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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySwayStacey Abrams on American Idealism and American Betrayal Abrams helped win major Democratic victories in Georgia, the right is retaliating and it’s getting personal. But Abrams says she doesn’t mind; it’s all about the long game.More episodes ofSwayMarch 4, 2021 • More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGeorgia Takes Center Stage in Battle Over Voting RightsTwo bills moving through the Republican-controlled Legislature would place new restrictions on voting access, in ways Democrats say would have an outsize impact on Black voters.A protest of a bill that would restrict voting access outside the State Capitol in Atlanta on Monday.Credit…Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressRichard Fausset, Nick Corasaniti and March 3, 2021Updated 7:14 a.m. ETATLANTA — After record turnout flipped Georgia blue for the first time in decades, Republicans who control the state Legislature are moving swiftly to implement a raft of new restrictions on voting access, mounting one of the biggest challenges to voting rights in a major battleground state following the 2020 election.Two bills, one passed by the House on Monday and another that could pass the Senate this week, seek to alter foundational elements of voting in Georgia, which supported President Biden in November and a pair of Democratic senators in January — narrow victories attributable in part to the array of voting options in the state.The Republican legislation would undermine pillars of voting access by ending automatic voter registration, banning drop boxes for mail ballots and eliminating the broad availability of absentee voting. The bills would restrict early voting on the weekends, limiting the longstanding civic tradition of “Souls to the Polls” in which Black voters cast ballots on Sunday after church services.Taken together, the new barriers would have an outsize impact on Black voters, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.Black voters were a major force in Democratic success in recent elections, with roughly 88 percent voting for Mr. Biden and more than 90 percent voting for Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections, according to exit polls.Democrats say that Republicans are effectively returning to one of the ugliest tactics in the state’s history — oppressive laws aimed at disenfranchising voters. “Rather than grappling with whether their ideology is causing them to fail, they are instead relying on what has worked in the past,” Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist, said, referring to what she said were laws designed to suppress votes. “Instead of winning new voters, you rig the system against their participation, and you steal the right to vote.”The Georgia effort comes as former President Donald J. Trump continues to publicly promote the lie that the election was stolen from him, which has swayed millions of Republican voters. It has also put further pressure on Republican state legislatures across the country to continue drafting new legislation aimed at restricting voting rights under the banner of “election integrity” as a way of appeasing the former president and his loyal base.New restrictions on voting have already passed in Iowa, and multiple other states are lining up similar efforts, while the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments this week on another challenge to the Voting Rights Act. Should the high court make changes to Section 2 of the act, which allows after-the-fact challenges to voting restrictions that may disproportionately affect members of minority groups, Democrats and voting rights groups could be left without one of their most essential tools to challenge new laws.People waited in line to vote early at a community center in Suwanee, Ga., in October.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesJustice Elena Kagan, in her questioning on Tuesday, appeared to allude to Georgia’s proposed limitations on Sunday voting.“If a state has long had two weeks of early voting and then the state decides that it is going to get rid of Sunday voting on those two weeks, leave everything else in place, and Black voters vote on Sunday 10 times more than white voters, is that system equally open?” Justice Kagan asked.For decades, Georgia has been at the center of the voting rights battle, with Democrats and advocacy groups fighting back against repeated efforts to disenfranchise Black voters in the state.As recently as 2018, Georgians faced hourslong lines to vote in many majority-Black neighborhoods, and thousands of Black voters were purged from the voting rolls before the election. Now Democrats and voting rights groups are alarmed that Republicans are again trying to change the state’s voting laws ahead of critical Senate and governor’s races in 2022.Though the bills in the Legislature have not been finalized, it is expected they will eventually reach the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. Mr. Kemp has not explicitly backed either bill, but he said on Tuesday morning that he was in favor of efforts “to further secure the vote.”“I’m supportive of putting the photo ID requirement on absentee ballots by mail and other things, making sure that there’s a fair process to observe,” Mr. Kemp told the radio host Hugh Hewitt. He said his decision on the bills would depend on “what it is and what’s in it.”Democrats, shut out of power in the Statehouse despite holding both United States Senate seats, are relatively powerless in the legislative process to stop the bills, though they do have avenues through the courts to challenge any final bill signed.In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Abrams, the former Democratic minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, called Monday’s House vote “a sign of fear” over Republicans’ failure to win support from young and minority voters, two of the fastest-growing sectors of the state’s electorate.She added that the measure was also potentially self-defeating for the G.O.P. in that large percentages of rural white voters, a traditionally Republican-leaning bloc, could also be impeded by laws that make it harder for citizens to cast absentee ballots and vote by mail.Asked about restrictions to Sunday voting, Ms. Abrams cited a study by the Center for New Data, a nonprofit group, that found Black voters were more likely to vote on weekends than white voters in 107 of Georgia’s 159 counties. Over all, 11.8 percent of Black voters voted on weekends compared with 8.6 percent of white voters, according to the study.“We know that some version of this bill is likely to pass because Republicans face an existential crisis in Georgia,” Ms. Abrams said, portraying the party as shortsighted in refusing to address the factors that have put its traditional demographic advantages at risk in recent elections.Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist and 2018 Democratic nominee for governor, may challenge Gov. Brian Kemp again in 2022.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesAmong the most pressing concerns for Georgia Democrats is the possibility that the House’s bill, H.B. 531, might be amended in the Senate to include provisions that put an end to automatic voter registration and a vote-by-mail system known as “no excuse,” which allows any voters to cast mail ballots if they choose. These proposals were included in a bill that passed out of a Senate committee last week.The automatic registration system, which registers voters when they apply for or renew a driver’s license, was put in place in 2016 under the Republican governor at the time, Nathan Deal.Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, another Republican, has credited the system with drastically increasing voter registration numbers, and Republicans have cited such figures to push back against charges leveled by Ms. Abrams and others that Georgia Republicans want to suppress votes.No-excuse absentee voting was approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2005 and was used by many voters during the pandemic. In December, Mr. Raffensperger supported ending no-excuse absentee voting, saying it “opens the door to potential illegal voting.”Mr. Raffensperger took that stance even as he defended Georgia’s electoral system against accusations by Mr. Trump that the election was somehow rigged; his refusal to support the former president’s baseless claims earned him the enmity of Mr. Trump and Georgia Republicans allied with him.Mr. Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday on the current legislative efforts in the Legislature, including the House bill, which would remove the secretary of state from his role as chair of the State Elections Board.Cody Hall, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp, repeated an oft-used phrase of his, saying that the governor wanted to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat” in Georgia.Kasey Carpenter, a Republican state representative whose district is a conservative swath of Northwest Georgia, said the House bill included a number of common-sense provisions that Democrats would be supporting if it were not for the intense partisan nature of the times. Changes to mail-in procedures, he said, were particularly important given the sharp increase in people who chose to vote that way because of the restrictions of the pandemic.“I think what you’re seeing is a measured approach,” he said.For example, Mr. Carpenter said, the bill requires voters to put the number of their driver’s license or state identification card on applications for a mail-in ballot, and requires photocopies to be sent in only if the voter is using alternative forms of identification.Mr. Kemp, a Republican, has not explicitly backed either bill, but said he favored efforts “to further secure the vote.”Credit…Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesIf a highly restrictive bill ends up on Mr. Kemp’s desk, he will be faced with a complicated dilemma.On the one hand, the governor must show his Trump-loyal Republican base that he has heard and responded to their concerns about election integrity. Doing so will be particularly important if Mr. Trump, who was incensed that Mr. Kemp did not take steps to overturn his electoral defeat in Georgia, carries out his threat to back a primary challenger on Mr. Kemp’s right flank.On the other hand, if Ms. Abrams chooses to engage Mr. Kemp in a rematch of their 2018 contest, she and her allies are likely to once again make allegations of voter suppression one of their most forceful and incessant attack lines against Mr. Kemp.In an electorate still reeling from the two-month effort to subvert the election result by Mr. Trump, and the rash of lawsuits attacking voting before and after the election, the bills in Georgia have quickly attracted national attention. More Than a Vote, a group founded by LeBron James, the basketball superstar, has vowed to draw attention to the issue during the N.B.A. All-Star game this weekend in Atlanta; his pledge was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Voting rights groups note that the severe limitations put on early voting could also have a cascading effect: By limiting the number of hours available for in-person voting, the bottlenecks created during high-volume times and on Election Day would very likely lead to more hourslong lines, like the waits that plagued the Georgia primary in June.“They’re creating a line management problem,” said Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a voting rights group. In the primary, she noted, “we saw people in line for over six hours. Just imagine if we were losing 108 hours of early voting time, of Sunday voting, access to the drop box, how many of those people are now going to have to wait in line?”Isabella Grullón Paz contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionShould Black Northerners Move Back to the South?Campaigning in GeorgiaCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.March 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTHE DEVIL YOU KNOWA Black Power ManifestoBy Charles M. BlowLeading up to the 2020 presidential election, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown and other grass-roots activists successfully registered an unprecedented number of Black voters in Georgia who had been stymied in the past by voter-suppression tactics. Their work brought key victories to Democratic candidates in the state and demonstrated the political power of Southern Black women.Georgia’s recent presidential and Senate elections are relevant to the argument of the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” There are two Black Americas, he says. One is the world of those who remained in the postslavery South. The other is inhabited by those who fled the South for refuge in what he terms “destination cities” across the North and West during the Great Migration. But these cities are now broken, according to Blow, and the Great Migration has been a “stinging failure.” Blow, a son of Louisiana who recently moved back south — to Atlanta — says Black Americans must bridge this divide.In what he believes would be “the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow calls for African-Americans to reverse-migrate south, to collectively dismantle white supremacy by using their ancestral homeland as a political base. He imagines a New South where “our trauma history is not our total history.” That Black people have been returning south for at least the past 40 years, he adds, demonstrates that there is fertile ground for his idea in the region, intellectually and materially.His is a familiar argument, revitalized by the South’s recent political developments. A genesis for Blow’s Black power proposition could have been the Black Belt nation thesis, proposed by Black Communists in the 1920s, or the agenda of the Republic of New Afrika in the 1960s. But Blow instead builds upon the political thought of the freethinking white hippies who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s with the intent of transforming the state’s conservative electoral politics. They succeeded, he says; young Black people today should follow their blueprint.Seeing Georgia flip blue in the 2020 election became Blow’s “proof of concept,” and for him, one thing now seems clear: The path to lasting Black power is through the vote. Forming a “contiguous band” of Black voters across the South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, in particular — would “upend America’s political calculus and exponentially increase” Black citizens’ influence in American politics. The weakness in Blow’s plan is that it requires faith in a political system that has consistently failed Black Americans at nearly every turn.For Blow, however, the reality that Black Northerners have no recourse but to leave is a painful truth that crystallized for him one night in 2015 when he learned that his son, a student at Yale, had been stopped at gunpoint by a university police officer. Stories like this fuel the book’s searing account of police violence, systemic racial disparities and social unrest in cities like New York, Minneapolis and Portland. This is where Blow is at his best.As a historian, I wish he had spent more time exploring the nuances of the Black migration framework the book hinges upon. Blow’s claim that the Great Migration “hit the South like a bomb,” causing an intellectual and cultural brain drain that stunted its growth, rings hollow. It obscures the truth that the region was an incubator of radical political activism — often led by its most disenfranchised citizens — during the Great Migration and beyond. The New South to which Blow is now beckoning people to return was created largely by the Black visionaries and community builders who remained in the rural and urban South.A strength of “The Devil You Know” is its affirmation of Black Americans as a formidable political bloc with whom the nation must reckon. The book is a helpful introduction for those seeking to make sense of fractious political debates about race and voting rights in the South, and the broken promises of American democracy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Statehouses, Stolen-Election Myth Fuels a G.O.P. Drive to Rewrite RulesRepublican legislators want big changes to the laws for elections and other aspects of governance. A fight over the ground rules for voting may follow.Poll workers preparing absentee ballots for tabulation in Lansing, Mich.Credit…Bryan Denton for The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 1:44 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Led by loyalists who embrace former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election, Republicans in state legislatures nationwide are mounting extraordinary efforts to change the rules of voting and representation — and enhance their own political clout.At the top of those efforts is a slew of bills raising new barriers to casting votes, particularly the mail ballots that Democrats flocked to in the 2020 election. But other measures go well beyond that, including tweaking Electoral College and judicial election rules for the benefit of Republicans; clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives; and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections, which were crucial to the smooth November vote.And although the decennial redrawing of political maps has been pushed to the fall because of delays in delivering 2020 census totals, there are already signs of an aggressive drive to further gerrymander political districts, particularly in states under complete Republican control.The national Republican Party joined the movement this past week by setting up a Committee on Election Integrity to scrutinize state election laws, echoing similar moves by Republicans in a number of state legislatures.Republicans have long thought — sometimes quietly, occasionally out loud — that large turnouts, particularly in urban areas, favor Democrats, and that Republicans benefit when fewer people vote. But politicians and scholars alike say that this moment feels like a dangerous plunge into uncharted waters. The avalanche of legislation also raises fundamental questions about the ability of a minority of voters to exert majority control in American politics, with Republicans winning the popular vote in just one of the last eight presidential elections but filling six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court.The party’s battle in the past decade to raise barriers to voting, principally among minorities, young people and other Democrat-leaning groups, has been waged under the banner of stopping voter fraud that multiple studies have shown barely exists. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, an expert on voting and elections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”The most conspicuous of the Republicans’ efforts are a slew of bills raising barriers to casting votes, particularly mail-in ballots.Credit…Robert Nickelsberg for The New York TimesConsider Iowa, a state that has not been a major participant in the past decade’s wars over voting and election rules. The November election saw record turnout and little if any reported fraud. Republicans were the state’s big winners, including in the key races for the White House and Senate.Yet, in a vote strictly along party lines, the State Legislature voted this past week to cut early voting by nine days, close polls an hour earlier and tighten rules on absentee voting, as well as strip the authority of county auditors to decide how election rules can best serve voters.State Senator Jim Carlin, a Republican who recently announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, made the party’s position clear during the floor debate: “Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” he said.State Senator Joe Bolkcom, a Democrat, said that served as justification for a law that created “a voting system tailored to the voting tendency of older white Republican voters.”“They’ve convinced all their supporters of the big lie. They don’t see any downside in this,” he said in an interview. “It’s a bad sign for the country. We’re not going to have a working democracy on this path.”The issues are particularly stark because fresh restrictions would disproportionately hit minorities just as the nation is belatedly reckoning with a racist past, said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of the voting advocacy group Fair Fight Action. The Republican push comes as the rules and procedures of American elections increasingly have become a central issue in the nation’s politics. The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning law and justice institute at New York University, counts 253 bills in 43 states that seek to tighten voting rules. At the same time, 704 bills have been introduced with provisions to improve access to voting.The push also comes as Democrats in Congress are attempting to pass federal legislation that would tear down barriers to voting, automatically register new voters and outlaw gerrymanders, among many other measures. Some provisions, such as a prohibition on restricting a voter’s ability to cast a mail ballot, could undo some of the changes being proposed in state legislatures.Such legislation, combined with the renewed enforcement of federal voting laws, could counter some Republican initiatives in the 23 states where the party controls the legislature and governor’s office. But neither that Democratic proposal nor a companion effort to enact a stronger version of the 1965 Voting Rights Act stands any chance of passing unless Democrats modify or abolish Senate rules allowing filibusters. It remains unclear whether the party has either the will or the votes to do that.“Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” State Senator Jim Carlin of Iowa said of Donald J. Trump’s loss to President Biden.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOn the legal front, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in an Arizona election lawsuit that turns on the enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That section is the government’s main remaining weapon against discriminatory voting practices after the court struck down another provision in 2013 that gave the Justice Department broad authority over voting in states with histories of discrimination.Those who back the Republican legislative efforts say they are needed to restore flagging public confidence in elections and democracy, even as some of them continue to attack the system as corrupt. In Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, the chairs of House election committees refused for weeks or months to affirm that President Biden won the election. The chairs in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin urged U.S. House members or former Vice President Mike Pence to oppose the presidential electors certified after Mr. Biden won those states’ votes.Some respected Republican lawmakers reject charges that election proposals are bad-faith attempts to advance Republican power. “These are really big tweaks. I get that,” said State Senator Kathy Bernier, who heads an election committee in Wisconsin. “But we do this routinely every session.” Ms. Bernier said the party’s election-law bills, two of which would strengthen ID requirements for absentee ballots and limit ballot drop boxes to one per municipality, were honest efforts to make voting more secure.That said, proposals in many states have little or nothing to do with that goal. Georgia Republicans would sharply limit early voting on Sundays, when many Black voters follow church services with “souls to the polls” bus rides to cast ballots. On Friday, a State Senate committee approved bills to end no-excuse absentee voting and automatic voter registration at motor vehicle offices.Iowa’s legislation, passed this past week, also shortens the windows to apply for absentee ballots and petition for satellite polling places deployed at popular locations like college campuses and shopping centers.Bills in some states to outlaw private donations to fund elections are rooted in the unproven belief, popular on the right, that contributions in 2020 were designed to increase turnout in Democratic strongholds. The nonprofit Center for Technology and Civic Life distributed the $400 million that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to underwrite coronavirus protective equipment, polling place rentals, drop boxes and other election needs.Unsurprisingly, some of the most vigorous efforts by Republicans are in swing states where last year’s races for national offices were close.An early voting site for Georgia’s Senate runoff at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in December. Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockRepublicans in Georgia, which Mr. Biden won by roughly 12,000 votes, lined up this week behind a State Senate bill that would require vote-by-mail applications to be made under oath, with some requiring an additional ID and a witness signature.Arizona Republicans are backing bills to curtail the automatic mailing of absentee ballots to voters who skip elections, and to raise to 60 percent the share of votes required to pass most citizen ballot initiatives. Legislatures in at least five other Republican-run states are also considering bills making it harder to propose or pass citizen-led initiatives, which often involve issues like redistricting or tax hikes where the party supports the status quo.And that is not all: One Arizona Republican has proposed legislation that would allow state lawmakers to ignore the results of presidential elections and decide themselves which candidate would receive the state’s electoral votes.In Wisconsin, where gerrymanders of the State Legislature have locked in Republican control for a decade, the Legislature already has committed at least $1 million for law firms to defend its redistricting of legislative and congressional seats this year. The gerrymander proved impregnable in November; Democrats received 46 percent of the statewide vote for State Assembly seats and 47 percent of the State Senate vote, but won only 38 percent of seats in the Assembly and 36 percent in the Senate.In New Hampshire, where Republicans took full control of the Legislature in November, the party chairman, Stephen Stepanek, has indicated he backs a gerrymander of the state’s congressional map to “guarantee” that at least one of the state’s two Democrats in the U.S. House would not win re-election.“Elections have consequences,” he told the news outlet Seacoastonline. He did not respond to a request for comment.And in Nebraska, one of only two states that award electoral votes in presidential contests by congressional district, conservatives have proposed to switch to a winner-take-all model after Mr. Biden captured an electoral vote in the House district containing Omaha, the state’s sole Democratic bastion.Conversely, some New Hampshire Republicans would switch to Nebraska’s current Electoral College model instead of the existing winner-take-all method. That would appear to help Republicans in a state where Democrats have won the past five presidential elections.Pennsylvania’s Legislature is pushing a gerrymander-style apportionment of State Supreme Court seats via a constitutional amendment that would elect justices by regions rather than statewide. That would dismantle a lopsided Democratic majority on the court by creating judicial districts in more conservative rural reaches.Many Republicans argue — and some election experts at times agree — that fears about restrictive election laws among Democrats and civil liberties advocates can be overblown. Republicans point to record turnout in November as proof that restrictive laws do not suppress votes.Ms. Bernier of Wisconsin, for example, said she saw little problem with a bill that would allot one ballot drop box for voters in towns like New Berlin, with 40,000 residents, and one for voters in Milwaukee, with 590,000 residents. There were no drop boxes at all, she noted, until state officials made an emergency exception during the pandemic.“The Legislature could say that no drop boxes are necessary at all,” she said. Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University political scientist and election expert, said he disagreed. Presidential elections always draw more voters, he said, but the grunt work of democracy often occurs in off-year votes for lesser offices where interest is lower. In those elections, “if there are barriers placed in the way of voters, they’re not going to turn out,” he said.Mike Noble, a Phoenix public-opinion expert, questioned whether the Arizona Legislature’s Trumpian anti-fraud agenda has political legs, even though polls show a level of Republican belief in Mr. Trump’s stolen election myth that he calls “mind-boggling.”Republicans who consider themselves more moderate make up about a third of the party’s support in Arizona, he said, and they are far less likely to believe the myth. And they may be turned off by a Legislature that wants to curtail absentee ballot mailings in a state where voters — especially Republicans — have long voted heavily by mail.“I don’t see how a rational person would see where the benefit is,” he said.Some other Republicans apparently agree. In Kentucky, which has some of the nation’s strictest voting laws, the solidly Republican State House voted almost unanimously on Friday to allow early voting, albeit only three days, and online applications for absentee ballots. Both were first tried during the pandemic and, importantly, were popular with voters and county election officials.If that kind of recognition of November’s successes resonated in other Republican states, Mr. Persily and another election scholar, Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a recent study, it could bode well for easing the deep divisions over future election rules. If the stolen election myth continues to drive Republican policy, Mr. Persily said, it could foretell a future with two kinds of elections in which voting rights, participation and faith in the results would be significantly different, depending on which party had written the rules.“Those trajectories are on the horizon,” he said. “Some states are adopting a blunderbuss approach to regulating voting that is only distantly related to fraud concerns. And it could mean massive collateral damage for voting rights.”Susan C. Beachy More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Georgia, a New District Attorney Starts Circling Trump and His AlliesFani Willis has opened a criminal investigation into efforts by the Trump camp to overturn the former president’s loss in Georgia. In an interview, Ms. Willis described a wide-ranging inquiry.“An investigation is like an onion,” Fani Willis said. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.”Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesDanny Hakim and Feb. 13, 2021Updated 5:56 a.m. ETAfter six weeks as a district attorney, Fani T. Willis is taking on a former president.And not just that. In an interview about her newly announced criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia, Ms. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, made it clear that the scope of her inquiry would encompass the pressure campaign on state officials by former President Donald J. Trump as well as the activities of his allies.“An investigation is like an onion,” she said. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.”She added, “Anything that is relevant to attempts to interfere with the Georgia election will be subject to review.”Ms. Willis, whose jurisdiction encompasses much of Atlanta, has suddenly become a new player in the post-presidency of Mr. Trump. She will decide whether to bring criminal charges over Mr. Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” votes to erase the former president’s loss there, and other efforts by Trump allies to overturn the election results. The severity of the legal threat to Mr. Trump is not yet clear, but Ms. Willis has started laying out some details about the inquiry.She and her office have indicated that the investigation will include Senator Lindsey Graham’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in November about mail-in ballots; the abrupt removal last month of Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, who earned Mr. Trump’s enmity for not advancing his debunked assertions about election fraud; and the false claims that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, made before state legislative committees.She laid out an array of possible criminal charges in letters sent to state officials and agencies asking them to preserve documents, providing a partial map of the potential exposure of Mr. Trump and his allies. Mr. Trump’s calls to state officials urging them to subvert the election, for instance, could run afoul of a Georgia statute dealing with “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud,” one of the charges outlined in the letters, which if prosecuted as a felony is punishable by at least a year in prison.Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, made false claims to state legislative committees in Georgia.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe misinformation spread by Mr. Giuliani could prove problematic, as Ms. Willis said in her letters that she would review “the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies.” Georgia law bars “any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement” within “the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.”Ms. Willis is also open to considering not just conspiracy but racketeering charges. As she put it in the interview, racketeering could apply to anyone who uses a legal entity — presumably anything from a government agency to that person’s own public office — to conduct overt acts for an illegal purpose. In this case, it applies to the pressure the president and his allies exerted on Georgia officials to overturn the election.Ms. Willis has brought a novel racketeering case before. In 2014, as an assistant district attorney, she helped lead a high-profile criminal trial against a group of educators in the Atlanta public school system who had been involved in a widespread cheating scandal.Racketeering cases tend to make people think of mob bosses, who have often been targets of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, since it was enacted in 1970. Asked how racketeering applied in the cheating scandal and in an election case, Ms. Willis said, “I always tell people when they hear the word racketeering, they think of ‘The Godfather,’” but she noted that it could also extend to otherwise lawful organizations that are used to break the law.“If you have various overt acts for an illegal purpose, I think you can — you may — get there,” she said.Ms. Willis, 49, who easily won election last year, is the daughter of an activist defense lawyer who was a member of the Black Panthers, and she is also a veteran prosecutor who has carved out a centrist record. She views the case before her as a critical task.“It is really not a choice — to me, it’s an obligation,” she said. “Each D.A. in the country has a certain jurisdiction that they’re responsible for. If alleged crime happens within their jurisdiction, I think they have a duty to investigate it.”For their part, Mr. Trump and his allies are girding for a second criminal investigation, alongside an ongoing fraud inquiry before a grand jury in Manhattan. This week, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, called the Georgia investigation “simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it.”Ms. Willis has many challenges before her, and not just relating to this inquiry. She replaced a controversial prosecutor who faced lawsuits accusing him of sexual harassment. In an overhaul of her office’s anti-corruption unit, which will handle the Trump investigation, she removed all eight lawyers and has since hired four, with a fifth on the way. The police in Atlanta, as elsewhere, are both maligned and demoralized, and 2020 was one of Atlanta’s deadliest years in decades. She must also decide how to proceed with the case of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man fatally shot by a white police officer last year.“I have 182 open, unindicted homicides involving 222 defendants,” she said. “I have a sex crime unit that is backed up. But I am very capable of identifying great people to work in this office who are dedicated to the cause of making this county safer, and I do not get to be derelict in my duty, because I have other responsibilities.”Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said it appeared that Ms. Willis might be “pulling out all the stops” for the Trump case, “because of the range of the types of crimes that are mentioned in that letter,” he said, adding, “and particularly the talk about racketeering and conspiracy.”The pressure campaign to overturn the Georgia election results began on Nov. 13, when Mr. Graham, a Trump ally from South Carolina, made a phone call to Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, later said that Mr. Graham had asked him if he had the authority to throw out all mail-in votes from particular counties, a suggestion the secretary of state rebuffed. (Mr. Graham disputed Mr. Raffensperger’s account.)On Dec. 3, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, made an appearance before a Georgia State Senate committee, saying that “there’s more than ample evidence to conclude this election was a sham,” and laid out a number of false claims. Two days later, Mr. Trump called Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Republican governor, to press him to call a special session of the legislature to overturn the election. Mr. Trump then called Georgia’s Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, and pressured him not to oppose a legal attempt to challenge the elections results in Georgia and other swing states.Because of the flurry of Trump calls, Ms. Willis said she believes that she is the only official with jurisdiction who does not have a conflict of interest. As she wrote in her letters to other public officials, “this office is the one agency with jurisdiction that is not a witness to the conduct that is the subject of the investigation.”Even after Mr. Raffensperger recertified the election results on Dec. 7, Mr. Trump’s efforts intensified. Three days later, Mr. Giuliani testified virtually before a state House committee, repeating false claims that poll workers at an Atlanta arena had counted improper ballots stuffed in suitcases, when they were simply using the normal storage containers. “They look like they’re passing out dope,” he said during the hearing.Gabriel Sterling, a top aide to Mr. Raffensperger, has derided the claims as a ridiculous, “‘Oceans 11’ type scheme,” adding, “This has been thoroughly debunked.”Mr. Giuliani returned on Dec. 30, telling a Senate committee, “You had 10,315 people that we can determine from obituaries were dead when they voted,” and adding: “So, right away, that number you submitted to Washington is a lie. It’s not true! It’s false!” The numbers, however, were farcical; state officials have found only two instances in which votes were cast in the names of people who had died.The pressure campaign culminated when Mr. Trump himself called Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Mr. Trump said on the call, fruitlessly searching for ways to reverse his election loss.Ms. Willis is also reviewing the departure of Mr. Pak, a Trump appointee. Shortly before Mr. Pak’s resignation, Mr. Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, told Mr. Pak that the president was unhappy that he wasn’t pursuing voter fraud cases.Byung J. Pak, then a U.S. attorney in Georgia, frustrated Mr. Trump because he wasn’t pursuing voter fraud cases.Credit…Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressMs. Willis has said that her office would request subpoenas “as necessary” when the next Fulton County grand jury convenes in March.She appears undaunted. As she put it, “this is not a 9-to-5 job.” For her, lawyering is a family calling. Her father is John Clifford Floyd III, a longtime civil rights activist and defense lawyer.“My dad was a single father that raised me,” she said. When she was a young girl in Washington, D.C., she said, her father would take her to court with him on Saturday mornings as he took on new clients who had been arrested the previous night.“There was an old white Irish judge,” she recalled. “He would let me come sit up on the bench with him,” she recalled. While she was on his lap, the judge would ask her, “should we send them home, or are they going to the back?”She decided then that she wanted to be a judge, but her father explained that she had to be a lawyer first. So her career ambition was set. While she embraces some of the prosecutorial reform efforts favored by the left, including diversion programs that keep some offenders out of jail, Ms. Willis has also said that she has a “conservative side” that separates her from the new wave of progressive prosecutors.Heretofore, she has been best known for the Atlanta school case, in which 11 educators were convicted of racketeering and other crimes. The case drew criticism in some quarters for overreach.“I’ve been criticized a lot for that case, but I’m going to tell you what I tell people if I’m taking criticism for defending poor Black children, because that’s mainly what we were talking about,” she said. The only chance many such children have to get ahead is through the public education system, she said, adding, “So if what I am being criticized for is doing something to protect people that did not have a voice for themselves, I sit in that criticism, and y’all can put it in my obituary.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentFriday’s HighlightsDay 4: Key TakeawaysWhat Is Incitement?Trump’s LawyersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFact CheckTrump’s Lawyers Repeated Inaccurate Claims in Impeachment TrialThe three members of the former president’s legal team made a number of misleading or false claims about the events of Jan. 6, antifa, the impeachment process and voter fraud.Former President Donald J. Trump’s defense lawyers Bruce L. Castor Jr. and Michael van der Veen arriving at the Capitol on Friday.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesFeb. 12, 2021Updated 7:52 p.m. ETAs they mounted their defense of the former president on Friday, Donald J. Trump’s lawyers made a number of inaccurate or misleading claims about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s remarks, the impeachment process and 2020 election. Many claims were echoes of right-wing talking points popularized on social media or ones that were spread by Mr. Trump himself.Here’s a fact check.Mr. Trump’s lawyers were misleading about what happened on Jan. 6.What Was Said“Instead of expressing a desire that the joint session be prevented from conducting its business, the entire premise of his remarks was that the democratic process would and should play out according to the letter of the law.” — Michael van der Veen, lawyer for Mr. TrumpFalse. In his speech on Jan. 6 and before, Mr. Trump repeatedly urged former Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of the Electoral College votes, saying Mr. Pence should “send it back to the States to recertify.” Mr. Trump continued his speech on Jan. 6 saying he was “challenging the certification of the election.”What Was Said“Far from promoting insurrection of the United States, the president’s remarks explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully and patriotically.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is exaggerated. Mr. Trump used the phrase “peacefully and patriotically” once in his speech, compared with 20 uses of the word “fight.”What Was Said“As everyone knows, the president had spoken at hundreds of large rallies across the country over the past five years. There had never been any moblike or riotous behaviors.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is misleading. While no other Trump rally has led to a siege of the Capitol, there have been episodes of violence, sometimes encouraged by the president. Less than two months before the riot on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump waved to supporters who had gathered in Washington to protest his election loss and who later violently clashed with counterprotesters. Previously, other supporters had attacked counterprotesters, and in one case a BBC cameraman, at several Trump rallies. Mr. Trump called one victim “disgusting” and offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who had punched a protester.What Was Said“Given the timeline of events, the criminals at the Capitol weren’t there at the Ellipse to even hear the president’s words. They were more than a mile away engaged in their preplanned assault on this very building.” — Bruce L. Castor Jr., another lawyer for Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. It is true that the Capitol was first breached before Mr. Trump had concluded his remarks, but this does not rule out the possibility that some rioters were inspired by his speech. In fact, several have said that they were.For example, Robert L. Bauer, who had attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 and entered the Capitol, told law enforcement that when Mr. Trump told the crowd to march to the Capitol (about 16 minutes into his speech), many heeded those words. Mr. Bauer “reiterated that he marched to the U.S. Capitol because President Trump said to do so,” according to a criminal complaint.Mr. Castor’s reasoning that Mr. Trump could not have incited the crowd to riot because the siege was preplanned also ignores an argument that House managers had made this week: Mr. Trump had spent months trying to invalidate the results of the election and encouraging his supporters to act.What Was Said“At no point was the president informed the vice president was in any danger.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is disputed. Comments by Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, suggest otherwise. This week, Mr. Tuberville recounted that he and Mr. Trump had spoken just as the Capitol was breached before the phone call was cut short.“I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Mr. Tuberville said.They made inaccurate references to antifa, left-wing protests and the 2016 election.What Was Said“One of the first people arrested was the leader of antifa.” — Mr. van der VeenThis is misleading. Mr. van der Veen was most likely referring to John E. Sullivan, a Utah man who was charged on Jan. 14 with violent entry and disorderly conduct. Mr. Sullivan, an activist, said he was there to film the siege. He had previously referred to antifa — a loosely affiliated group of antifascist activists that has no leader — on social media, but he has repeatedly denied being a member of the movement.The F.B.I. has said there is no evidence that supporters of the antifa movement had participated in the Capitol siege.What Was Said“As many will recall, last summer the White House was faced with violent rioters night after night. They repeatedly attacked Secret Service officers, and at one point pierced a security wall, culminating in the clearing of Lafayette Square.” — Mr. van der VeenFalse. This timeline is wrong. Law enforcement officials began clearing Lafayette Square after 6 p.m. on June 1 to allow Mr. Trump to pose with a Bible in front of a church, not because of a breach. Additional security barriers were installed after those events, according to local news reports and the National Park Service.What Was Said“The entire Democratic Party and national news media spent the last four years repeating without any evidence that the 2016 election had been hacked.” — Mr. van der VeenFalse. United States intelligence agencies concluded years ago that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 election. The Republican-led Senate agreed last year that Russia had disrupted that election to help Mr. Trump.They mischaracterized the impeachment process.What Was Said“The House waited to deliver the articles to the Senate for almost two weeks, only after Democrats had secured control over the Senate. In fact, contrary to their claim that the only reason they held it was because Senator McConnell wouldn’t accept the article, Representative Clyburn made clear they had considered holding the articles for over 100 days to provide President Biden with a clear pathway to implement his agenda.” — David I. Schoen, another lawyer for Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. Democrats had considered delivering the article of impeachment earlier, but Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the majority leader, precluded the possibility. In a letter on Jan. 8, he informed Republican lawmakers that the Senate was in recess and “may conduct no business until Jan. 19.”Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, suggested withholding the articles longer after Mr. McConnell made his timeline known. In an interview with CNN, Mr. Clyburn suggested Mr. McConnell was “doing what he thinks he needs to do to be disruptive of President Biden,” but Democrats might respond to that tactical delay with one of their own to “give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running.”What Was Said“Our Constitution and any basic sense of fairness require that every legal process with significant consequences for a person’s life, including impeachment, requires due process under the law, which includes fact-finding and the establishment of a legitimate, evidentiary record. Even last year, it required investigation by the House. Here, President Trump and his counsel were given no opportunity to review evidence or question its propriety.” — Mr. SchoenThis is misleading. The point about lack of “due process” is one that Mr. Trump’s lawyers and supporters had argued during his first impeachment and one that law scholars have dismissed.There are no “enforceable rights” to due process in a House inquiry, and while those rights exist in the Senate trial, they are limited, said Frank O. Bowman III, a law professor at the University of Missouri and an expert on impeachment.“One justice suggested something like that if it were found that the Senate was deciding cases on a coin flip, that might violate due process,” Mr. Bowman said. “Anything short of that, basically court’s not going to get involved.”Moreover, a senior aide on the House impeachment team said that the Trump legal team was given the trial material, including all video and audio footage, before the start of the proceedings.They repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims about voter fraud.What Was Said“Based on an analysis of publicly available voter data that the ballot rejection rate in Georgia in 2016 was approximately 6.42 percent, and even though a tremendous amount of new, first-time mail-in ballots were included in the 2020 count, the Georgia rejection rate in 2020 was a mere 0.4 of 1 percent, a drop-off from 6.42 percent to 0.4 percent.” — Mr. CastorThis is misleading. Georgia elections officials have repeatedly debunked this claim, which conflates the overall rejection rate for mail-in ballots in 2016 to the rejection rate specifically for signature mismatch in 2020. (Ballots can also be rejected for arriving late or not having a signature, among other reasons.)In 2016, Georgia rejected about 6.4 percent of all returned mail-in ballots and 0.24 percent of those ballots because of signature-matching issues. It is unclear what the 0.4 percent refers to, but in both 2018 and 2020, Georgia rejected 0.15 percent of mail-in ballots because of signature-matching issues.What Was Said“President Trump wanted the signature verification to be done in public. How can a request for signature verifications to be done in public be a basis for a charge for inciting a riot?” — Mr. CastorThis is misleading. Contrary to Mr. Trump’s belief and Mr. Castor’s repetition of it, Georgia does verify signatures. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state noted that the state trained officials on signature matching and created a portal that checked and confirmed voters’ driver’s licenses. In a news conference last month debunking Mr. Trump’s claims, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, explained that the secretary of state’s office also brought in signature experts to check over 15,000 ballots. They discovered issues with two, and after further examination, concluded that they were legitimate.“Shockingly, the disinformation continues,” Mr. Sterling tweeted during the trial.Nicholas Fandos More
Prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, are investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the southern state’s 2020 presidential election results, according to a letter, in the second criminal investigation faced by the former president.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has sent a letter asking state government officials to preserve documents, including those related to the then president’s call to the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “find” more votes.“This matter is of high priority, and I am confident that as fellow law enforcement officers sworn to uphold the constitutions of the United States and Georgia, our acquisition of information and evidence of potential crimes via interviews, documents, videos and electronic records will be cooperative,” said the letter dated 10 February.“This letter is notification that all records potentially related to the administration of the 2020 general election must be preserved, with particular care being given to set aside and preserve those that may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering that election.“Representatives for the county prosecutor’s office and for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment.On Monday, Raffensperger’s office opened its own investigation into Trump’s 2 January phone call pressuring him to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 3 November victory in the state, based on unfounded voter fraud claims by the Trump team. Raffensperger said any further legal efforts would be up to the state’s attorney general.The New York Times first reported the investigation.Trump also faces criminal and civil fraud investigations in New York, with an ongoing crime inquiry into his finances by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, and a civil investigation by New York attorney general, Letitia James.The announcement of the Georgia investigation is important for Willis, who is new to the post.She is the first African American woman to hold the job in Georgia’s most populous county, the New York Times further reported, and has promised reforms.Willis is tackling high homicide numbers in Atlanta as well as a review of the handling of the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, last June. More
The Georgia secretary of state’s office opened an investigation on Monday into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, according to a new report.The office of Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, had faced calls to open an investigation after Trump was recorded in a 2 January phone call pressuring Raffensperger to overturn the state’s election results based on unfounded voter fraud claims.“The secretary of state’s office investigates complaints it receives,” said Walter Jones, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, describing the investigation as “fact-finding and administrative”, Reuters reported.“Any further legal efforts will be left to the attorney general,” he said.Legal experts said Trump’s phone calls might have violated at least three state criminal election laws: conspiracy to commit election fraud, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, and intentional interference with performance of election duties.The felony and misdemeanor violations are punishable by fines or imprisonment.In the 2 January phone call, Trump urged Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss to Joe Biden.The transcript quotes Trump telling Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes,” which is the number Trump needed to win.Trump made another phone call in December to Georgia’s chief elections investigator, Raffensperger’s office told Reuters.Additionally, two Democratic members of Congress – Kathleen Rice, of New York, and Ted Lieu, of California – have asked in a 4 January letter to the FBI for a criminal investigation into Trump’s call to Raffensperger.On 6 January – the day of the US Capitol riots – Trump bragged about the call in a speech to supporters: “People love that conversation because it says what’s going on,* he said. “These people are crooked.”The push for investigations is one illustration of the legal perils facing Trump since he lost the constitutional protections that shield sitting presidents from prosecution.Trump now faces nearly a dozen legal battles, including a criminal inquiry by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, into his business dealings, and several civil lawsuits.Trump has described the investigations into his family business as politically motivated.David Worley, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s state election board, had planned to introduce a motion at Wednesday’s board meeting urging the state attorney general, Chris Carr, and Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, to open a criminal investigation into Trump’s phone calls with election officials.He said such a move would be unnecessary if the secretary of state’s office had opened an investigation. “If they’ve done this, I won’t need to make my motion,” Worley said.“This is the normal thing that should happen when a complaint is filed. If a complaint is filed, an investigation is started. That’s how it works.” More
