Law (US)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘You want to think America is better’: can the supreme court be saved?

      by

      When Dawn Porter studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, she would pass the US supreme court every day. “You walk by the marble columns, the frontage which has inspirational words, and you believe that,” she recalls. “You think because of this court Black people integrated schools, because of this court women have the right to choose, because of this court, because of this court, because of this court.”Its profound role in American life is chronicled in Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, Porter’s four-part documentary series that traces the people, decisions and confirmation battles that have helped the court’s relationship with politics turn from a respectful dance into a toxic marriage.Porter, 57, an Emmy award winner who maintains her bar licence, remembers first year common law classes when she studied the court’s landmark decisions. “Like most lawyers I have a great admiration for not only what the court can do but its role in shaping American opinion as well as American society,” she says via Zoom from New York, a poster for her film John Lewis: Good Trouble behind her.“If there’s a criticism of the court in this series, it comes from a place of longing, a place of saying we can’t afford for this court to lose the respect of the American people. There’s going to be decisions over time that people disagree with. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is how cases are getting to the court, how they’re ignoring precedent and the procedures by which the decisions are getting made. That’s where I would love people to focus.”Deadlocked offers a visual montage of the court winding back in time: women and people of colour gradually disappear in favour of an all-white, all-male bench. They include Chief Justice Earl Warren, who heralded an era of progressive legal decisions such as Brown v Board of Education, a unanimous 1954 ruling that desegregated public schools.Porter says of the paradox: “One of the things we were thinking is, isn’t it ironic that this all-male, all-white court is responsible for Brown v Board and for Roe v Wade [which enshrined the right to abortion] and you have the right to an attorney, which is Gideon v Wainwright, and you have the right to have your rights read to you. Yet when we have the most diverse court we’ve ever had, we’re seeing a rollback of some of these civil rights.”In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black man to serve on the court. A group of southern senators, almost all Democrats, sought to exploit riots in the major cities and fears about crime to try to derail his nomination. Marshall endured five days of questioning spanning three weeks and was finally confirmed by the Senate in a 69-11 vote.There have only been two African American justices since: conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first woman to sit on the court was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative appointed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan.“It takes a century of supreme court jurisprudence before we get a woman on the court. There’s an irony there that we have the current composition of the court and yet we have probably one of the most least hospitable courts to individual rights.”The court’s relationship with public opinion has been complex, leading at some times, following at others. In 2015, it ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The 5-4 decision removed same-sex marriage bans in 14 states – an acknowledgment of shifting attitudes and the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.Porter observes: “The court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have PR or a media representative. The supreme court can’t change public opinion but what the court can do is either set an aspirational goal or it can reflect where the country is. For the gay marriage decision, that’s where the country was. The country was supportive of same-sex marriage and the court ratifies that public opinion and makes it law.”Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have also consistently supported reproductive rights. In Roe v Wade in 1973, the court voted 7-2 that the constitution protects individual privacy, including the right to abortion. Porter observes: “It’s not that controversial a decision by that time. More than half the states had reproductive rights access so it was only going to affect some of the states.”At the time, Christian evangelicals were not opposed to abortion rights. “Evangelicals historically were pro-choice. This is where politics comes in and is on this collision course with the judiciary. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell realised, oh, wait, abortion is a wedge issue and there are all these Catholic voters. So they come together.“What the evangelicals want is tax exemption for religious schools. The Catholics don’t want abortion and together they’re a powerful voting bloc. They not only say we’re going to try and get the supreme court to change but we’re going to elect a president who is going to help us.”These religious groups duly turned against the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Sunday school teacher, in favour of the divorced former Hollywood actor Reagan. Porter continues: “What you see is kind of politics at work. How can we get power? How can we get what we want? How can we form alliances?“That alliance is very powerful because Reagan ends up having so many appointments to the court and you see the rightward shift of the court. These kinds of monumental changes don’t happen quickly but building blocks are constructed in these earlier years, like in the 80s, and they’ve continued to this day.”The court’s role as a political actor was never more stark than in 2000, when its ruling in Bush v Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the presidential election, effectively handing the White House to George W Bush. Porter notes: “It’s 5-4 to step in and stop the voting to determine who would be the next president of the United States. Sandra Day O’Connor later said she regretted voting with the majority.“Also, interestingly, Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all working with the Republicans on the side of soon-to-be President Bush. Is that illegal? No. Is it impermissible? No. Is it unethical? No. Is it interesting? Yes!” Porter says with a laugh.But the ever-growing politicisation of the court became turbocharged – perhaps irreversibly – by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, committed a professional foul by refusing to act on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, insisting that the seat remain vacant in an election year.Step forward Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president who released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees based on advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It was an unprecedented political masterstroke that comforted religious conservatives troubled by his unholy antics and past support for abortion rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcConnell is seen in Deadlocked asserting that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump … was the supreme court”. This clip is from an address he made in 2019 to the Federalist Society, which has played a critical role in tilting the court to the right.The group was founded in 1982 under the mentorship of Justice Antonin Scalia to challenge what conservatives perceived as liberal dominance of courts and law schools. Among its most prominent members was Leonard Leo, who oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association.Porter says: “Leonard Leo is one of the most fascinating and yet not widely known political actors in our contemporary history. The Federalist Society realises: we can have influence in grooming judges and who’s getting appointed to the lower courts. Leonard Leo takes that on steroids and eventually becomes the person who former president Trump looks to create his list of potential supreme court nominees.“In recent years Leo has secured a multibillion-dollar war chest in order to continue to groom and populate the lower courts with very conservative ideologues. Amy Coney Barrett is a product of that. Kavanaugh is a product of that. All the greatest hits are with Federalist Society influence.”Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, has called it “the scheme”: a decades-long plot by rightwing donor interests to capture the supreme court and use it to accomplish goals that they cannot achieve through elected officials. The Federalist Society is a receptacle for “dark money” – millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.Porter adds: “The problem with private entities like the Federalist Society having so much influence and power is that there’s no insight into the source of their funds. We certainly do know that it’s not a coincidence that some of the interests of some of the most conservative folks seem to be being served by these appointments.”Last year the rightwing forces achieved their greatest victory with a decision that once seemed unthinkable: the overturning of Roe v Wade after nearly half a century. Most Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion with 14 banning the procedure in most cases at any point in pregnancy. About 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling.Porter had wanted to believe the court she admired as a student was a bulwark in defence of individual liberties. “Every pundit, every organisation, said Roe is going to be overturned and yet it was still hard to believe that 50 years later, when so many people rely on that decision, that it actually could be overturned.“I will say it really did personally impact my feeling about the court. Reading the decision, there’s ignoring of history. It’s not a well-written opinion, it’s not coherent, and that’s really hard. We all need to believe in things and we all need to believe that these are the smartest people and that they’re able to put aside their personal beliefs and that didn’t seem to be the case.“It was more than disappointing. It’s somewhat comforting that we have such a strong reaction to it but I see the cases of the women who have been so harmed by this decision. There are people have been forced to carry pregnancies to term that were not viable, people who just stay pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant. You want to think America is better than that.”As the final episode of Deadlocked acknowledges, the court faces a crisis of legitimacy. A series of extremist rulings out of whack with public opinion have come at the same time as ethics scandals involving the rightwing justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. The share of Americans with a favourable opinion of the court has declined to its lowest point in public opinion surveys since 1987: 44% favourable versus 54% unfavourable, according to the Pew Research Center.Porter adds: “Every single person we spoke to for this series regardless of their political background – and we have Scalia’s former clerk, who wrote the decision broadening access to guns; we have Ted Olson, who argued Bush v Gore for President Bush; we have Don Ayer, who was a Reagan justice department official – is concerned about the reputation of the court and what the future holds if the court continues to chart its own path and not realise the delicate balance of our tripartite system of government.“What if the court sides with a Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election next year? That’s what we’re talking about and a lot of the people who did the insurrection are still out there; we didn’t arrest them all. We’re in uncharted waters. It’s not a game and I don’t think anyone wants to actually put this to the test of: will our democracy survive?”
      Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court premieres on Showtime on 22 September with a UK date to be announced More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Why is Georgia prosecuting leftwing activists with the same law as Trump? | Akin Olla

      by

      Within weeks of each other, Donald Trump and 61 leftwing activists were indicted under criminal conspiracy laws in Georgia. What may feel like a victory for centrism and justice is actually a dangerous conflation.The protesters are part of the Stop Cop City movement, fighting to prevent the construction of a new police urban combat training facility over what the Muscogee Creek people call the Weelaunee forest outside of Atlanta. One protester has already been killed by police, with an independent autopsy detailing that they probably had their hands up when they were shot 57 times.Georgia has expansive anti-racketeering laws, originally created to fight the mafia; the state’s Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, has decided to stretch these laws far past what could reasonably be considered their intended purpose. While the former president was indicted for an alleged conspiracy to literally overthrow the government, many Stop Cop City protesters are facing similar charges for such acts as receiving reimbursements for glue and food and raising money to bail others out of jail.The indictments against the protesters are a naked attempt to destroy a grassroots social movement. Worse, they create a precedent that will allow both Republicans and Democrats to further their separate tracks of crushing any public opposition to government policy.Cop City was first planned in 2017 but only gained steam following the 2020 Black liberation protests. Instead of addressing the myriad of issues that Atlanta residents face, the city backed the giant police and fire training facility, which was proposed by a rightwing police foundation funded by corporations like Home Depot and Wells Fargo. A large network of organizers and activists, from faith and environmental groups to socialist parties and anarchist collectives, got together to protect the forest. They used a range of tactics, from occupying the land to knocking on the doors of neighbors to inform them about the construction.It was the occupations of the forest and disruption of construction, traditional tactics of environmentalists, that triggered a police raid that led to officers shooting 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. Police claimed Tortuguita shot first, wounding police officers, but one autopsy denies that Tortuguita could have been holding a gun and an officer was recorded on video during the incident saying: “You fucked your own officer up,” implying that the police may have been in a friendly-fire incident.Following Tortuguita’s death, organizers mobilized hundreds of people to city hall to speak in a record-breaking 14 hours of public comment, but the Atlanta city council ignored the anti-Cop City groundswell and went on to approve $67m of public money for the project.A coalition within the movement switched strategies and moved to put the construction to a referendum; thus far the coalition has submitted petitions signed by over 100,000 Atlanta residents – a gobsmacking fifth of the entire city. In response, the city has prepared a series of roadblocks to ensure that no resident will have a say in this process, a move that some residents are calling voter suppression.The indicted Stop Cop City protesters are being charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) act, an extension of a federal law created under Richard Nixon to crush the Italian American mafia. For those unfamiliar with The Sopranos and the trials and tribulations of the mob, Rico statutes target the unique structure of the mafia, a hyper-centralized organization with an insulated leadership that can’t be caught up in street-level crimes. The laws allow for different crimes to be linked together and used to prosecute an entire organization at the same time, with increased charges for everyone involved. These increased charges also make it easier to coerce lower-level mobsters to snitch on their higher-ups.While Trump’s alleged conspiracy – a centralized operation with vague attempts to obscure the leadership – fits the bill, the Stop Cop City movement is the opposite. It is neither centralized nor a criminal organization. While some activists have engaged in acts of sabotage to protect the forest, it is absurd to consider their activities as constituting a criminal organization, unless you consider all protest movements illegal. But these indictments basically do just that – tying together acts like passing out flyers, providing legal support and literally writing the letters “ACAB” into an amorphous nonsensical conspiracy.This, of course, has been the unfortunate trajectory of such indictments and anti-protest laws since the mass protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Because Georgia prosecutors can’t name a clear command structure like one might do with the mob, the indictment of the Stop Cop City activists is focused on the alleged anarchist ideology of the protesters and their desire to create a better world.The indictment lists things like “mutual aid”, essentially inter-communal charity, as if they are acts of terrorism or equivalent to shaking down store owners for protection. In the words of Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law expert interviewed by the New York Times, the document “seems like an indictment of an ideological disposition”.It is hardly surprising when rightwing forces use the law to shut down progressive protest; what is unsettling here is the complicity of supposedly liberal Democrats. Unfortunately the Stop Cop City indictments fit neatly with the increasingly reactionary and anti-democratic behavior of Democratic politicians in Atlanta and elsewhere. (Recall Joe Biden’s past comments about “antifa” and his desire to increase funding for police.)There is a growing conspiracy to use violence and coercion to take over the country, but the instigators are figures of the right like Trump and Ron DeSantis and organizations like the Proud Boys. As prices and temperatures rise, leftwing movements will be necessary for our collective survival. Framing progressive activists as equivalent to gangsters and rightwing insurrectionists is a dangerous path that will birth a system even worse than our already cracking capitalism.
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Appeals court shields Trump ally Scott Perry’s phone in 2020 election inquiry

      by

      A federal appeals court has ruled that top House Republican Scott Perry’s text messages about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were constitutionally protected and off-limits to prosecutors, according to the opinion in the case that was newly unsealed on Wednesday.The three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit found that Perry’s communications with congressmen and staff were protected under the so-called speech or debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties.“These are quintessential legislative acts entitled to the privilege, and we vacate the district court’s judgment with respect to those communications and remand,” the appeals court ruled.It also concluded the lower court was wrong to decide that Perry’s communications only qualified for the speech or debate clause protection if the fact-finding had been authorized by an official body, like a congressional committee, saying some “informal” fact-finding would be privileged.The opinion – written by the Trump-nominated circuit judge Neomi Rao and joined by Greg Katsas, also nominated by Trump, and Karen Henderson, nominated by George HW Bush – marks a setback for the special counsel Jack Smith investigating efforts in 2020 to stop the peaceful transfer of power.Still, the appeals court determined that some information gathered by Perry during his informal fact-finding might not be protected. For messages to qualify for the privilege, the appeals court ruled, they must be “integral” or “essential” to the legislative work in question.It also rejected Perry’s categorical position that all of his messages, including to people not working in the executive or legislative branches, were privileged.“We disagree with the district court’s holding that informal fact-finding is never a legislative act. But we also reject Representative Perry’s proposition that informal fact-finding is always a legislative act,” the appeals court found.The ruling instructed the then chief US district judge Beryl Howell to reconsider her initial decision allowing prosecutors to access some of Perry’s phone, and apply their reasoning on a communication-by-communication basis for his messages with executive branch and non-congressional officials.The case now goes back to federal district court in Washington, unless prosecutors ask for an en banc rehearing of the matter before the full DC circuit. A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment whether prosecutors would take that step.For around a year, prosecutors have sought to trawl through 2,200 messages and documents on Perry’s phone related to his involvement in Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and to stop the January 6 congressional certification of the 2020 election results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI seized Perry’s phone last August pursuant to a court-authorized warrant, even before Smith was appointed special counsel, but sought a second warrant to search through his texts and emails with members of Congress, executive branch officials and other third-parties.The interest in Perry, the chairman of the powerful and ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and one of Trump’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill, came because he introduced Trump to former justice department official Jeff Clark in 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.Clark subsequently became a central player in Trump’s efforts to decertify the election results in battleground states that he lost and infamously drafted a false memo saying the justice department was investigating election fraud in Georgia when it was not.That false memo, among other things, led to prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, charging Clark alongside Trump and others on racketeering charges alleging that he violated state law in trying to overturn the election results. Clark has pleaded not guilty in that case.Perry was also involved in meetings with Trump at the White House in the weeks before the Capitol attack, including a strategy session with other Republican members of Congress on 21 December 2020, where they strategized ways to stop the certification from taking place. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Christine Blasey Ford to release memoir detailing Kavanaugh testimony

      by

      Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, pitching the then conservative US supreme court nominee into huge controversy, will release a memoir next year that she sees as a call for people to speak out about wrongdoing.Publisher St Martin’s Press said Ford’s book would share “riveting new details about the lead-up” to her Senate testimony and “its overwhelming aftermath”, including receiving death threats and being unable to live in her home.The publisher also said Ford would discuss “how people unknown to her around the world restored her faith in humanity”. The book, to be called One Way Back, will be published in March.In a statement, Ford said: “I never thought of myself as a survivor, a whistleblower, or an activist before the events in 2018.“But now, what I and this book can offer is a call to all the other people who might not have chosen those roles for themselves, but who choose to do what’s right. Sometimes you don’t speak out because you are a natural disrupter. You do it to cause a ripple that might one day become a wave.”Kavanaugh, a former Republican operative, was the second of Donald Trump’s three nominees to the supreme court, tilting the court decisively in favor of conservatives and leading to rightwing rulings including the removal of the right to abortion.Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University and Stanford University School of Medicine.In September 2018, she told the Senate judiciary committee Kavanuagh sexually assaulted her at a high-school party in the 1980s.He pinned her on a bed, she said, pressing his hand over her mouth while trying to remove her clothes.In prepared testimony, Ford said: “I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help … I thought Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”Ford escaped when a friend of Kavanaugh jumped on the bed, she said, famously telling senators: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”The assault, Ford said, “drastically altered my life. For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details”. She told “very few friends” and her husband, she added.Kavanaugh angrily denied the accusation, and others about alleged drunken behaviour which roiled confirmation proceedings in a way not seen since the scandal over Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill, in 1991.Backed by Republicans on the committee vociferously including the then chair, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court by 50 votes to 48. Only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, declined to support him. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Giuliani says Trump ‘really, really upset’ by conviction of ex-White House adviser

      by

      Donald Trump was “really, really upset” when he learned that his former White House adviser Peter Navarro had been convicted of contempt of Congress, according to the ex-president’s close ally Rudy Giuliani.“This one really got to me,” Giuliani – the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney – said Friday on the far-right media outlet Newsmax. “I was with former president Trump when we found out about it [on Thursday], and I’ve got to tell you, he was really, really upset about it.”Giuliani told the Newsmax host Eric Bolling that pending criminal charges against him and Trump were “one thing” – but it was different to see “your family, your friends, the people working for you” to get in similar trouble.“I mean, this is absurd,” Giuliani said.Navarro served as a senior trade adviser during Trump’s presidency. Congress subpoenaed him in February 2022 to face questioning about why Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, temporarily delaying certification of Joe Biden’s victory during the previous year’s presidential election.A House committee investigating the attack suspected Navarro had more information about any connection between claims of voter fraud that Trump allies had pushed and the assault on the Capitol. But Navarro did not surrender any emails, reports or notes, and he refused to testify.On Thursday, he was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, both punishable by up to a year behind bars. Navarro’s sentencing has tentatively been scheduled for 12 January.Giuliani alluded in passing to “executive privilege” on Friday when discussing Navarro’s conviction on Newsmax, which is generally a friendly environment for Trump and his allies.Among other remarks, he also acknowledged that Navarro’s conviction had him worried as he grappled with charges filed against him by Georgia prosecutors who accuse him of trying to help Trump illegally overturn Biden’s electoral victory in that state in 2020.“Am I concerned? Of course I am,” Giuliani said to Bolling when asked about the criminal case being pursued by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis.Giuliani and Trump have pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against them by Willis. The pair were among 19 people named in a sprawling, 41-count indictment accusing them of conspiring to thwart the will of Georgia’s voters who had selected the Democratic victor Biden over his Republican rival Trump.At his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump on Thursday night hosted a $100,000-a-plate fundraiser meant to help Giuliani pay his legal bills, the Associated Press reported.Willis’s case against Giuliani, Trump and their co-defendants isn’t the only reason the ex-New York City mayor’s legal bills are piling up. A federal judge held him liable in August in a lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers who say they were falsely accused of fraud.Giuliani could ultimately be compelled to pay significant damages to the election workers, in addition to the tens of thousands in court and lawyers’ fees for which he’s already on the hook, according to the AP.The charges in Georgia against Trump are contained in one of four criminal indictments filed against him this year. The others charge him for his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels and other efforts to forcibly nullify his defeat to Biden.Trump has denied all wrongdoing and maintains significant leads in national and key state polling of candidates seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Georgia report reveals jury called for criminal charges against Lindsey Graham and others

      by

      A special purpose grand jury in Georgia that investigated Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election for nearly two years recommended bringing criminal charges against several people who ultimately were not charged, including US senator Lindsey Graham, former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as the influential conservative figure Cleta Mitchell.Those recommendations were revealed Friday when the special purpose grand jury’s final report was unsealed. A regular grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election last month. Those charged include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and former Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer.The special purpose grand jury recommended bringing charges against Graham, Perdue and Loefller “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election with efforts focused on Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia”.Graham, a key Trump ally in the senate, called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger after the election and inquired about tossing aside legally cast mail-in ballots. Perdue reportedly pushed Georgia governor Brian Kemp to call a special session of the Georgia legislature in order to overturn the election results. Loeffler initially said she would vote against certification of Biden’s win in the US Senate before reversing course after the January 6 riot and voting in favor of certification.Mitchell, who remains an influential figure on the right today, was on the infamous January 2021 phone call in which Trump asked Raffensperger to find votes in his favor. The special purpose grand jury unanimously recommended indicting her under several Georgia statutes.The special purpose grand jury also recommended indicting Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Boris Epshteyn, who remains a top Trump aide.It also recommended charges against Burt Jones, who served as a fake elector and is now lieutenant governor of Georgia. A special prosecutor is handling an investigation of Jones after Willis was barred from investigating him after hosting a fundraiser for a political rival. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Trump may seek to transfer Georgia 2020 election charges to federal court

      by

      Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.There is no obligation for a defendant to inform a judge about a hypothetical motion and so, in that sense, Trump’s filing was aimed more at giving notice to the judge who is deliberating on whether all the defendants in the case should be tried at the same time.A spokesperson for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.Last month, the Atlanta-area grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment against Trump and 18 others, alleging that the former president violated Georgia’s state Rico statute in pursuing a multi-pronged effort to throw out the results of a fair election.For the moment, two of the defendants, the former Trump election litigation lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, are scheduled for trial on 23 October after they both sought a speedy trial. But it remains unclear whether everyone else will also go to trial on that date.The removal question has major and complicated implications: if Trump or Meadows manages to transfer to federal court, that could upend any trial in Fulton county superior court that had started or finished because of potential jurisdictional issues.Trump can wait until 30 days after his arraignment – or in this case, his arraignment waiver and not-guilty plea filed on 31 August – to decide whether to seek removal to federal court.The Trump legal team is almost certain to wait until the last moment to file, the people said, given Trump’s overarching legal strategy with all of his criminal cases is to delay, potentially even beyond the 2024 election for which he is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Former Trump White House adviser found guilty of contempt of Congress

      by

      A White House adviser to Donald Trump was found guilty of contempt of Congress on Thursday when he refused to cooperate with an investigation of the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol.Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser during Trump’s presidency and who had promoted his baseless claims of mass voter fraud, was convicted in Washington’s federal courthouse after a short trial.He was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, both punishable by up to a year behind bars.Judge Amit Mehta scheduled Navarro’s sentencing for 12 January.Navarro had been subpoenaed in February 2022 by the House committee investigating how and why Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, interrupting certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.The committee thought he might have more information about any connection between those claims and the attack on Congress.But Navarro did not hand over any emails, reports or notes. When the date came for him to testify before the committee, he did not show up.A defense attorney, Stanley Woodward, told the jury Navarro did get in touch with committee staffers but asked them to talk to Trump to see what information he intended to be protected by executive privilege. That never happened, Woodward said.Prosecutors, though, said Navarro should have handed over what material he could have and flagged any questions or documents believed to be protected under executive privilege. They said much of the material the committee sought was already publicly available.“Peter Navarro made a choice. He chose not to abide by the congressional subpoena,” prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi said. “The defendant chose allegiance to former president Donald Trump over compliance to the subpoena.”Navarro, a former economics professor, was the second Trump aide to face criminal charges after refusing to cooperate with the House committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSteve Bannon, a sometime White House adviser and full-time far-right provocateur, was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison. He has been free while appealing the verdict.On Thursday after Navarro was found guilty, Woodward moved for a mistrial, saying that the jurors had taken an outdoor break near where protesters and media regularly gather outside the courthouse and came back with a verdict shortly after. Mehta did not immediately rule, but said he would consider written arguments on the issue.The House January 6 committee completed its work in January, saying Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.Separately, the US justice department has charged Trump on four criminal counts related to his election subversion efforts. He also faces state 13 counts in Georgia, related to election subversion there.The Associated Press contributed to this report More