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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

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      Georgia Supreme Court Rejects Trump Effort to Quash Investigation

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      With indictment decisions imminent, the court refused to scuttle an investigation into whether the former president and his allies interfered in the 2020 election.ATLANTA — In a ruling on Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a long-shot attempt by former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team to scuttle an investigation into election interference weeks before indictment decisions are expected.The pronouncement from the court was both unanimous and swift, coming just three days after Mr. Trump’s lawyers submitted their filing. They had sought a court order that would throw out the work of a special grand jury in Atlanta and disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, from the proceedings. She has been the prosecutor in charge of the investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia.Most of the court’s nine justices were originally appointed by Republican governors; thus far, the case has played out in Superior Court in Atlanta.Mr. Trump’s lawyers had conceded in their filing that they were up against long odds and had identified “no case in 40 years” where the court had intervened in the way they were seeking. In their ruling, the justices said the Trump team had “not shown that this case presents one of those extremely rare circumstances in which this court’s original jurisdiction should be invoked, and therefore, the petition is dismissed.”They also said that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had not presented “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Willis’s disqualification.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers had previously sought to scuttle the investigation with a motion, filed in March, to quash much of the evidence that Ms. Willis’s team had collected since the investigation began in early 2021 and to take Ms. Willis off it. But the Superior Court judge handling the case, Robert C.I. McBurney, has yet to rule.“Stranded between the supervising judge’s protected passivity and the district attorney’s looming indictment, petitioner has no meaningful option other than to seek this court’s intervention,” the lawyers wrote in their filing to the state’s high court on Friday.The lawyers could not be reached immediately on Monday; the district attorney’s office had no immediate comment.Ms. Willis has signaled that any indictments will come in the first half of August; she recently asked judges in a downtown Atlanta courthouse not to schedule trials for part of that time as she prepares to bring charges. The investigation has examined whether the former president and his allies illegally interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, where Mr. Trump lost narrowly to Joe Biden.The special grand jury heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people; its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them. To bring any charges, Ms. Willis must now seek indictments from a regular grand jury. More

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      Georgia grand jury selected in Trump case over attempt to overturn 2020 defeat

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      A grand jury selected in Georgia on Tuesday is expected to say whether Donald Trump and associates should face criminal charges over their attempt to overturn the former president’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.The district attorney of Fulton county, Fani Willis, has indicated she expects to obtain indictments between the end of July and the middle of August. Trump also faces possible federal charges over his election subversion, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Trump already faces trials on 71 criminal charges: 34 in New York over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and 37 in Florida, from federal prosecutors and regarding his retention of classified documents after leaving office.His legal jeopardy does not stop there. In a civil case in New York, Trump was fined about $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll. Another civil case, concerning Trump’s business practices, continues in the same state.Grand jury selection for the Georgia case comes at a febrile moment in US society. Denying all wrongdoing and claiming political persecution, Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination to face Biden again at the polls next year.Trump has repeatedly claimed Willis, who is African American, is motivated by racism as well as political animus. Willis has indicated possible charges under an anti-racketeering law also used to target members of gangs.Before 2020, no Democratic candidate for president had won Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. But Biden beat Trump by 0.2% of the vote, or a little under 12,000 ballots.As he explored ways to stay in office, Trump was recorded telling the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win. The Fulton county investigation of such attempted election subversion has produced dramatic headlines, stoking anger on both sides of a deepening political divide.In February, the foreperson of the grand jury that investigated the case told CNN it would be a “good assumption” that a subsequent panel would recommend indictments – to be decided on by Willis – for more than a dozen people.The foreperson also told the New York Times it was “not rocket science” to work out if Trump would be one of those people. The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is among Trump aides and associates also believed at risk of indictment.In March, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, was reported to have told grand jurors: “If somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots … Trump would’ve believed it.”Last month, eight of 16 “fake electors” who sought to falsely declare Trump the winner in Georgia were revealed to have reached immunity deals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTwo grand juries were impaneled on Tuesday, each with 23 members and three alternates.Elie Honig, a former state and federal prosecutor now senior legal analyst for CNN, said: “This is now a ‘regular’ grand jury. At the end of it, if Fani Willis asks for an indictment, they will vote on it. The vast majority of times, that does result in an indictment.”Ed Garland, a local attorney, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the jurors would face an “awesome responsibility” that “no other group of Georgia citizens has ever dealt with – the potential indictment of a former president”.Garland added: “This is a case that has been saturated in the media with political overtones, so it is imperative for them to be fair and impartial and for our judicial system to live up to its ideals.”At the courthouse, the judge presiding over grand jury selection, Robert McBurney, reminded reporters of the sensitivity of proceedings. “It would not go well if any of [the jurors’] pictures appear in any of your outlets,” he said. “If you need extra photos, get Fani Willis.”Filmed arriving at the courthouse, Willis did not speak to reporters. More

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      Trump documents trial judge sets first hearing; Georgia grand jury set to weigh 2020 election charges – live

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      From 1h agoThe first hearing before US District Judge Aileen Cannon in the federal criminal case against Donald Trump will be on 18 July, according to a court order.As California considers implementing large-scale reparations for Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the state has also become the focus of the nation’s divisive reparations conversation, drawing the backlash of conservatives criticizing the priorities of a “liberal” state.“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed. Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
      It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.
      Read the full story here.More than 1,5000 amendments were filed to the FY2024 defense authorization bill, which is projected to hit the House floor this week. At issue is whether the House will take up the hard-right amendments, with the weight falling once again on Speaker Kevin McCarthy.Some of the most closely watched amendments relate to abortion, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) funding, and transgender troops, according to Politico’s Playbook.McCarthy will need to navigate between the demands of his most conservative members – three of whom serve on the House rules committee – and the need for Democratic votes in order to get a bill ultimately signed into law, Playbook writes. It continues:
      In the past, House leaders typically have told the hard right to pound sand, knowing they weren’t going to vote for the final bill anyway. But after pissing off conservatives during the debt limit standoff, McCarthy looks poised to make a different calculation this time.
      Facing heavy criticism from the House Freedom Caucus and other conservatives, McCarthy is under pressure to give on a number of high-profile issues touching defense policy, Punchbowl News writes. It says:
      Every ‘culture war’ provision from the Freedom Caucus that’s added to the base legislation will cost Democratic votes. It will also make GOP moderates unhappy.
      The House rules committee is scheduled to mark up the FY2024 defense authorization bill, the annual bill setting Pentagon priorities and policies, today.The bill, which is expected to hit the floor later this week, has been signed into law 60 years straight. But this year, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and GOP leaders are confronting a legislative landmine as the far-right House Freedom Caucus push for dozens of proposed changes to the legislation.Adam Smith, the head Democrat on the House armed services committee, said he was worried about a flurry of “extreme right-wing amendments” attached to the bill and that he wasn’t “remotely” confident the bill will pass this week.Smith told the Washington Post he was concerned about GOP measures on “abortion, guns, the border, and social policy and equity issues”. Without the controversial amendments, Smith predicted that well over 300 House members would vote for the bill. With them, “you lose most, if not all, Democrats,” he told Politico’s Playbook.Iowa’s state legislature is holding a special session on Tuesday as it plans to vote on a bill that would ban most abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t yet know they are pregnant.The state is the latest in the country to vote on legislation restricting reproductive rights after the overturning of Roe v Wade last year, which ended the nationwide constitutional right to abortion.Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, called for the special session last week, vowing to “continue to fight against the inhumanity of abortion” and calling the “pro-life” movement against reproductive rights “the most important human rights cause of our time”.Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature will debate House Study Bill 255, which was released on Friday and seeks to prohibit abortions at the first sign of cardiac activity except in certain cases such as rape or incest.Iowa’s house, senate and governor’s office are all Republican-controlled, and the bill faces few hurdles from being passed.Read the full story here.The first hearing before US District Judge Aileen Cannon in the federal criminal case against Donald Trump will be on 18 July, according to a court order.Trump was charged with retention of national defense information, including US nuclear secrets and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack, which means his case will be tried under the rules laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.Cipa provides a mechanism for the government to charge cases involving classified documents without risking the “graymail” problem, where the defense threatens to reveal classified information at trial, but the steps that have to be followed mean it takes longer to get to trial.The process includes the government turning over all of the classified information they want to use to the defense in discovery, like any other criminal case, in addition to the non-classified discovery that is done in a separate process.Trump’s lawyers argued the amount of discovery – the government is making the material available in batches because there is so much evidence and it has not finished processing everything that came from search warrants – meant that they could not know how long the process would take.Trump’s lawyers wrote:
      From a practical manner, the volume of discovery and the Cipa logistics alone make plain that the government’s requested schedule is unrealistic.
      Donald Trump asked the federal judge overseeing the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case to indefinitely postpone setting a trial date in court filings on Monday and suggested, at a minimum, that any scheduled trial should not take place until after the 2024 presidential election.The papers submitted by Trump’s lawyers in response to the US justice department’s motion to hold the trial this December made clear the former president’s aim to delay proceedings as their guiding strategy – the case may be dropped if Trump wins the election.The filing said:
      The court should, respectfully, before establishing any trial date, allow time for development of further clarity as to the full nature and scope of the motions that will be filed.
      Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis launched the investigation in early 2021, after Donald Trump tried to overturn his election defeat in Georgia by calling Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and suggesting the state’s top elections official could help him “find 11,780 votes”, just enough needed to beat Joe Biden.The investigation expanded to include an examination of a slate of Republican fake electors, phone calls by Trump and others to Georgia officials in the weeks after the 2020 election and unfounded allegations of widespread election fraud made to state lawmakers, according to AP.About a year into her investigation, Willis asked for a special grand jury. At the time, she said she needed the panel’s subpoena power to compel testimony from witnesses who had refused to cooperate without a subpoena. In a January 2022 letter to Fulton county superior court chief judge, Christopher Brasher, Willis wrote that Raffensperger, who she called an “essential witness”, had “indicated that he will not participate in an interview or otherwise offer evidence until he is presented with a subpoena by my office”.That special grand jury was seated in May 2022, and released in January after completing its work. The panel issued subpoenas and heard testimony from 75 witnesses, ranging from some of Trump’s most prominent allies to local election workers, before drafting a final report with recommendations for Willis.Portions of that report that were released in February said jurors believed that “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to bring charges. The panel’s foreperson said in media interviews later that they recommended indicting numerous people, but she declined to name names.Here’s a bit more on the grand jury being seated today in Atlanta, Georgia, that will probably consider charges against Donald Trump and his Republican allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The new grand jury term begins today in Fulton county, and two panels will be selected at the downtown Atlanta courthouse, each made up of 16 to 23 people and up to three alternates. One of these panels is expected to handle the Trump investigation.Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney will preside over today’s court proceedings, CNN reported. McBurney oversaw the special grand jury that previously collected evidence in the Trump investigation, and he is also expected to oversee the grand jury tasked with making charging decisions in the case.Good morning, US politics blog readers. A grand jury being seated today in Atlanta is expected to consider charges against former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis launched the investigation in early 2021, shortly after Trump tried to overturn his loss by calling Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and suggested the state’s top elections official could help him “find 11,780 votes”.A special grand jury previously issued subpoenas and heard testimony from about 75 witnesses, which included Trump advisers, his former attorneys, White House aides, and Georgia officials. That panel drafted a final report with recommendations for Willis.The new grand jury term begins today in Fulton county, which includes most of Atlanta and some suburbs. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney will swear-in two grand juries, one of which is expected to hear evidence in the Georgia elections case.Willis, an elected Democrat, is expected to present her case before one of two new grand juries being seated. The panel won’t be deciding guilt, only if Willis has enough evidence to move her case forward and who should face indictment. Willis has previously indicated that final decisions could come next month.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      Joe Biden is meeting with other Nato leaders in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Russia’s war in Ukraine will top the agenda.
      The House rules committee is scheduled to mark up the FY2024 defense authorization bill today. The legislation is set to hit the floor later this week, with final passage currently envisioned for Friday.
      The House will meet at noon and at 2pm will take up multiple bills, with last votes expected at 6.30pm
      The Senate will meet at 10am and vote on several nominations throughout the day. There will be classified all-senators briefing with defense and intelligence officials on how AI is used for national security purposes. More

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      L. Lin Wood, Lawyer Who Tried to Overturn Trump’s 2020 Loss, Gives Up License

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      Mr. Wood wrote that the Georgia State Bar had “agreed to drop the disciplinary cases” against him if he retired from the profession.L. Lin Wood, one of the key lawyers who sought to overturn former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss and faced potential disciplinary action in Georgia as a result, opted to give up his law license in the state.Mr. Wood officially requested that the State Bar of Georgia transfer his attorney status to “retired” on July 4, according to a letter he posted on the messaging platform Telegram. The request was approved, and two pending disciplinary charges against him were dropped, according to a letter from Georgia’s Office of the General Counsel that Mr. Wood also posted to Telegram.Mr. Wood, a former libel lawyer who became an ardent supporter of Mr. Trump, has faced his own series of legal troubles since he joined Mr. Trump’s crusade to use the court system to overturn the 2020 results, echoing falsehoods that there was widespread voter fraud.The Georgia State Bar wrote in documents filed with the state’s Supreme Court that Mr. Wood’s retirement had “achieved the goals of disciplinary action, including protecting the public and the integrity of the judicial system and the legal profession.”Mr. Wood wrote on Telegram that the bar had “agreed to drop the disciplinary cases” if he retired from the profession. In an interview with The Times, he said that he had wanted to retire sooner, but that legal proceedings from cases filed around the 2020 election prevented him from doing so.“I wish I had been able to do it two years ago,” he said. “I was tired of practicing law. I’d had enough.”The letters Mr. Wood posted on Telegram specified that his request was “unqualified, irrevocable and permanent” and that Mr. Wood could not practice law in any state. He is, however, allowed to represent himself in future cases so long as he does not present himself as a lawyer.Mr. Wood had been a licensed attorney in Georgia since 1977. His status is now listed as “retired” on the State Bar website, with no public discipline on record.Mr. Wood brought a federal lawsuit seeking to halt Georgia’s certification of the election in November 2020, which was blocked by a federal judge that year. His name subsequently appeared in lawsuits challenging election results in various other states.The State Bar opened an investigation into Mr. Wood for disciplinary action in 2021 and held a disciplinary trial earlier this year. Mr. Wood sued the association after it sought to obtain a mental health exam as part of its investigation, but he lost in a federal appeals court.He was one of several attorneys who faced $175,000 in sanctions and a recommendation for possible suspension or disbarment in Michigan for filing a lawsuit that a judge determined in 2021 “threatened to undermine the results of a legitimately conducted national election.”Mr. Wood claimed that he was not involved in that lawsuit but that another lawyer had added his name to documents filed in that case and several others.Last year, Mr. Wood was asked to testify in the Fulton County district attorney’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. There have been signals that charges related to that inquiry could be issued in August. More

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      Georgia elections official downplays cybersecurity threats despite report

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      Georgia’s top election official is disregarding a recently released report that identifies serious vulnerabilities in Georgia’s computerized election system, instead siding with a conflicting report and claiming that scientific findings about cybersecurity threats are no more than conspiracy theories.The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, charged with overseeing elections, announced that despite the report’s findings, he will not update software to protect against the vulnerabilities before the 2024 presidential elections.The dueling reports were released by a federal court as part of a lawsuit. One, a 96-page report prepared by J Alex Halderman, and Drew Springall, computer science professors at the University of Michigan and Auburn University, respectively, is based on tests of the equipment used in the increasingly important swing state. The report, which had been sealed for two years by the court, found “vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system that is exposed to potential attackers” which could allow votes to be changed, potentially affecting election outcomes in Georgia, according to a summary by Halderman.The other was prepared by Mitre, a research and development company, and paid for by Dominion Voting Systems, manufacturer of the state’s electronic voting system. Mitre did not have the same access to test Georgia’s voting equipment, and claimed the vulnerabilities are unlikely to be exploited on a wide scale.In justifying his decision not to update the state’s voting system, Raffensperger pointed to the Mitre report, which says the potential attacks Halderman identifies are “operationally infeasible”.Halderman called Raffensperger’s decision not to address the system’s vulnerabilities “irresponsible and wrong”. Raffensperger has made several statements in recent weeks calling the computer scientists’ conclusions “theoretical and imaginary”, and conflating their warnings with “Stop the Steal” efforts post-2020 – leading Halderman to label the state’s officials as “vulnerability deniers”. Computer scientists from many of the US’s leading universities signed a letter decrying the standoff, and urging Mitre to retract its report.The scenario lands Georgia in a situation where top computer scientists and Trump-aligned election deniers appear to be sharing the same or similar concerns, even while one relies on groundbreaking research, while the other has been discredited by courts and election officials alike.US district judge Amy Totenberg had sealed the Halderman report since 2021 because of cybersecurity concerns, as part of a lawsuit that started before the most recent presidential election and rise of election deniers. But an agreement was reached earlier this month to release a redacted version, together with the Mitre report.Halderman, who has researched digital elections equipment for decades, said court-ordered access to Georgia’s election equipment, manufactured by Dominion, allowed them to do “the first study in more than 10 years to comprehensively and independently assess the security of a widely deployed US voting machine, as well as the first-ever comprehensive security review of a widely deployed ballot marking device”.“The most critical problem we found,” Halderman wrote, is a “vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county’s central election management system to every ballot-marking device in the jurisdiction. This makes it possible to attack the ballot-marking devices at scale, over a wide area, without needing physical access to any of them.”Mitre’s countering report not only lacks any testing of voting machines, it also relies on a key premise, stated in a footnote on the first page: that no one besides election workers have access to the state’s voting hardware and software.But records obtained by the Coalition for Good Governance – the group behind the ongoing lawsuit against Georgia’s election system – show that people associated with the effort to deny the 2020 election results visited rural Coffee county’s election department in early 2021, and the Trump attorney Sidney Powell was able to copy Dominion software and other data. These records, including surveillance video, were reported by the Washington Post and are now under investigation by the Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI).The Coffee county security breach and other issues led a group of 29 computer scientists from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Georgia Tech and other US universities to write a letter last week urging Mitre to retract its report, calling the company’s conclusions a “dangerously misleading analysis”.“Mitre embarrassed themselves,” Richard DeMillo, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech and one of the letter’s signers, told the Guardian. The report is “based on representations from the secretary of state about physical security, when right before our eyes, we can see video of people marching into Coffee county’s election department”.Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Raffensperger, pointed to the GBI investigation when asked about the Coffee county incident and whether people other than election workers can access voting equipment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHassinger also said that the “vulnerabilities identified in a lab are not real vulnerabilities, and do not pose risks” to the state’s election system. But DeMillo, who has worked in cybersecurity at Hewlett-Packard and the US Department of Defense, said: “If Alex Halderman can discover the system’s vulnerabilities, then nation states like North Korea and Russia can as well.”DeMillo has testified as part of the lawsuit, now in its sixth year. In 2019, the Coalition for Good Governance’s efforts led Judge Totenberg to order the state to scrap its previous statewide computer election system, made by Diebold Election Systems, due to vulnerabilities – a first in election integrity court cases. Diebold no longer makes voting machines, and coalition plaintiffs have continued their efforts to force the state to use paper ballots filled out by hand for voting instead of touchscreens, as is done by nearly 70% of voters across the US, with computers available for people with disabilities.“Ballots filled out by pencil and paper are non-hackable,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the coalition. Georgia’s current system prints out a ballot after voters use touchscreens, and the ballot has a barcode that scanners read to record each voter’s choices.In the months leading up to Georgia’s 2019 decision to change its election system to Dominion’s machines, a committee formed to advise the state on the decision ignored the recommendations of its lone computer scientist, Georgia Tech’s Wenke Lee, who urged the state to move to paper ballots marked by hand.But the state ignored the recommendations and purchased machines from Dominion, another digital system, instead. “You can see that pattern of negligent, vulnerability denialism – of not facing facts,” Halderman said.In a statement released on 20 June, Raffensperger said that “critics of Georgia’s election security” are probably either “election-denying conspiracy theorists or litigants in the long-running … lawsuit. These two groups make ever-shifting but always baseless assertions that Georgia’s election system is at risk because bad actors might hack the system and change the result of an election.”The statement conflates conspiracists like Cyber Ninjas – the now-defunct company that performed discredited “audits” in Arizona after the 2020 presidential election – with cybersecurity experts who have decades of research to their names at leading universities. Asked about the researchers’ claims, Hassinger dismissed the line of inquiry as an “appeal to authority fallacy” and said in an email that “election denialism comes in many forms”, again conflating researchers with conspiracists.Halderman told the Guardian he found Raffensperger’s 20 June statement “offensive”.“Can they actually not tell the difference?” he asked. “Are they so incompetent? Scientists can’t sit quietly while a state like Georgia continues to ignore these issues.” More