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      Donald Trump expected to face 2020 election charges in Georgia this week

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected early this week to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants that could include the former president, according to two people briefed on the matter.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week. The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day.For weeks, the prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the sources said.The expansive Rico statute, for the purposes of the Trump case, would require only that prosecutors show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors were examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Trump and his allies, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”. More

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      How Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election Results in Georgia

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      The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.A recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee last October. Alex Wong/Getty ImagesUnleashing ‘Hate and Fury’It did not take long for the gloves to come off.During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.) Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”A Show for LawmakersIt was time to turn up the volume.Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.Rudolph Giuliani at a legislative hearing at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta in December 2020.Rebecca Wright/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressHe repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.Trump supporters protesting election results at State Farm Arena in Atlanta in the days following the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe President CallingIn the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”The Fake Electors MeetRather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, at a news conference following the election in 2020.Al Drago for The New York TimesLater that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.Moves in the White HouseWith other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.Mr. Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, leaving the White House en route to Georgia in January 2021.Pool photo by Erin ScottMr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”The letter was never sent.One Last CallStill, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”Cathy Latham, center, in a light blue shirt, in the elections office in Coffee County, Ga., while a team working on Mr. Trump’s behalf made copies of voting equipment data in January 2021.Coffee County, Georgia, via Associated Press‘Every Freaking Ballot’On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.” More

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      Georgia DA summons former lawmaker and journalist in Trump election inquiry

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      The office of the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has issued summonses to former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and journalist George Chidi to testify before a grand jury on Tuesday regarding Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in that state.The announcement of the summonses confirmed previous reporting by the Guardian that Willis’s office in Atlanta on Tuesday would present evidence to a grand jury weighing charges against the former president. Prosecutors could ask the grand jury to hand up charges on Tuesday as well, having completed an internal review of evidence in the case weeks ago.“I can confirm that I have been requested to testify before the Fulton county grand jury on Tuesday. I look forward to answering their questions around the 2020 election,” Duncan tweeted on Saturday.He added: “Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness.”Speaking to CNN, Duncan said that he has “no expectations as to the questions, and I’ll certainly answer whatever questions are put in front of me”.Similarly, Chidi wrote: “I’ve just received a call from district attorney Fani Willis’s office. I have been asked to come to court Tuesday for testimony before the grand jury.”In recent weeks, Willis’s office has considered several potential statutes under which to charge the former president and affiliated operatives, including solicitation to commit election fraud and conspiracy to commit election fraud, sources familiar with the matter have told the Guardian.Other state election law charges that have been under consideration include solicitation of a public or political officer to fail to perform their duties and solicitation to destroy, deface or remove ballots, sources said.They also added that Willis is looking to charge certain Trump operatives who were involved in accessing voting machines and copying sensitive election data in Georgia’s Coffee county in January 2021 with computer trespass crimes.Last month, sources familiar with the nearly three-year investigation into the former president told the Guardian that Willis has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass.The sprawling investigation began after Trump placed a phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on 2 January 2021 and pressured him to “find 11,780 votes” in the state which his Democratic rival Joe Biden ultimately won on his way to clinching the presidency.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump can be heard saying in a recording. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated … So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn indictment could come soon after the grand jury hears the case and in turn constitute a fourth active criminal case against Trump, who’s been facing mounting legal woes since April.The former president is already facing federal criminal conspiracy charges related to purported attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and his alleged encouragement of the January 6 US Capitol attack.Additionally, New York state prosecutors filed charges against him related to hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.The ex-president is also facing a separate federal indictment pertaining to his alleged illegal hoarding of government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after his presidency.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the cases against him and denies wrongdoing. More

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      Grand Jury to Hear Trump Election Interference Case Early Next Week

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      The NewsAtlanta-area prosecutors have indicated that they will go before a grand jury early next week to present the results of their investigation into election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, raising the possibility that within days Mr. Trump could face a fourth criminal indictment.On Saturday, two witnesses who have received subpoenas to testify before the grand jury — Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia, and George Chidi, an independent journalist — revealed that they had received notices to appear before the grand jury on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the Fulton County district attorney’s office, which conducted the investigation, could not be reached for comment on Saturday.Former President Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWhy It MattersA state-level indictment of Mr. Trump in Georgia would follow closely on the heels of a federal indictment, unveiled this month, that is also related to the former president’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But unlike with federal convictions, Mr. Trump, if re-elected president, could not attempt to pardon himself if convicted of state crimes in Georgia.Moreover, while the federal case brought by the special counsel Jack Smith names only Mr. Trump, details have surfaced suggesting that a Georgia indictment could name numerous people, some of them well known and powerful, who played roles in the multipronged effort to help Mr. Trump overturn his narrow 2020 election loss in the state.Mr. Chidi informed The New York Times on Saturday that he had received the notice to appear. Mr. Duncan on Saturday told CNN, where he is an on-air contributor, that he had received the notice to appear.BackgroundFani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has spent two and a half years investigating whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in the state. Other investigations of the former president have resulted in indictments in New York, Florida and Washington, D.C.In New York, Mr. Trump was indicted in April on state charges stemming from his alleged role in paying hush money to a porn star. In June, he was indicted in Miami in a federal case related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents; the federal indictment regarding election interference came on Aug. 1.Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in those cases.The Georgia investigation may be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers undertook to keep him in power. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges as a result of the investigation.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have described an indictment in Georgia as a foregone conclusion in recent legal filings, and the forewoman of a special grand jury that heard evidence for several months last year strongly hinted afterward that the group, which served in an advisory capacity, had recommended Mr. Trump for indictment.What’s NextIf Mr. Trump is indicted in Georgia, he will have to travel to Atlanta in the days or weeks afterward to be booked and arraigned. Numerous security measures are in place at the courthouse, including orange barriers that now ring the downtown court complex. More

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      Trump allies face potential charges in Georgia over voting machine breaches

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia has evidence to charge multiple allies of the former president involved in breaching voting machines in the state, according to two people briefed on the matter.The potential charges at issue are computer trespass felonies, the people said, though the final list of defendants and whether they will be brought as part of a racketeering case when prosecutors are expected to present evidence to the grand jury next week remain unclear.To bring a racketeering case under Georgia state law, prosecutors need to show the existence of an “enterprise” predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes, of which computer trespass is one. The Guardian has reported that prosecutors believe they have sufficient evidence for a racketeering case.The statute itself prohibits the intentional use of a computer or computer network without authorization in order to remove data, either temporarily or permanently. It also prohibits interrupting or interfering with the use of a computer, as well as altering or damaging a computer.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.The story about how a group of Trump allies gained unauthorized access to voting machines – informed by deposition transcripts, surveillance tapes and other records – can be traced back to 2020, when the top elections supervisor for Coffee county came across the “adjudication” system for mail ballots within the machines.A spokesperson for the Fulton county district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.In Georgia, mail ballots are marked by hand. If a ballot cannot be read by the machine, because of stray marks or other errors, it goes through an adjudication process whereby a bipartisan panel reviews the ballot and agrees on the voter’s intention before telling the machine how to count it.The adjudication process became a point of controversy in local Republican party circles after the elections supervisor, Misty Hampton, said in a viral November 2020 video that the person entering the information could theoretically tell it to falsely count a ballot intended for one candidate for another.Swapping a vote through the adjudication process would be straightforwardly illegal, and there is no evidence that such conduct took place during the 2020 presidential election. If it had, it would have been detected during the subsequent statewide hand count, experts have said.On 5 January 2021, Georgia held runoff elections for the state’s two US Senate seats. That day, amid a fraught atmosphere, the Coffee county GOP chair, Cathy Latham, was the Republican member on the bipartisan adjudication panel.As Latham later recounted in depositions in a long-running lawsuit brought by the Coalition for Good Governance, the ballot scanner in Coffee county repeatedly jammed as it tried to read mail-in ballots. And in Latham’s retelling, it appeared to jam more often for ballots marked for Republican candidates.When Latham complained, the on-site Dominion Voting System technician advised her to wipe the ballot scanner with a cloth. Latham said in her statement that the wiping did not work, and it was only after the technician held his phone near the scanner that the problems were resolved.According to Latham’s account, the suspicion was that the technician had downloaded something to the ballot scanner through his phone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere remains no such evidence to date and the Georgia secretary of state’s office has affirmed the scanners have no wireless capability. But that bizarre episode appears to have been the trigger for a number of Trump allies to see if someone could have manipulated the election.The day after the Capitol attack in Washington, on 7 January 2021, surveillance video picked up Eric Chaney, a member of the Coffee county elections board, arriving at the county’s elections office around 11am. Latham also arrived at the office around an hour later.The tapes then show Latham greeting data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in “imaging”, or making exact copies, of electronic devices, and Scott Hall, a bail bond business owner with ties to the local Republican party hunting for evidence of election fraud.What happened inside the elections office is only partially captured on surveillance video, but records show the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives and flash memory cards.The company believed it had authorization to collect the data, SullivanStrickler’s director of data risk Dean Felicetti later said in a deposition, and suggested that Hampton and Latham had given their approval.Most of the imaging work apparently took place off camera, though tapes from the lobby of the Coffee county elections office show Latham, Hampton and Chaney with the SullivanStrickler experts as they bend over to look at computer screens and walk around elections equipment.Lawyers for Latham and Hampton did not respond to requests for comment. But Latham’s previous lawyer has told the Washington Post that she did not authorize the copying and had “not acted improperly or illegally”. Hall and Chaney also did not respond to requests for comment.The next day, according to text messages, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – who helped organize the clandestine operation and paid for it through her non-profit – was informed that SullivanStrickler would post the data it had gathered on to a password-protected site from where it could be downloaded.Breaches of the Coffee county voting machines appear to have happened at least two additional times. On 18 January 2021, they were accessed on a second occasion when Hampton arrived with Doug Logan, the CEO of elections security firm CyberNinjas, and a retired federal employee named Jeffrey Lenberg.The pair spent at least four hours that afternoon inside the elections office, and then returned the following day for another nine hours. Lenberg then again gained access to the elections office every day for four days starting on 25 January 2021.What Lenberg did inside remains uncertain. But in a subsequent podcast interview, Lenberg said he and Logan went to Coffee county after hearing about the Senate runoffs incident because they wanted to see if they could replicate the error but “didn’t touch” the machines themselves. More

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      Trump Georgia Election Inquiry: Grand Jury Likely to Hear Case Next Week

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      The district attorney in Atlanta is expected to take the findings from an election interference investigation to a grand jury, which could issue indictments.The fourth criminal case involving Donald J. Trump is likely to come to a head next week, with the district attorney in Atlanta expected to take the findings from her election interference investigation to a grand jury.The Georgia investigation may be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges as a result of the investigation, which Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has pursued for two and a half years.Ms. Willis has signaled that she would seek indictments from a grand jury in the first half of August. In a letter to local officials in May, she laid out plans for most of her staff to work remotely during the first three weeks of August amid heightened security concerns. Security barriers were recently erected in front of the downtown Atlanta courthouse, and at lunchtime on Tuesday, 16 law enforcement vehicles were parked around the perimeter.On Tuesday afternoon, two witnesses who received subpoenas to appear before the Fulton County grand jury said in interviews that they had not received notices instructing them to testify within the next 48 hours, a sign that the case will not get to the jury until next week.Earlier this month, Mr. Trump was indicted in a federal case brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, in an investigation also related to election interference that listed a number of unindicted co-conspirators. The Georgia inquiry, elements of which overlap with the federal case, involves not just the former president, but an array of his aides and advisers at the time of the 2020 election, several of whom are expected to face charges.If Mr. Trump were to be convicted in a federal prosecution, he could theoretically pardon himself if he were re-elected president. But presidents do not hold such sway in state matters. Moreover, Georgia law makes pardons possible only five years after the completion of a sentence. Getting a sentence commuted requires the approval of a state panel.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have described an indictment in Georgia as a foregone conclusion in recent legal filings, and the forewoman of a special grand jury that heard evidence for several months last year strongly hinted afterward that the group, which served in an advisory capacity, had recommended Mr. Trump for indictment.Two grand juries have been hearing cases at the Fulton County Courthouse during the current Superior Court term, which began on July 11 and runs through Sept. 1. Twelve of 23 jurors need to agree that there is probable cause to hand down criminal charges after hearing evidence in a case.“The work is accomplished,” Ms. Willis recently told a local TV station. “We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go.”“The work is accomplished,” Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., recently told a local TV station. “We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go.”Audra Melton for The New York TimesHer office began investigating in February 2021 whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden.The inquiry focused on five things that happened in Georgia in the weeks after the election. They include calls that Mr. Trump made to pressure local officials, including a Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his loss.Ms. Willis’s office also scrutinized a plan by Trump allies to create a slate of bogus electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia, even though Mr. Biden’s victory had been certified several times by the state’s Republican leadership. The office also investigated harassment of local election workers by Trump supporters, as well as lies about ballot fraud that were advanced by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, and other allies during legislative hearings after the election.At times the investigation stretched beyond Fulton County, including to rural Coffee County, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, where Trump allies and contractors working on their behalf breached the election system in the first week of 2021.Ms. Willis has said that by bringing charges under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, her inquiry could cover a wide range of issues. Broadly speaking, so-called RICO laws require prosecutors to prove that a group of people conspired to take part in organized criminal activity.With RICO indictments, Ms. Willis said in an interview last year, “there are sometimes acts that occurred outside of the jurisdiction that are overt acts that we can use if they are evidence of the greater scheme.”The special grand jury heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months and recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, its forewoman has said. The Trump aides and allies whose conduct has been scrutinized in the inquiry include Mr. Giuliani, who was told last year that he was a target who could face charges. A number of other lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have also been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before the special grand jury last year. He traveled to Georgia after the election and became personally involved in the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office despite his loss.Ms. Willis’s office also sought the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking official at the Justice Department, but was blocked by the department. Mr. Clark sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election, over the strong objections of more senior officials at the department.More than half of the 16 Republicans who were bogus Trump electors in Georgia are cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office, but others have been told they could face charges, including David Shafer, the former leader of the state Republican Party.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have called the Atlanta inquiry a “clown show” and have filed numerous court motions seeking to disqualify the district attorney and derail the investigation. They argued that the special grand jury proceedings were unconstitutional, and that Ms. Willis has made prejudicial public statements.But Georgia judges have shown no inclination to act before any charges are brought. Both the presiding Fulton Superior Court judge, Robert C.I. McBurney, and the Georgia Supreme Court have rejected motions from the Trump team in recent weeks.Two witnesses who have been subpoenaed to appear before Fulton grand jurors currently hearing cases — George Chidi, an independent journalist, and Jen Jordan, a former state senator — said Tuesday afternoon that they had not received 48-hour notices to appear this week. Mr. Chidi was one of a handful of reporters who discovered a December 2020 meeting of bogus Trump electors, and Ms. Jordan, a Democrat, attended a legislative hearing in which Mr. Giuliani and other Trump allies advanced false claims of election fraud.This has been a busy year for Mr. Trump’s lawyers. In April, he was indicted in state court in Manhattan on 34 felony counts related to his role in what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme, covering up a potential sex scandal to clear his path to the presidency in 2016.In June, he was indicted in Miami on federal criminal charges related to his handling of classified documents and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to recover them after he left office.Christian Boone contributed reporting. More

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      in US Politics

      Inside Trump’s ‘alternate electors’ plot to steal the vote in Georgia

      by

      At 11.30am on 14 December 2020, Greg Bluestein, a political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, hurried into the Georgia state capitol at the start of what he knew would be a momentous day. He was one of a handful of reporters who were to witness the casting of electoral college votes which would officially hand Joe Biden victory in the critical battleground state – and with it the US presidency.As Bluestein rushed up to the state senate chamber where the 16 Democratic electors were assembling ahead of the historic vote, he passed meeting room 216. He noticed a gaggle of people milling around its heavy wooden door, among them some of the 16 Republican electors chosen to represent Donald Trump should he have won the Georgia race.The reporter was surprised. Trump had officially lost in Georgia by 11,779 votes, an outcome that had been confirmed by two recounts including a full hand tally of all ballots.Only the electors of the winning candidate based on popular support were supposed to show up. Electors representing Trump, the loser, simply had no reason to be there.“So I went over and peeked my head in and went, ‘What’s going on here, guys?’” Bluestein recalled. “A couple of people started flurrying, someone was shuffling papers, then a party functionary standing at the door said to me, ‘It’s an education meeting’ and basically slammed the door on me.”Thus began one of the more bizarre days in Bluestein’s reporting life. He spent the next couple of hours scurrying up and down the marble steps of the capitol building, ping-ponging between the official casting of the electoral college votes for Biden on the third floor and the thoroughly unofficial casting of fake Trump votes in room 216.“The Democratic vote had pomp and circumstance – it was a real, formal process. As each elector stood and voted you could feel the gravity and the emotion of the moment,” Bluestein said.Scrambling down to room 216, by contrast, he found the setting devoid of any gravitas. “It was just willy-nilly.”It is this gathering of what the Trump campaign called “alternate” electors – but which others have denounced as “fake”, “sham” and “phony” ones – which is now at the centre of the criminal investigation into the attempt to overturn the presidential election in Georgia. The probe is being led by Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton county which covers much of Atlanta.She is expected to convene a grand jury this month with the power to issue indictments. Among the targets of possible charges is Trump himself, several in his inner circle including his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, the conservative attorney credited as being the architect of the legal road map for subverting the 2020 election, and key members of the 16 fake electors who came together in room 216.The federal investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election led by special counsel Jack Smith is also ramping up its probe of the fake electors. CNN reported in June that at least two Republican fake electors have been forced to testify to a grand jury in Washington in return for limited immunity. And in Michigan, attorney general Dana Nessel recently announced multiple felony charges against the state’s 16 fake electors.The Fulton county and federal investigations pose serious legal peril for Trump that adds to his criminal prosecution for allegedly mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, and the federal inquiry into his role in the violent storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. A special grand jury in Georgia has already recommended indictments for several people, with the forewoman hinting strongly that they included the former president.“You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science,” she said.The story of how 16 men and women came together in an improvised attempt to reshape the course of US history – told here through interviews with participants, law experts and a review of evidence gathered by the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol siege – is not only a live legal issue with potentially profound ramifications for Trump as he vies to return to the White House in 2024. It also provides insight into the febrile nature of American politics, where democratic norms can seemingly be shredded “willy-nilly”.According to the House January 6 committee, the fake elector scheme was the brainchild of an outside legal advisor to the Trump campaign, Kenneth Chesebro. The committee’s final report points to the New York-based lawyer as being “central to the creation of the plan”.On 18 November, two weeks after the presidential election, Chesebro wrote a secret memo which is seen as the first shot fired in the fake elector war. Taking the example of Wisconsin, he argued that by mobilizing his electors, Trump could buy himself time to challenge through the courts his defeat in key swing states.Chesebro’s proposal was for Trump electors to turn up and vote in their respective states on 14 December – the date stipulated for the electoral college to convene only for winning candidates under America’s arcane presidential election system. The lawyer glossed over the inconvenient truth that Trump had lost in those states, rendering his electors redundant.Chesebro conceded in his memo that it “may seem odd that electors pledged to Trump and [vice president Mike] Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count … However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”Specialists in constitutional law take a starkly different view. They point out that by then Trump’s legal team was struggling to find any credible evidence of fraud in the presidential election and were losing court challenges in abundance – out of at least 62 cases that Trump fought over the 2020 election, 61 were defeated.Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, employed Chesebro as a research assistant some 20 years ago. He told the Guardian that his former aide was “smart enough to know full well that the scheme he helped cook up – a conspiracy for fake electors to gather and sign phony pro-Trump ballots on December 14 so as to buy Trump time – was anything but a ‘reasonable course of action’.”Tribe added: “It was obviously and transparently illegal – indeed, it was manifestly criminal.”The Guardian contacted Chesebro directly and through his lawyers, but received no response.In a deposition with the January 6 committee in October 2022, Chesebro was asked to describe his role in the plan to have electors meet and cast electoral college votes for Trump in states he had lost. He declined to answer, pleading the fifth amendment.Despite its shaky legal foundations, Chesebro’s theory quickly gained traction within Trump’s inner legal circle, earning the enthusiastic embrace of Eastman and Giuliani.Within days they had devised a new strategy for what they called “litigation states”. Six states were identified – Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – as the focal points of the “alternate” elector master plan.In all of them, Trump had lost the election, which meant that under electoral law his electors should have stood down.In all of them, too, Trump lawyers had claimed widespread election fraud without producing evidence and were using that false claim to justify calling their electors into action. It just so happened that the total electoral college votes wielded by these six states (79 votes) came out four ahead of Biden’s actual margin of victory (75 votes).In other words, the fake electors had the potential, if the plan could be pulled off, to overturn the election and keep Trump in the White House.Georgia’s 16 Trump electors were nominated towards the beginning of 2020 by the executive committee of the Georgia Republican party. They were drawn from the usual suspects – senior apparatchiks, major donors, and local dignitaries.The chairman of the state party at the time was David Shafer, who had a controversial four years at its helm. Under his tenure, the party has shifted sharply towards the extreme right. It also effectively handed control of the US Senate to Democrats by losing both senatorial elections in Georgia in 2021.The group of 16 electors, with Shafer as chairman, began routinely enough. Individuals were flattered to be invited to take part in what is usually seen as a ceremonial electoral role.John Isakson was one of the initial 16 who accepted the invitation. He told the January 6 committee in an interview that Shafer invited him to be a presidential elector.Isakson agreed. His idea of the role was that if Trump won, “we went to Washington to cast our votes in the electoral college”.As Isakson rightly conceived it, in the normal run of events the 16 Trump electors would effectively have ceased to exist on 7 December, the date that Biden’s victory was certified in Georgia. But then there was Chesebro’s “reasonable course of action” – the idea that they should gather to vote anyway to buy Trump time.Days before the Democratic electors were scheduled to appear at the Georgia capitol to cast their ballots on behalf of the winner, the Republican electors began receiving calls asking them to come to the Capitol to cast their alternative ballots. The request came as a surprise to many.Trump’s legal team tied it to a big lawsuit pending in the US supreme court in which Biden’s victory was being challenged in four battleground states including Georgia. It was claimed (without credible evidence) that voting irregularities had occurred.The case was lodged on 8 December by the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton.Electors were told that if that suit were to have any chance of success, a slate of “alternate” ballots had to be cast in the battleground states. Otherwise, Trump might win the court challenge, and thus the presidency, only to find himself stymied because key electoral college votes hadn’t been cast on the allotted day.Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator who served as the secretary of the 16 Republican fake electors, used a sporting analogy to visualise the concept. He told the January 6 committee in a deposition: “When you have the Super Bowl you print T-shirts, both teams as being the winner, and you keep the T-shirts for the ones that were the winner, and you throw away the ones that weren’t, but you still have to have two sets of T-shirts for both sets of winners.”Guardian interviews with participants in the fake elector plan and a review of January 6 committee documents show that the same official line kept being presented: the Republican electors would have to cast their votes in order to keep Trump’s hopes alive should a judge find in his favour. The votes would only be relevant if the president’s lawsuit went ahead.The problem was that Trump’s lawsuit did not go ahead. On 11 December, the US supreme court brusquely threw out the Texas case.The decision, issued three days before the electors were set to gather, was another pivotal point at which the plan could have been called off. In fact, the team of Trump campaign lawyers who had been given the job of running the “alternate” scheme assumed that it would indeed now be terminated.Records compiled by the January 6 committee reveal that the supreme court’s dismissal of the lawsuit had a seismic impact inside the Trump campaign. Three of its key lawyers – general counsel Matt Morgan, his associate Josh Findlay, and deputy campaign manager Justin Clark – all immediately agreed that the “alternate” elector plan which they supervised up until then no longer had any merit.“We’re done with this, just stop work on this exercise… There’s no other recourse here,” Morgan told Findlay by phone within minutes of the court’s decision being delivered.The three lawyers thought that would be the end of it. They were wrong. Shortly after Morgan contacted Findlay to tell him to drop the fake elector scheme, he called a second time.“Rudy wants to keep fighting this thing,” Morgan said, referring to Giuliani who was at that time leading the legal effort to overturn Biden’s victory. “So we’re going to have you pass it off to Ken.”This was a bombshell exploding on top of a bombshell. Not only did Giuliani want to press on with the fake elector idea, but he wanted the three most senior campaign lawyers to step aside and hand the project over to Chesebro, the inventor of the plan.Findlay was astounded. He told January 6 committee investigators that the impetus for this switch in strategy clearly came from Trump himself.Trump “made it clear that Rudy was in charge of this and that Rudy was executing what he wanted. Rudy had been given power and this is what he wanted to do,” Findlay said.In that moment the Trump campaign was riven in half. Findlay and his fellow senior attorneys, convinced that the fake elector plan was moribund, suddenly found themselves confronted by Trump, Giuliani and Chesebro who were itching to carry on.“It led to a divide in the campaign,” Findlay said. “Everyone was shocked by the tactics. It felt like nothing was off the table to some people. [They] were going to do whatever they wanted to do.”What Giuliani and Chesebro wanted to do was have the 16 fake electors turn up at the Georgia capitol on 14 December and proceed as though Trump had won. For that to proceed, it was critical that the 16 individuals knew nothing about the significance of the dismissal of the Texas lawsuit, the consequent collapse of the legal argument for “alternate” votes, and the rift within the campaign.As investigators for the January 6 committee told Findlay during his questioning: “Based on our investigation, we have not yet seen any indication that the change in circumstances around the justification for, or reason why, the electors met was communicated to the electors themselves.”A Georgia official who was close enough to the party leadership to be able to watch the fake elector saga unfold confirmed to the Guardian that many of the electors were kept in the dark. In his estimation, 12 or 13 of the 16 “had no idea what they were doing”.For at least one of them, the paucity of information was not good enough. Isakson told the January 6 committee that shortly before the electoral college was due to convene, he received a phone call from a number he did not recognize.The man said there was a gathering at the capitol for the electors and that all of them were invited. Isakson was unimpressed by how the man pitched the event.“It came across to me like a political rally,” he told investigators. “I indicated that I couldn’t attend because of work.”In the end, Isakson was one of four of the initial cohort of Republican electors who did not participate in casting fake votes on 14 December. The other three backed out for personal and other reasons that have not been fully disclosed, and all four were replaced.Apart from keeping the electors in a state of ignorance, there was another order coming down from Trump’s top team: maintain secrecy. Two days before the electoral college gathered, Chesebro wrote to campaign operatives and said that Giuliani would “like to wait until all the electors have voted before putting out any statements or otherwise alerting anyone”.The following day – just one day to go now – an email was sent by Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director for election day operations, to all Georgia fake electors. “Thank you for agreeing to serve as a Republican elector or alternate,” it began.Sinners continued: “I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result – a win in Georgia for President Trump – but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”In his deposition to January 6 investigators, Sinners attempted to downplay his email, saying its call for omertà among the fake electors was “innocuous”. He told investigators: “The secrecy element was simply get the people on the bus and make sure that they’re there.”That was not the sense that Greg Bluestein, the Journal-Constitution reporter, picked up in the days leading to his surreal running up and down the marble stairs at the Georgia Capitol. He reached out to many prominent state Republicans and was repeatedly told nothing was up.“I remember asking, ‘Hey, just in case, you guys aren’t planning anything right?’ Multiple people told me, ‘No, nope, we’re not gonna do anything.”This only added to Bluestein’s bemusement when he saw the gaggle outside room 216, including several Republican electors. That’s when he realized that the Trump campaign was very much preparing to do something.This is the way democracy ends, not with a bang but a whimper. After the electors had gathered in room 216, and the four replacements had been selected, the important business of the day was set to begin – casting false electoral college ballots.But there was a technical glitch. That morning Sinners, the Trump campaign operative, had bought a new printer at Target to run off the certificates of votes for the electors to sign.It took him 20 minutes to get the printer out of its box and install the driver software onto his laptop. As the secretary of the fake electors, Shawn Still, recounted to the January 6 committee: “He just fumbled through that, it just kind of became a bit of a snicker moment for everyone”.Eventually, the printer was sorted. Shafer, as chairman of the electors, called the meeting to order and told the group, in his own words, that “there was an election contest pending and that we were taking these actions today to preserve President Trump’s remedies”. Then they sat around a U-shaped table and each solemnly signed six copies of the certificates.History had been made. Even if it was fake history.Copies of those signed documents were obtained by American Oversight, and there it is in black and white: “We, the undersigned, being the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Georgia, do hereby … cast each of [our] ballots FOR DONALD J. TRUMP – 16 VOTES.”The wording was striking. In Pennsylvania, the fake electors had written into their ballots the proviso that the votes would only count should there be “a final non-appealable court order or other proceeding prescribed by law” that gave Trump victory in that state.In Georgia, there was no such caveat. The certificates read verbatim exactly as they would have done had Trump legitimately won.These un-caveated certificates were marked to be sent to the “President of the Senate” – Pence in his role as presiding official over the upper chamber of Congress – and to the head of the National Archives. Some of the fake electors were puzzled by this – hadn’t it been agreed that their votes would only be sent to Washington were Trump to win his law case?Shawn Still told the January 6 committee that he had raised precisely this point as the signed votes were being drawn together by Sinners in room 216. He thought of his Super Bowl T-shirt analogy, and wanted to know from Sinners what would happen to the votes should Trump fail in the courts.“I remember specifically asking him what happens to them if there is not an overturn. And he said, ‘Well, that’s not up to me to decide, but I guess we’ll just set them aside and box them up somewhere, and that’ll be the end of it’.”Unbeknownst to several of the Republican electors, Trump’s inner circle of lawyers led by Giuliani and Chesebro had no intention of setting aside the ballots should the legal strategy through the courts fail – as it already had. They now had their sights firmly set on Pence and the final certification of Biden’s victory by Congress on January 6.On 8 December 2020, six days before the electors convened, Chesebro spoke to an Arizona lawyer who was involved in organising the “alternate” slate for Trump in that state. In an email obtained by the New York Times, the lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, made clear that he was fully aware that the plan was for “fake” votes, though he quickly corrected himself, changing the word to “alternative” and adding a smiley face.Chesebro’s idea, Wilenchik wrote, was to have the electors send in their votes even though they had no legal standing. That way “members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th … Kind of wild/creative.”Wild, certainly. Creative, maybe. Legal, unlikely. Tribe told the Guardian that mailing false certificates from Georgia and the other battleground states was a breach of both state and federal laws involving election fraud, interference with the electoral college, obstruction of official government proceedings, and subversion of the lawful transfer of presidential power.Others have pointed out that sending the false certificates to the National Archives also opened up the possibility of indictments for forgery of a public record. Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described the Georgia ballots for Trump as being as “phony as a three-dollar bill”At 12.51pm on 14 December 2020 Shafer, called the meeting in room 216 to a close. The deed had been done. In the end, 84 people from seven states including Georgia signed bogus electoral votes for Trump and sent them off to Washington as part of the billowing sequence of events that culminated violently on January 6.In the days that followed, the reality sunk in for many people involved in the fake elector plan that they had become enmeshed in something much bigger than themselves. As Sinners put it to January 6 investigators: “It became clear to me afterwards that I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges. He was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the Vice President to accept these slates of electors regardless … We were just kind of useful idiots or rubes at that point.”Shafer, the chairman of the electors, stood down in June as head of the state Republican party. He faces legal peril from both the Fulton county and federal probes into the fake elector scheme.His lawyer Holly Pierson disputed that there was any legal danger from what she called a “baseless, politically motivated prosecution.” She told the Guardian that Shafer was in no actual jeopardy because “everything he and the other presidential electors did was proper and lawful, in keeping with federal and state law, done on the specific advice of legal counsel, and fully protected by the US Constitution.”Shafer’s lawyers set out his self-defense in an 11-page letter to Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, in May. They said that he had received his own legal advice a week before the events at the state Capitol arguing that it was right for him and the other Republican electors to convene in order to preserve Trump’s remedies.That advice specifically pointed to a local lawsuit, Trump v Raffensperger, that had been lodged on 4 December and was still pending. (The case languished in the courts until it was voluntarily dismissed a day after the storming of the US Capitol.)Shafer and his 15 elector peers were all informed last year that they were targets of Willis’ criminal investigation. Since then, at least eight of them have agreed to immunity deals with prosecutors.The fall-out of the elector plan has elicited a range of responses from the electors themselves. Isakson, who declined to come to the Capitol on 14 December and was replaced in the final fake elector lineup, only learned of what happened after the event.In his interview with January 6 investigators more than a year later, he was shown one of the false ballots and asked whether he approved of its language that described the 16 as the “duly elected and qualified electors in Georgia”.He replied: “Knowing everything that I know now, I would have had great concerns. The challenges have been exhausted, and this wouldn’t have been appropriate.”Some of the electors who, unlike Isakson, did go ahead and sign certificates on 14 December have let it be known privately that they were upset by how things panned out. They had tried to do the right thing but ended up being tied in legal knots.Sinners expressed even stronger sentiments. He told the January 6 committee that people had been put into a legally compromising position.“I’m angry. I am angry because I think in a sense, you know, no one really cared if people were potentially putting themselves in jeopardy.”Sinners was asked by investigators what he felt when he made the connection that his involvement in the fake elector scheme had been used by Trump and Giuliani to spearhead the pressure campaign against Pence leading to the violence on January 6.“I was ashamed,” he replied. “I was ashamed.” More

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      in Elections

      How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks

      by

      The special counsel layered varied charges atop the same facts, while sidestepping a free-speech question by not charging incitement.In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances, heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict.“Especially in a case like this, you want to have multiple charges that are applicable or provable with the same evidence, so that if on appeal you lose one, you still have the conviction,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor.That structure in the indictment is only one of several strategic choices by Mr. Smith — including what facts and potential charges he chose to include or omit — that may foreshadow and shape how an eventual trial of Mr. Trump will play out.The four charges rely on three criminal statutes: a count of conspiring to defraud the government, another of conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and two counts related to corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding. Applying each to Mr. Trump’s actions raises various complexities, according to a range of criminal law experts.At the same time, the indictment hints at how Mr. Smith is trying to sidestep legal pitfalls and potential defenses. He began with an unusual preamble that reads like an opening statement at trial, acknowledging that Mr. Trump had a right to challenge the election results in court and even to lie about them, but drawing a distinction with the defendant’s pursuit of “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”While the indictment is sprawling in laying out a case against Mr. Trump, it brings a selective lens on the multifaceted efforts by the former president and his associates to overturn the 2020 election.“The strength of the indictment is that it is very narrowly written,” said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and former public defender. “The government is not attempting to prove too much, but rather it went for low-hanging fruit.”For one, Mr. Smith said little about the violent events of Jan. 6, leaving out vast amounts of evidence in the report by a House committee that separately investigated the matter. He focused more on a brazen plan to recruit false slates of electors from swing states and a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to block the congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.That choice dovetails with Mr. Smith’s decision not to charge Mr. Trump with inciting an insurrection or seditious conspiracy — potential charges the House committee recommended. By eschewing them, he avoided having the case focus on the inflammatory but occasionally ambiguous remarks Mr. Trump made to his supporters as they morphed into a mob, avoiding tough First Amendment objections that defense lawyers could raise.For another, while Mr. Smith described six of Mr. Trump’s associates as co-conspirators, none were charged. It remains unclear whether some of them will eventually be indicted if they do not cooperate, or whether he intends to target only Mr. Trump so the case will move faster.Mr. Smith chose to say very little about the violent events of Jan. 6 and instead focused on the scheme to recruit slates of fake electors and the pressure Mr. Trump brought upon Vice President Pence.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAmong the charges Mr. Smith did bring against Mr. Trump, corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding is the most familiar in how it applies to the aftermath of the 2020 election. Already, hundreds of ordinary Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with it.To date, most judges in Jan. 6 cases, at the district court and appeals court level, have upheld the use of the statute. But a few Trump-appointed judges have favored a more narrow interpretation, like limiting the law to situations in which people destroyed evidence or sought a benefit more concrete than having their preferred candidate win an election.Mr. Trump, of course, would have personally benefited from staying in office, making that charge stronger against him than against the rioters. Still, a possible risk is if the Supreme Court soon takes up one of the rioter cases and then narrows the scope of the law in a way that would affect the case against Mr. Trump.Proving IntentSome commentators have argued in recent days that prosecutors must persuade the jury that Mr. Trump knew his voter fraud claims were false to prove corrupt intent. But that is oversimplified, several experts said.To be sure, experts broadly agree that Mr. Smith will have an easier time winning a conviction if jurors are persuaded that Mr. Trump knew he was lying about everything. To that end, the indictment details how he “was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue” and “deliberately disregarded the truth.”“What you see in Trump — a guy who seems to inhabit his own fictional universe — is something you see in other fraud defendants,” said David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor. “It’s a common challenge in a fraud case to prove that at some level the defendant knew what he was telling people wasn’t true. The way you prove it is, in part, by showing that lots of people made clear to the defendant that what he was saying was baseless.”Moreover, the indictment emphasizes several episodes in which Mr. Trump had firsthand knowledge that his statements were false. Prosecutors can use those instances of demonstrably knowing lies to urge jurors to infer that Mr. Trump knew he was lying about everything else, too.The indictment, for example, recounts a taped call on Jan. 2 with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump shared a series of conspiracy theories that he systematically debunked in detail. But on Twitter the next day, Mr. Trump “falsely claimed that the Georgia secretary of state had not addressed” the allegations.And on Jan. 5, Mr. Pence told Mr. Trump that he had no lawful authority to alter or delay the counting of Mr. Biden’s electoral votes, but “hours later” Mr. Trump issued a statement through his campaign saying the opposite: “The vice president and I are in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act.”Vice President Pence appears during House committee hearings investigating Jan. 6. The indictment suggests Mr. Trump knew he was lying about what Mr. Pence had told him on January 5.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn any case, several rioters have already argued that they did not have “corrupt intent” because they sincerely believed the election had been stolen. That has not worked: Judges have said that corrupt intent can be shown by engaging in other unlawful actions like trespassing, assaulting the police and destroying property.“Belief that your actions are serving a greater good does not negate consciousness of wrongdoing,” Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote last month.Mr. Trump, of course, did not rampage through the Capitol. But the indictment accuses him of committing other crimes — the fraud and voter disenfranchisement conspiracies — based on wrongful conduct. It cites Mr. Trump’s bid to use fake electors in violation of the Electoral Count Act and his solicitation of fraud at the Justice Department and in Georgia, where he pressured Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,780 votes, enough to overcome Mr. Biden’s margin of victory.“Whether he thinks he won or lost is relevant but not determinative,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former prosecutor who worked on the independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton. “Trump could try to achieve vindicating his beliefs legally. The conspiracy is tied to the illegal means. So he has to say that he thought ‘finding’ 11,000 votes was legal, or that fake electors were legal. That is much harder to say with a straight face.”Proving Mr. Trump’s intent will also be key to the charges of defrauding the government and disenfranchising voters. But it may be easier because those laws do not have the heightened standard of “corrupt” intent as the obstruction statute does.Court rulings interpreting the statute that criminalizes defrauding the United States, for example, have established that evidence of deception or dishonesty is sufficient. In a 1924 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice William H. Taft wrote that it covers interference with a government function “by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.” A 1989 appeals courts ruling said the dishonest actions need not be crimes in and of themselves.This factor may help explain the indictment’s emphasis on the fake electors schemes in one state after another, a repetitive narrative that risks dullness: It would be hard to credibly argue that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators thought the fake slates they submitted were real, and the indictment accuses them of other forms of trickery as well.The opening of the Michigan Electoral College session at the State Capitol in 2020. The indictment emphasizes Mr. Trump’s involvement in fake electors schemes in several swing states.Pool photo by Carlos Osorio“Some fraudulent electors were tricked into participating based on the understanding that their votes would be used only if the defendant succeeded in outcome-determinative lawsuits within their state, which the defendant never did,” it said.A Novel ChargeThe inclusion of the charge involving a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters was a surprising development in Mr. Smith’s emerging strategy. Unlike the other charges, it had not been a major part of the public discussion of the investigation — for example, it was not among the charges recommended by the House Jan. 6 committee.Congress enacted the law after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal prosecutors to go after Southern white people, including Ku Klux Klan members, who used terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved Black people from voting. But in the 20th century, the Supreme Court upheld a broadened use of the law to address election-fraud conspiracies. The idea is that any conspiracy to engineer dishonest election results victimizes all voters in an election.“It was a good move to charge that statute, partly because that is really what this case really is about — depriving the people of the right to choose their president,” said Robert S. Litt, a former federal prosecutor and a top intelligence lawyer in the Obama administration.That statute has mostly been used to address misconduct leading up to and during election, like bribing voters or stuffing ballot boxes, rather than misconduct after an election. Still, in 1933, an appeals court upheld its use in a case involving people who reported false totals from a voter tabulation machine.It has never been used before in a conspiracy to use fake slates of Electoral College voters from multiple states to keep legitimate electors from being counted and thereby subvert the results of a presidential election — a situation that itself was unprecedented.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have signaled they will argue that he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted. Indeed, the indictment acknowledged that it was not illegal in and of itself for Mr. Trump to lie.But in portraying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods as “integral to his criminal plans,” Mr. Smith suggested he would frame those public statements as contributing to unlawful actions and as evidence they were undertaken with bad intentions, not as crimes in and of themselves.Mr. Trump at Reagan National Airport Thursday following his court appearance. Mr. Trump’s legal team has signaled they will argue that he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA related defense Mr. Trump may raise is the issue of “advice of counsel.” If a defendant relied in good faith on a lawyer who incorrectly informed him that doing something would be legal, a jury may decide he lacked criminal intent. But there are limits. Among them, the defendant must have told the lawyer all the relevant facts and the theory must be “reasonable.”The indictment discusses how even though White House lawyers told Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence had no lawful authority to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, an outside lawyer — John Eastman, described in the indictment as Co-Conspirator 2 and who separately faces disbarment proceedings — advised him that Mr. Pence could.Several legal specialists agreed that Mr. Trump has an advice-of-counsel argument to make. But Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor, said Mr. Smith was likely to try to rebut it by pointing to the repeated instances in which Mr. Trump’s White House legal advisers told him that Mr. Eastman was wrong.“You have to have a genuine good-faith belief that the legal advice is legitimate and valid, not just ‘I’m going to keep running through as many lawyers as I can until one tells me something I want to hear, no matter how crazy and implausible it is,’” Mr. Buell said. More