26-year-old man charged with kidnapping and murdering a nursing student at the University of Georgia in Athens will remain in jail after he was denied bond at a hearing on Saturday, the authorities said.The suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, lived in an apartment complex about one mile from a wooded trail where the body of Laken Riley, 22, was found on Thursday afternoon, said Jeffrey Clark, the chief of university police. Ms. Riley, a student at nearby Augusta University and a former student at the University of Georgia, had been reported missing by friends after she did not return from a run. Mr. Ibarra, a resident of Athens who is not a U.S. citizen, migrated to the United States from Venezuela, the authorities said. He was arrested by the Border Patrol for crossing the border illegally in September 2022 and was released quickly with temporary permission to stay in the country, a federal law enforcement official said Saturday. That release, or parole, was a practice the administration used when officials were overwhelmed with high numbers of crossings. The administration ended that practice about six months later. It was typical for many Venezuelans to be released with permission to stay temporarily because they could not be repatriated back to their country due to strained diplomatic relations. Some six million Venezuelans have fled their troubled country, the largest population displacement in Latin America’s modern history.On Saturday, it was not clear what Mr. Ibarra’s immigration status was. Many conservative politicians, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, on Saturday linked the killing to the immigration policies of President Biden, which they contend have overwhelmed the country with more migrants than the system can handle. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, urged the president to close the border. “House Republicans will continue to fight tooth and nail for a return to law and order,” Mr. Johnson said in a post on X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Find Me the Votes review: Fani Willis of Georgia, the woman who could still take down Trump

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      If this week’s hearing about Fani Willis’s affair with her assistant Nathan Wade has piqued America’s interest in the character of the Fulton county district attorney, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have written the perfect book for this moment.Isikoff has been a dogged investigator for the Washington Post, NBC and Yahoo, while his longtime friend and collaborator Klaidman is a former managing editor of Newsweek now a newly minted investigative reporter for CBS. Together they have produced the most readable and authoritative account to date of all of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.At its center is a nuanced portrait of Willis, who at least until a couple of days ago appeared to be Trump’s most effective nemesis, having indicted him, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as 16 other co-conspirators.Whether Willis’s affair with one of her principal assistants is a valid reason to force the presiding judge to dismiss her from the case remains to be seen. But the revelation seems to have been as much of a bombshell for her biographers as it was for everyone else.Contacted by the Guardian, both authors declined to predict the outcome of the current proceeding. But Isikoff sounded optimistic that Willis would survive this latest assault.“How did the relationship between Willis and Wade prejudice any of the other defendants?” Isikoff asked. “There is simply no evidence that it did.”Willis is a daughter of the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, her father, John C Floyd III, migrated from the politics of John F Kennedy and the non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr to the much tougher ideology of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles, which he co-founded in 1967. After that he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer.Isikoff and Klaidman say Floyd’s odyssey gives us “a glimpse into his daughter’s pugnacious personality and her deep-seated loathing of bullies” – both of which were on prominent display when she defended herself in the hearing room.While it was her personal passion that brought Willis into an unwelcome spotlight, it was her own focus on allegations of sexual harassment against her previous boss and mentor that made her election as the first woman district attorney of Fulton county possible. Paul Howard became the first Black person to hold the job of Fulton county DA in 1996, and made Willis a star by giving her some of his Atlanta office’s most famous cases. She became famous as the lead prosecutor in an indictment of 35 public school officials for alleged violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act. The Atlanta schools superintendent, six principals, two assistant principals and 14 teachers were accused of faking students’ test scores, in response to the requirements of No Child Left Behind.That law, championed by George W Bush, put schools at risk of losing federal aid if students didn’t meet minimum standards for success on standardized tests. All but one of the defendants was Black, which made the prosecution even more controversial. By the time Howard gave Willis the case she was chief of the office’s trial division. Isikoff and Klaidman say she proved a “hands-on micromanager” who “plunged into every detail of the case”. Its complexity turned out to be the perfect training for Willis to use the same Rico statute to go after Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.One of this book’s most important contributions is to remind us of the breadth and viciousness of the president’s efforts to undermine democracy – and the horrendous effects they had on the lives of decent, honest election officials in every swing state Trump lost.After multiple lawsuits alleging voter fraud were thrown out by nearly every judge who heard them, Trump famously turned his attention to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, one of several Republicans whose resistance proved heroic. When Trump got Raffensperger and his assistants on the phone, they were shocked by how many QAnon conspiracy theories Trump seemed to have accepted as fact – just because so many of his supporters had retweeted them. A particular favorite of the president’s was the notion there had been 200,000 forged signatures on absentee ballots in Fulton county – even though the total number of absentee votes had been 148,319.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the same call, Trump repeated the big lie that the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss had run between 18,000 and 56,000 bogus ballots through election scanners. Trump said Freeman was “known all over the internet”. This was the same lie promoted by Giuliani, which ultimately cost him a richly deserved verdict of $148m for libeling the two innocent women.In one of the many telling details of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, the authors remind us that the other hero from that phone call was the Georgia deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs.“Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors believe. To protect her boss, she decided to tape the phone call – without telling Raffensperger. After the tape leaked to the Washington Post, it quickly became the single most powerful piece of evidence against the ex-president in any of the four prosecutions he is still facing.When you see all of Trump’s alleged crimes piled together in a single narrative, it is beyond belief that he remains the favorite of a majority of Republican primary voters. But these same facts should surely be enough to guarantee his defeat if he actually gets the chance to face the larger electorate in November.
      Find Me the Votes is published in the US by Twelve More

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      Messy Diversion in Georgia Trump Case Creates Perception Problem

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      Regardless of whether Fani T. Willis is disqualified from leading the high-stakes case, the extraordinary detour it has taken may have changed it fundamentally. At some point in the coming weeks or months, the Georgia criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies will presumably focus once again on the defendants and whether they conspired to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss there in 2020. But the extraordinary detour that the case has taken, plunging into the intimate details of a romantic relationship between the two lead prosecutors and forcing them to fight accusations of impropriety, may have changed it fundamentally. Now it is unclear whether the case will even remain with Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, since lawyers for Mr. Trump and other defendants are seeking to have her entire office disqualified. Even if the presiding judge allows Ms. Willis to keep the case, she is likely to face tough scrutiny from now on, including from a new state commission that will be able to remove prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation. The controversy has also provided fresh fodder for Mr. Trump and his allies, who are adept at exploiting their opponents’ vulnerabilities. Mr. Trump was already making inflammatory attacks on Ms. Willis even before her relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the lawyer she hired to help run the election interference case, came to light. If nothing else, Ms. Willis’s decision not to disclose her relationship with Mr. Wade from its outset has created a messy diversion from an extremely high-stakes prosecution. Even if the revelations do not taint a jury pool in Fulton County, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and Ms. Willis has many admirers, her world-famous case could face a lasting perception problem. And if the case gets taken from her, more serious problems may follow. Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court suggested on Friday that he is likely to not rule next week on whether the relationship created a disqualifying conflict of interest. But already, state officials are considering what might happen if Ms. Willis, who has given no indication that she will step aside voluntarily, has to hand off the case to another district attorney in the state. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fani Willis must prove herself before a judge, her voters and the whole country

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      When Fani Willis took the stand to trade sharp elbows with lawyers defending Donald Trump and his co-defendants, she stood before three audiences.But Willis only really cares about two of them.The first is an audience of one: the superior court judge Scott McAfee, who will rule sometime two weeks or so from now on whether Willis, the special prosecutor Nathan Wade and the rest of the Fulton county district attorney’s office will continue to handle the Trump trial, or if instead it will be handed to another attorney chosen by the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.If Willis is bumped off the case, it almost certainly means there will be no resolution before the US presidential election in November, in which Trump is almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee for president again.Willis and her team have been presenting evidence and testimony to rebut questions about financial motivations for pressing the case against Trump by showing how much personal harm Willis and her staff have had to endure in the process. Willis’s father, the venerable civil rights attorney John C Floyd, gave florid testimony today about the death threats and harassment that drove Willis from her home as she prosecuted the case, for example.McAfee recognizes high-drama courtroom confrontations for what they are: irrelevant to the legal question. He must decide if the appearance of impropriety and the legal question of alleged unjust enrichment raised by the defense are sufficient to create an appellate court problem if Trump and others are convicted at trial. Has there been misconduct, and is removing Willis the appropriate remedy under the law if there has been misconduct? That’s the legal question.But it’s not the only issue for Fani Willis, who is up for re-election in 263 days.Until this moment, Willis looked like an unbeatable shoe-in for re-election. She is, arguably, the highest-profile district attorney in the US today, and she’s as recognizable to a Fulton county voter as the president, governor or Georgia’s senators. In a game of name recognition … well, people have stopped mispronouncing her first name in Atlanta now.But the revelation that she had been dating a highly paid office subordinate while working on a trial with the presidency on the line raises questions about her judgment. She may be contemplating a political challenger, who will argue that Willis is not the one to continue the case … assuming it is still in court in November.Her challenge here was to remind voters why they voted for her in the first place: to aggressively confront crime in Atlanta. Willis beat a 20-year incumbent in 2020 amid sharply rising crime and issues with prosecutions by her predecessor. She won in part by arguing that she would get the job done where her previous boss could not.Willis has to make her case to the Fulton county voters that she’s still their best choice. That’s where the sharp elbows and Black cultural callbacks on the stand come from: she’s speaking to the second audience – the primarily Black, majority-female, predominantly Democratic Fulton county electorate who is watching all of this unfold dreading the possibility that the county’s chance to impose justice on the powerful may be slipping through her fingers.By showing her grief and rage, she humanizes herself before this audience, which is likely to be sympathetic to the horrors of a Black professional’s love life aired like a reality television show before the American public as a Trump defendant’s legal ploy.It’s telling, perhaps, that Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, and the former mayor Shirley Franklin were both in attendance at the hearing on Friday morning, ostensibly as a show of political and moral support for Willis.There is, of course, a third audience. Every other person in the free world.Americans of all political stripes recognize that there’s a lot riding on the outcome of this case. Of all the criminal and civil cases Trump faces today, a conviction in Georgia is the only one for which he is almost certain to do time in prison, because there’s effectively no pardon power to save him. And Trump’s recorded phone call provides powerful evidence for a prosecutor to present to a jury.Voters across the country have a stake in the outcome here. But the only voters that count for Willis’s purposes are the ones that live in Fulton county. And until that changes, she’s not going to care about what they think. More

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      Fani Willis hearing struggles to dent Trump prosecutor’s credibility

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump’s co-defendants charged over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia struggled on Friday to undermine the credibility of the Fulton county district attorney and her top deputy, with whom she had a romantic relationship, in order to disqualify them from bringing the case.The district attorney, Fani Willis, and her deputy, Nathan Wade, both previously testified there was no financial conflict of interest (the defendants alleged Willis hired him to benefit financially) because the relationship started after Wade was retained as a special prosecutor.At an extended hearing, the defendants called Terrence Bradley, a former divorce lawyer for Wade, on the expectation that he would testify that the romantic relationship started before Wade started work on the Trump case on 1 November 2021.The objective, in essence, was to have Bradley to contradict under oath the testimony of Willis and Wade. Had that happened, that could lead the presiding Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee to discredit, or at least give less weight to, the narrative advanced by the prosecutors.But the lawyers for the defendants were not immediately successful in their approach. Bradley was a particularly reluctant witness and testified he had privileged information about when the relationship started, but not personal knowledge he obtained separate from him representing Wade.That proved to be important because it meant Bradley provided little new evidence to help the defendants as they attempt to have Willis and Wade disqualified from prosecuting them on alleged conflict of interest grounds.The eventual outcome of the hearing – expected to continue potentially next Tuesday for arguments over what legal standards should be applied for disqualification – could have far-reaching implications for the viability of one of the most perilous criminal cases against Trump.If the defendants are able to meet their burden to show a conflict of interest that leads to the disqualification of Willis, it would also mean that the entire district attorney’s office would be disqualified. That would cast into disarray the already complicated racketeering prosecution.After a morning during which Willis did not return to the stand for further testimony – the state told the judge it had no further questions – and two additional witnesses gave evidence that tracked Willis’s narrative from the day before, the defendants called Bradley to testify under subpoena.Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant wanted Bradley to say on the witness stand what he had texted her in January: the relationship between Willis and Wade had started after they met at a judicial conference, long before Wade was hired to work on the Trump case.But the judge restricted the line of questioning to include information that Bradley learned independent of his legal work representing Wade in the divorce case, because that would be protected by attorney-client privilege protections.That led Merchant to try to overcome the privilege by invoking the so-called crime-fraud exception, which pierces privilege if legal advice is used in furtherance of a crime. The judge ruled that did not apply, but allowed the defendants to contest his decision with a sealed filing after the hearing.In a further twist, Merchant appeared to win a partial victory when Bradley testified that the relationship allegations as initially filed by Merchant earlier this year were accurate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat raised the dueling situation that crediting Bradley as a witness meant Willis and Wade had committed perjury, but not crediting Bradley meant he had lied about his former client and committed perjury himself for seemingly no clear reason.The allegations first surfaced in an 8 January motion filed by Merchant, who complained about a potential conflict of interest arising from what she described as “self-dealing” between Willis and Wade as a result of their then-unconfirmed romantic relationship.Roman’s filing, in essence, accused Willis of engaging in a quasi-kickback scheme, in which Wade paid for joint vacations to Florida and California using earnings of more than $650,000 from working on the Trump case. The filing also alleged the relationship had started before he was hired.Whether Willis will be disqualified remains uncertain.Legal experts have generally suggested the evidence to date – there has been almost none, bar Wade’s bank statements showing he paid for a couple of trips – does not show an actual conflict of interest.The potential problem for Willis is that she was previously disqualified from investigating the Georgia lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, over a lower legal standard of “appearance of impropriety”, after she publicly endorsed Jones’s political rival in Jones’s re-election race.The allegations have also threatened to turn the case into political theatre. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has derided the prosecution as scandal-plagued in addition to his usual refrain that the criminal charges against him are a political witch-hunt. More

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      Georgia voters shrug off Biden-Trump age question

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      Next week, Frank Stovall turns 103. The retired Lockheed engineer has until recently been a lifelong Atlantan, is a veteran of two wars, and is old enough to remember when Republicans were rare in Georgia.“Well, yes, I think they’re both healthy,” Stovall said, when asked at the Church at Wieuca in Buckhead about the mental fitness for office of President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump. “I’m a Republican, but I’m not going to vote for Trump, if I can help it. I hate to say this, but I think he was a traitor to the country on January 6.“Biden? I’ve been really impressed with him on everything except the border thing. But yeah, I think Biden is a good man. If he got mental lapses … goodness, most of us do when you get a few years on you.”Buckhead, an affluent neighborhood of Atlanta, is split between Republicans and Democrats. Georgia is often described as a politically purple state, with strong Democrats and strong Republicans competing to be seen in nearly equal numbers – though spaces where they cohabitate are scarce.So when a special prosecutor at the Department of Justice released a report last week alleging striking gaps in Biden’s memory and mental acuity, political pundits jumped to assess how the issue of age will affect the American presidential election in places like this. But in the US, broad opinions matter much less than those of the relatively small number of persuadable voters.“Basically, you’re catering to a million voters, in a few states,” said Clarence Blalock, a political consultant in Georgia who is competing in the Democratic primary to challenge Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The average age of voters tends to be older than the general public, he said, and any strategy questioning the competence of the president – or Donald Trump – due to age may backfire. “They may feel insulted by it. I don’t think it’s a good strategy.”Certainly, many on the right saw in the report’s accusations a confirmation of what they already believe about Biden – that he is largely a figurehead, with decisions being made by others. “I feel sorry for him,” said Chris Swindell, 68, a self-described libertarian from Marietta. “He comes out, and he’s not running the country. The people in the background are running the country.”But few will flip their votes over the age issue, Blalock said. He noted that most partisans had already decided to overlook the flaws of their own candidates.One of those is Jimmy Bennett, 67, a staunch Republican and Trump voter.“Listen, we know a lot of older people that are on the money with their mindset,” said Bennett over a slice of pie at Matthew’s Cafeteria in politically ecumenical Tucker, Georgia.“But if they start making these crazy decisions, and start doing things way off, and then you can see the degrade, then that’s the time to step in.”Only about 10% of voters in Georgia consider changing their votes for any reason at all, and no matter who is running. In 2022, despite the threats of defection by stalwart Trump supporters, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by about 300,000 votes out of roughly 4m ballots, but on the same day, the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock beat his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, by about 40,000 votes (and later won a runoff by about 100,000).“We’re never going to have a 60-40 election,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist and political commentator here. “We wouldn’t have a 60-40 election if Biden died and people were voting for a dead person.”Nonetheless, the age issue is top of mind for Americans of both parties, he said, consistently ranking along with immigration and the economy as the main concerns voters express. In that regard, the special prosecutor’s report was a blow to the Biden campaign. “Democrats are hoping that independent voters are coming to Biden because they don’t like Trump. The [age] issue nullifies some of that Democratic advantage,” Robinson said.“The Biden campaign has, in some way, to provide optics that he’s healthy mentally and physically – and that’s a risk.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Trump has to be careful too, Robinson said. “The Democrats are trying to create an equivalency there. [Trump] has to avoid providing Democrats with ammo showing equivalent incapacity.”That may prove difficult, given Trump’s own propensity for mental lapses – for every time Biden confuses a Macron with a Mitterrand, Trump takes a Haley for a Pelosi – and equally advanced age: currently 81 and 77, both Biden and Trump would, if elected, be the oldest presidents ever.“I think Donald Trump is a fool and an idiot, and I think he has no mental acuity – period – because he doesn’t live in a world of reality. He lives in a fantasy world where facts are not facts,” said Jackie Goodman, 74, a fourth-generation Atlantan.For Goodman, her choice is about policy – she identifies as a pro-choice voter – and less about either man running.“I wish we could have a younger candidate who has a lot more vitality,” she admits. “But I definitely would not vote Republican – and I definitely would not vote for Trump.”Indeed, the question may be less about whether the age issue makes anyone switch their vote, but rather if it makes voters simply check out, said Blalock. Given the importance of turnout in US elections, how many Americans decide not to vote at all could prove crucial.“The idea that Biden doesn’t have it together, so I’m going to vote for Trump … I mean, do people think Trump has it together [either]?” he asked.“Or [do they] just stay home?” More

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      ‘That’s lies’: Fani Willis defends herself over relationship with Trump prosecutor – video

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, vehemently denied wrongdoing while testifying at a court hearing on Thursday as she rebutted accusations that her romantic relationship with a deputy prosecutor on the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump meant she should be disqualified from the case. The district attorney testified that her relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade started months after he was retained to work on the case, charging Trump over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state, and ended in summer 2023 More