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      in US Politics

      Letitia James: the fearless attorney general threatening Trump’s business

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      New York attorney general Letitia James has never shied away from taking on powerful adversaries – from the National Rifle Association to former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.On Monday she will take on her biggest case yet: a fraud trial that threatens the very foundation of Donald Trump’s New York real estate empire.Critics have accused the 64-year-old career prosecutor of using her office, with 1,700 staff and over 700 assistant attorneys general, for political purposes. To others, the Democrat is a heroic figure: the first woman elected as New York’s attorney general and the first Black person to serve in the role. A fearless prosecutor who has taken on cases others would walk away from.Like Trump, “Tish” James was born and raised in New York City. It’s about the only thing they have in common. Raised with her seven siblings in Brooklyn, James attended public schools in the city before getting her law degree at Howard University in Washington DC.She started her law career as a public defender before entering New York politics as a councilmember and then as public advocate, the first Black woman to hold the watchdog role. James’s passions were clear from the start – she filed a record number of suits on behalf of tenants, seniors and people with disabilities. James became New York state attorney general in 2018.Few think her ambitions stop there. Top state prosecutor has often been the jumping off point for a run for New York’s governorship, which James briefly attempted last year.The Trump trial will thrust James further into the spotlight and she is off to an impressive start. James has already claimed one victory in the case. Last week, the New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled the real estate developer had committed fraud for years as he built his empire by inflating the value of his holdings. In an early win for James, Engoron revoked the business licenses of Trump and his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, essentially barring them from doing business in the state.This week, Engoron will hear arguments on a potential fine, which could be at least $250m.“I come from a long line of very strong, tough women. We stick to our principles and stand up for what we believe in, which is fundamental fairness, which is my raison d’être,” James told Elle Magazine in 2017.As attorney general, she has worked for more funding for pre-trial services, the reform of bail laws for minor offenses, treatments for the mental health crisis, cracking down on ghost guns and defending the state’s gun laws restricting the public carrying of firearms.James has also said she wants to prioritize antitrust investigations and consumer protections, and focus on reducing tenant evictions amid skyrocketing rents in the city and state.Last year, James suspended her campaign for New York governor, saying she wanted to “finish the job” with her ongoing investigations, including overseeing a sexual harassment investigation into former governor Cuomo that led to his resignation, an inquiry into the NRA and fraudulent financial practices of the former president.In interviews during her campaign, James said that not pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by Trump or the NRA would have been a “dereliction of my duty” and rejected claims that her legal pursuits were not on behalf of New Yorkers but her “own personal ambitions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I make no apologies, because this is who I am, and this is what I do,” James added.On the same day that she ended her campaign, reports said she was looking to sit Trump for a deposition as part of her civil investigation into his business practices. Trump has called James “a renegade and out of control prosecutor”, dismissed the case as “crazy” and a “witch-hunt”, and invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination 400 times.Trump maintains his innocence and his lawyers are appealing the pre-trial ruling. But outside observers believe this case will be a real test of Trump’s – often successful – bluster.Andrew Lieb, a real estate attorney and legal political analyst, says James is doing no more or less than what attorneys general do. The fact that Trump received a pre-trial ruling in his fraud trial shows just how clear the case against him was.“He was so outrageous, pompous and immune to order and business practices that someone had to do something about it. It was like spitting and saying it’s raining,” Lieb said. “It’s not like he took a $10m property and said it was worth $11m. He took a $10m property and said it was worth over $100m.”James, he says, will go down as an effective attorney general. “She’s effective in that she won. No one remembers how you played the game, they just remember that you won.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump official Jeffrey Clark loses bid to move Georgia trial to federal court

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      A federal judge on Friday denied a request from Jeffrey Clark, the former Trump justice department official, to transfer from state to federal court his criminal case for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, saying he had failed to prove he had been acting within the scope of his official duties.The ruling from the US district judge Steven Jones, which came a day after Donald Trump decided against making a similar request, means Clark will be tried in Fulton county superior court – with its mainly Democratic jury pool – unless the ruling is overturned by the 11th circuit appeals court.Clark was charged last month alongside Donald Trump and top allies in the sprawling Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act case brought by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, because he had drafted a letter in December 2020 falsely claiming the justice department was investigating supposed election fraud in Georgia.The letter was never sent to Georgia officials and Clark had argued he had been acting within the scope of his official duties as the acting US assistant attorney general for the civil division when he drafted the memo, making him immune from state prosecution under a special federal law.But the judge rejected his arguments in a 15-page opinion that concluded the available evidence cut against him and his efforts to try to show he had satisfied a three-part test to determine whether he was eligible to move his case to federal court.“The letter pertained to election fraud and election interference concerns that were outside the gamut of his federal office. Consequently, Clark has not shown the required nexus for federal officer removal,” Jones wrote.Clark made two specific arguments at an evidentiary hearing last week: first, that he had been permitted to draft legal memos as the top official in the civil division, and second, that as an assistant attorney general, he could do work for any of the justice department’s sub-sections.The judge concluded that Clark’s first argument failed because election-related matters have never been in the purview of the civil division, which is involved in defending lawsuits that are filed against the United States or officers of the federal executive branch.The only witness to testify at the hearing, Jody Hunt, Clark’s predecessor as head of the civil division, also disclaimed Clark’s argument and affirmed that anything with respect to election irregularities would be handled by the civil rights division or the criminal division.The judge wrote that deposition transcripts showed that even Clark’s own assistant who helped him draft the letter, Kenneth Klukowski, had recounted to prosecutors he had been “shocked” at the assignment because “election-related matters are not part of the civil’s portfolio”.Clark’s lawyer had responded at the hearing that Clark had been in a unique position in 2020 because he defended the vice-president, Mike Pence, in an election-related lawsuit. But the judge dismissed that notion, saying Clark had to defend that suit because Pence was being sued as an actual federal officer.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJones also entirely rejected Clark’s second argument – that he had been acting within the scope of his justice department role because Trump could have delegated him authority to write the December 2020 letter – because he had failed to show any evidence that had actually happened.The contention from Clark’s lawyer Harry MacDougal at the hearing was that Trump had “ratified” Clark to look at election fraud allegations because he had been summoned to discuss the matter at an Oval Office meeting on 3 January 2020.However, the judge noted it was unclear whether Trump had expressly given Clark authority to write the letter. “Other than his counsel’s own vague and uncertain assertions, the Court has no evidence that the President directed Clark to work on election-related matters,” Jones wrote.“Instead, the evidence before this Court does not show the President’s involvement in this letter specifically until the January 3 meeting where the President decided not to send it to the Georgia officials,” Jones wrote, adding: “Any such delegation … would have been outside the scope of DoJ more broadly.” More

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      in US Politics

      Prosecutors accuse Trump of new effort to delay classified documents trial

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      Special counsel prosecutors accused Donald Trump of trying to delay the classified documents case to within three months of the 2024 election in a court filing late on Wednesday, suggesting his lawyers had attempted to weaponize the complex government secrecy rules to upend the trial schedule.The alleged delay effort from Trump – whose overarching legal strategy is to push back his criminal cases, potentially until after the election because he could have them dropped were he to win – centers on a proposal from his legal team to extend pre-trial deadlines.The Department of Justice prosecutors said in their filing that they were prepared to accept a short extension in the case after the presiding US district judge, Aileen Cannon, allowed Trump to ask for more time to prepare his next legal briefs following earlier delays in the pre-trial process.But they sharply objected to a proposal from Trump to delay not just one deadline but the entire pre-trial schedule, saying it amounted to a veiled attempt to re-litigate the trial date set for May 2023.“The Court invited the defendants to file a ‘motion to extend deadlines’,” the 15-page filing said. “Instead, defendant Donald J. Trump, joined by his co-defendants, filed a motion that threatens to upend the entire schedule established by the Court.”At issue is the complex nature of the US government’s own rules for using classified documents at trial, known as Cipa, short for the Classified Information Procedures Act that governs how the materials can be introduced in national security cases.Trump was charged with retaining national defense information – including US nuclear secrets and plans for US military retaliation in the event of an attack – and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, which is why the case is being governed by Cipa rules.The complaint from prosecutors in the office of Jack Smith, the special counsel, is that Trump’s lawyers are attempting to weaponize Cipa section 4, where the judge has to decide whether to allow the government to redact the classified documents that need to be turned over in discovery.Trump’s lawyers know the judge has to rule on the proposed redactions or substitutions before those classified documents can be turned over to them, prosecutors contended, and appeared to be trying to delay that entire process in order to push back the trial date further.The complaint sets up another significant early test for Cannon, a Trump appointee who came under widespread criticism last year during the criminal investigation after she issued a series of favorable decisions to the former president before her rulings were struck down on appeal.A spokesperson for the special counsel declined to comment. A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.At its core, prosecutors objected to Trump lawyers’ claim they could not start Cipa section 4 before they had reviewed all of the discovery, and their attempt to create a new Cipa section 4 process that involved sequential court filings from both sides instead of doing it simultaneously.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The defendants provide no examples of where a Court has handled Section 4 briefing on a responsive briefing schedule as defendants propose – and the Government is aware of none,” the filing said of the proposal.Prosecutors argued that Trump only had a number of potential defenses to the charge that he retained national defense information, and his lawyers did not need to go through all of the discovery to come up with their broad defense arguments for the purpose of filing a section 4 brief.The defenses would come down to a handful of options, prosecutors argued: Trump was authorized to posses those documents, the documents did not contain national security information, the documents were not “closely held”, or that Trump did not wilfully retain them.“The nature of the material the Government will propose substituting and the limited redactions it will propose are unlikely to require finely detailed defense theories in order for the Court to determine the helpfulness of the material or the adequacy of a substitution,” the filing said.Prosecutors added that even if Trump did need to review more discovery than usual, most of the unclassified discovery had already been produced, including more than 200 witness interview transcripts as well as all of the surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.The production of the classified discovery was also almost complete, the prosecutors said, and the only materials not turned over were five classified documents that were so highly sensitive that they could not be stored with the rest of the materials in a secure facility in Florida. More

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      in US Politics

      US prison labor is cruel and pointless legalized slavery. I know first-hand | Dyjuan Tatro

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      Almost immediately after I was sent to prison, I was assigned to a “program”, the term American prison officials use for a job. I was to sweep the prison hallways, alongside roughly 30 other men. Together we pushed brooms across gray corridors hour after hour, day after day.No matter how many hours I worked, I couldn’t afford toilet paper, soap or toothpaste. We had to pay for basic hygiene products at exploitative markups, way more than they cost in free society, and I was paid 10 cents an hour. To survive in prison, even with a full-time job, I was forced to rely on family, who struggled to support me financially.There’s a misleading narrative pushed by officials about prison labor, one that falsely frames prison jobs as rehabilitative. Nothing could be further from the truth.In prison, my work was meaningless and dehumanizing. It conveyed no new skills, taught me no life lessons and earned me next to nothing. It did not build my résumé, prepare me to navigate workplace relationships or teach me how to budget. It served only to devalue my labor and person. Prisons are about punishment, not rehabilitation.I had no choice in whether I went to work or not – and there were no sick days. If I didn’t go, I would be locked in my cell for 23 hours a day. And as little as it was, I needed the pay.About halfway through my sentence, I had the chance to apply to the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most renowned and rigorous college-in-prison programs in the US. The opportunity changed the trajectory of my life. Graduating from Bard College with my bachelor’s degree gave me something that no one could take away: an education. It was a hard-won prize, especially given the system’s intent to let me languish.Sitting in those classrooms better prepared me for work outside. Engaging with other students prepared me to later engage with co-workers; interacting with professors prepared me to deal with supervisors. Alongside classes in philosophy, political economy and differential equations, I was learning valuable social and professional skills that were radically at odds with the reality of prison.It costs New York around $70,000 a year in taxpayer money to imprison someone. It costs the BPI about $10,000 a year to educate an incarcerated student. New York’s recidivism rate is 40%, while graduates of the BPI and similar programs recidivate at only 4%, a tenfold decrease. Yet, despite its clear positive record, only 300 of New York’s 30,000 incarcerated people are enrolled at the BPI in any given semester. I was one of a lucky few.Prisons are designed to warehouse, traumatize and exploit people, then send them back home in worse shape than when they entered the system. Despite having worked every day, the vast majority of people are released with no job experience, no references and no hope. Some would take this to mean that the system is failing. And it is with regard to public safety, rehabilitation and justice, but it’s horrifyingly successful at two things: guaranteeing jobs for some and perpetuating slavery for others.Over the years, I learned that prison officials were not interested in giving us fruitful educational and job opportunities that allowed us to go home and stay home. The reality is much more sinister. Prisons are a job program for officers that requires us to keep coming back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou may be familiar with company towns and coal towns; in the US, we have prison towns, too. In New York, all state prisons were built upstate as economic stimuli in rural districts and failing farm communities. The facilities imprison predominantly Black and brown inner-city residents who toil under a class of white overseers. I remember a guard bending over to shackle me one day and saying, “I just want to thank you for being here because I’m too old to be digging ditches.” My body and my labor made him an easy living. The parallels to slavery are stark and visceral.Prison officials ignore these critiques and justify their practices by pointing to the exception in the 13th amendment of the US constitution – negotiated as a concession to slave states – that allows slavery “as a punishment for crime”. This exception enables states like Texas to force incarcerated people, mostly Black men, to pick cotton – even at a net loss to the state, because cruelty is the point.Thankfully, a new abolition movement is working to end this exception, and I hope for its success. Over the past few years, seven states – from Tennessee and Alabama to Oregon and Vermont – have voted to end the exception in their state constitutions. And earlier this year, just ahead of Juneteenth, Senators Jeff Merkley and Cory Booker and Congresswoman Nikema Williams introduced the abolition amendment in Congress to end the exception in the US constitution and outlaw the enslavement of incarcerated people. Today it has bipartisan support.After 12 years, I was released with $40 and a bus ticket. The state did not even give me an ID. But I was one of the lucky ones who went home with a college degree. Without it, I would probably be back in prison today. I understand the value of giving incarcerated people real opportunities. Enslaving people is diametrically opposed to it. Nothing good can come from it.
      Dyjuan Tatro is the senior government affairs officer at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he focuses on expanding college access for incarcerated people, and an #EndTheException ambassador More

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      in US Politics

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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      Christine Blasey Ford to release memoir detailing Kavanaugh testimony

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      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