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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

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      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

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      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

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      A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district

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      Since 1870, the Augusta judicial circuit has been home to the criminal justice system of a three-county area on Georgia’s border with South Carolina. In that time, no African American has been elected district attorney of the circuit – until 2020, when a Black lawyer named Jared Williams upset a conservative, pro-police candidate with just more than 50% of the vote.But that historic win was short-lived. The day after his election, a lawyer and state lawmaker in the area proposed something unusual: that the circuit’s whitest county separate itself from the Augusta circuit, creating a new judicial circuit in Georgia for the first time in nearly 40 years.“Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit,” Barry Fleming, a Republican state legislator from nearby Harlem, asked the Columbia county commission chair, Doug Duncan, in a text message.Duncan supported the plan, and in December 2020 issued a resolution asking the area’s lawmakers, including Fleming, to introduce legislation that would separate Columbia county from the judicial circuit it had been a part of for 150 years. Fleming’s bill passed with bipartisan support.The split caused the disenfranchisement of the old circuit’s Black voters, voting advocacy organization Black Voters Matter Fund contended in a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by the state supreme court. Those voters had chosen Williams, who ran on a pledge to uphold criminal justice reforms such as not prosecuting low-level marijuana possession, a crime which disproportionately affects Black and minority communities.Instead of Williams, Black voters in Columbia county got as their prosecutor Bobby Christine, a Trump-appointed US attorney who was appointed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Christine then chose Williams’s opponent as his chief deputy.Voting advocates say the circuit split is an example of the type of minority rule that Republicans are accused of engaging in across the US.“There was a time when as we started to win these elections, white people would leave,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund. “But now they’ve figured out, we don’t actually have to leave, we can just change the jurisdiction. It is a way, even when the political minority is losing, to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.”Despite voting advocates’ opposition, the circuit split had bipartisan support and was welcomed by some Black Democrats in the legislature, who argued that a backlog of felony cases in Richmond county could be reduced if the circuit were smaller and didn’t include Columbia county.Fleming and Duncan did not respond to requests for comment. In response to a public records request, Duncan’s office said it had no communications with Fleming related to the Augusta split.The splitting of the Augusta judicial circuit and the resulting creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit is not the only split to have been proposed in recent years. Nor is it the only split to have involved Fleming, a hardline conservative lawyer who was the architect of Georgia’s 2021 sweeping voter suppression law.Following the Augusta split, two Republican lawmakers in Georgia proposed a circuit split in Oconee county after the election of a progressive prosecutor who ran on a platform of addressing systemic racism. Since then, Republican legislators statewide created a prosecutor oversight commission that holds the power to remove prosecutors for misconduct. The commission has been heavily criticized by Democratic prosecutors such as Fani Willis, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis and others told lawmakers the commission was created so white Republicans could target minority prosecutors.The splits come at a time when criticism of prosecutors like Williams – who refuse to toe the line of tough-on-crime conservative policies – abounds on the right. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has made punishment of so-called progressive prosecutors part of his presidential campaign, firing a prosecutor who signed a pledge criticizing the criminalization of transgender people. In Mississippi, white Republican leaders have created a judicial district with hand-picked judges and law enforcement to oversee a majority-Black city.The Florida prosecutor who was removed by DeSantis has sued the governor, saying that by “challenging this illegal abuse of power, we make sure that no governor can toss out the results of an election because he doesn’t like the outcome”.Tossing out the outcome of an election is exactly what happened in Georgia when Republicans pushed for the creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit, Williams and others said.Before Fleming spearheaded the Augusta split, others had proposed breaking up the circuit. In 2018, state senator Harold Jones, who is Black, requested that the judicial council of Georgia conduct a workload study for courts in the three counties that comprise the old circuit – Columbia, Richmond and Burke. The study found that workloads were high for local judges, especially in the majority-Black county of Richmond, Jones said, so he argued that the 200,000 people there should have their own circuit. But he couldn’t make any headway.“As a Democrat, to do something that monumental, it’s next to impossible,” Jones said.It wasn’t until December 2020 that the study was used as rationale for a circuit split. Then, the Columbia county board of commissioners issued a resolution requesting that its local legislative delegation – which includes Fleming – introduce a law that would formalize the split. The resolution cited Jones’s 2018 study, but that was only part of the story.Behind the scenes, Columbia county leaders were coordinating to separate the county in response to Williams’s historic election win. Among those working to institute the split was Fleming himself.Fleming, an attorney who works on behalf of nearly 40 state and county governments throughout Georgia, is a full-throated Trump supporter. He has been heavily involved in election matters through his former role as chair of the special committee on election integrity. Fleming and Duncan were vocal opponents of Williams and supported his opponent, Natalie Paine.Held in the midst of widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 race between Williams and Paine, who was appointed by Kemp in 2017 and ran unopposed in 2018, reflected national themes of conflict between so-called law-and-order conservatives and progressive reformers. Williams prevailed despite attacks calling him “soft on crime”.His win set in motion the series of events to split Columbia county. After Fleming’s House bill, state senator Lee Anderson, who has ties to Fleming through their failed effort to annex land in Fleming’s home town away from Columbia county, introduced a senate bill officially calling for the creation of the Columbia judicial circuit.Co-sponsoring the bill were a handful of conservative and well-connected legislators including Jeff Mullis, a Confederate monument defender; Butch Miller, a far-right election denier; and state senator Bill Cowsert, who is Kemp’s brother-in-law. The bill eventually passed the senate unanimously, with many Democrats including Jones voting in favor due to their desire for a smaller circuit that could better serve Richmond’s high Black population, Jones said.Seven of the eight judges in the old Augusta circuit objected to the split, saying it would not address workload issues.The Augusta split provided a roadmap for Republicans throughout Georgia to fight back against progressive prosecutors. In 2020, Deborah Gonzalez became the state’s first Latina district attorney for the Western judicial circuit, winning on a platform of ending prosecution of low-level marijuana possession. Two Republican state lawmakers quickly asked the judicial council of Georgia to perform a study that would justify the separation of Oconee County from the Western circuit. Oconee is 87% white while the other county in the circuit, Athens-Clark, has a much higher Black population of 27%.One of the lawmakers, state representative Houston Gaines, was clear about the rationale behind the proposed split.“Our district attorney is choosing which laws to prosecute and which laws not to, and that is not the role of the district attorney,” Gaines told the local press.Then on 12 April, Meriwether county commissioners issued a resolution asking for itself and two other counties – Troup and Coweta – to have their own circuit, citing increasing populations and felony caseloads.The public reason for the proposed split, according to the Coweta circuit district attorney, Herb Cranford, is the circuit’s per-judge caseload. But recommendations for splits traditionally come from the judicial council of Georgia, and Cranford has said that a council study isn’t necessary.The Carroll county sheriff, Terry Langley – whose law enforcement agency oversees one of the five counties in Coweta’s judicial circuit – spoke in support of the split, saying the growing population of the area made it necessary.Much of that population growth has come in the form of people moving from the Atlanta metro area, Langley noted in a recent interview. The Atlanta area is far more Black than Carroll county.“I’m not big into growth … I like some of our small-town stuff that we have, much of it’s gone,” Langley said. “It’s managed growth. We’re gonna grow, but you gotta manage it to a way that you don’t lose the quality of life that we have.”Officials in Coweta, Heard, Meriwether and Troup counties did not respond to requests for comment.Fleming is also co-sponsor of a bill proposing to split Banks county from the Piedmont judicial circuit. All of the circuit’s judges, its public defender and its district attorney have spoken in opposition to the split.The Piedmont circuit does not have an abnormally high caseload for judges, according to the two most recent judicial council of Georgia workload assessments, although the circuit has seen a steady increase in population in recent years.The real reason for the desired split probably comes down to a disagreement over prosecutorial ideology. During testimony before lawmakers, Judge Joseph Booth said that the bill was a result of disagreements between Sheriff Carlton Speed, whose office has been accused of racially discriminating against a defendant in a prominent case involving a Black former Atlanta Hawks basketball player, and the district attorney, Brad Smith.Another judge in the circuit, Currie Mingeldorff, also noted that the split was proposed after he engaged in a failed effort to institute a drug court in Banks county. Drug or specialty courts have been around for decades to prevent mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. But Speed opposed the program.“I never considered it to be tough on crime or not tough on crime, I considered it to be a way to keep the community safe, rehabilitate a person and reduce recidivism,” Mingeldorff said.The bill stalled in Georgia’s house of representatives but was replaced by a Senate bill that remains pending. Erwin, Speed, Smith and Booth did not respond to requests for comment.James Woodall, a public policy associate with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of indigent defense, said circuit splitting allows lawmakers to hand-pick conservative prosecutors in a swing state.“They’re trying to find ways to maintain power,” Woodall said. “And who’s going to choose those people? Not the voters.” More

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      Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed sufficient evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has amassed enough evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.The copied data from the Dominion Voting System machines, which is used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged.Though Coffee county is outside the jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, folding a potential computer trespass charge into a wider racketeering case would allow prosecutors to also seek an indictment for what the Trump operatives did there, the people said.A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, while prosecutors at the federal level are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.A special grand jury in Atlanta that heard evidence for roughly seven months recommended charges for more than a dozen people, including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews, though Willis will have to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.The grand jury that could decide whether to return an indictment against Trump was seated on 11 July. The selection process was attended by Willis and two prosecutors known to be on the Trump investigation: her deputy district attorney, Will Wooten, and special prosecutor Nathan Wade.Charges stemming from the Trump investigation are expected to come between the final week of July and the first two weeks of August, the Guardian has previously reported, after Willis told her team to shift to remote work during that period because of security concerns.The district attorney originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who acted as fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end. More

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      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

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      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More

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      Georgia’s top court rejects Trump’s attempt to block prosecutor in 2020 election inquiry

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      Georgia’s highest court Monday rejected a request by Donald Trump to block a district attorney from prosecuting the former president for his actions in the wake his 2020 election defeat.The Georgia supreme court unanimously shot down a petition that Trump’s attorneys filed last week asking the court to intervene. Trump’s legal team argued that Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and her office should be barred from seeking charges and that a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry should be thrown out.Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his election loss in Georgia to Joe Biden. She has suggested she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.The state supreme court noted in its five-page ruling Monday that Trump has a similar petition pending in Fulton county superior court. The justices unanimously declined to overstep the lower court, writing that Trump “makes no showing that he has been prevented fair access to the ordinary channels”.Regarding Trump’s attempt to block the prosecutors, the justices said his legal filing lacked “the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification by this court at this time on this record”.A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. Trump attorney Drew Findling did not immediately respond to phone and text messages seeking comment.Trump’s legal team previously acknowledged that the dual filings were unusual but said they were necessary given the tight time frame. Two new regular grand juries were seated last week, and one is likely to hear the case.Trump’s attorneys made similar requests in a previous filing in March in Fulton county superior court. They asked superior court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, to step aside and let another judge hear the Trump team’s claims. McBurney kept the case and has yet to rule.In their legal petition to the state supreme court, Trump’s lawyers argued they were “stranded between the supervising judge’s protracted passivity and the district attorney’s looming indictment” with no choice other than to ask the high court to intervene.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWillis opened her investigation shortly after Trump called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, in January 2021 and suggested he could help Trump “find” the votes needed to overturn his election loss in the state.The special grand jury, which did not have the power to issue indictments, was seated last May and dissolved in January after hearing from 75 witnesses and submitting a report with recommendations for Willis. Though most of that report remains sealed for now, the panel’s foreperson has said without naming names that the special grand jury recommended charging multiple people. More