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

    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

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

    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

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

    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

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    Former Trump White House adviser found guilty of contempt of Congress

    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

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    First hearing held in Georgia for 2020 election interference case

    A Fulton county judge said that he hoped to decide on trial schedules in the Georgia election interference case next week, a case for which a joint trial will take approximately four months, according to state prosecutors.On Wednesday, the judge Scott McAfee held the first hearing in the Georgia election interference case involving 19 co-defendants including ex-president Donald Trump, who have been charged with interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.During the hearing, a prosecutor from the Fulton county district attorney’s office said that a joint trial involving all 19 defendants will take approximately four months.The prosecutor Nathan Wade also said that the trial will involve approximately 150 witnesses and that the timeline does not account for jury selection.McAfee also denied the request of Kenneth Chesebro to sever his case from his co-defendant Sidney Powell and ordered the two defendants to stand trial on 23 October together.McAfee disagreed with requests from Chesebro and Powell – both attorneys who worked alongside the Trump campaign in 2020 – who wanted their cases to be handled separately from other defendants. Both Chesebro and Powell have also filed motions for a speedy trial.Chesebro’s attorney Scott Grubman argued that while Chesebro’s case surrounds the fake electors scheme, Powell’s case revolves primarily around Coffee county’s voting systems breach.“You’re going to have two cases in one. You’re going to have days, if not weeks, God forbid months, of testimony just related to the Coffee county allegations,” Grubman argued.Manubir “Manny” Arora, another attorney of Chesebro’s, echoed similar sentiments, saying that Powell’s charges have “nothing to do with Mr Chesebro”.Meanwhile, state prosecutor Wade argued that even if Chesebro and Powell’s cases were severed, the Fulton county district attorney’s office would “absolutely” still require the same amount of time and witnesses to try the case.Nevertheless, McAfee disagreed, saying: “Based on what’s been presented today, I am not finding the severance from Mr Chesbro or Ms Powell is necessary to achieve a fair determination of the guilt or innocence for either defendant in this case.”McAfee, who decided to adhere to Chesebro and Powell’s request for a speedy trial, has yet to issue a final ruling on whether the remaining 17 co-defendants will also be tried in October.“It sounds like the state is still sticking to the position that all these defendants should remain and they want to address some of these removal issues,” McAfee said on Wednesday. “I’m willing to hear that. I remain very skeptical, but we can – I’m willing to hear what you have to say on it,” he added.McAfee gave prosecutors until Tuesday to submit a brief on whether the 23 October trial will include only Chesebro and Powell or all of the defendants. More

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    Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro faces trial on contempt of Congress charges

    Federal prosecutors are expected to present the case on Wednesday that former Trump White House official Peter Navarro should be convicted of contempt of Congress because he wilfully ignored a subpoena issued last year by the House January 6 committee during the investigation into the Capitol attack.The only standard that prosecutors will have to reach is that Navarro’s failure to comply with the subpoena was deliberate and intentional – and Navarro will not be able to argue in defense that he blew off the subpoena because he thought Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege.Navarro is about to face his contempt of Congress trial without what he had hoped would be his strongest defense, after the presiding US district court judge Amit Mehta ruled last week Navarro had failed to prove Trump had actually asserted executive privilege to block his cooperation.In an added twist, prosecutors also said the day before trial that they intend to argue that Navarro’s claim of executive privilege was actually self-incriminating because it reinforced his failure to comply with the subpoena was calculated and deliberate, according to court documents.That sets the stage for a trial in federal court in Washington which could end in a quick defeat for Navarro given his lack of defenses, though the consequential nature of the case could also mean it immediately becomes tied up for months on appeal.Navarro was indicted last June on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress after he was referred to the justice department for prosecution for defying the January 6 committee’s subpoena demanding documents and testimony about the former president’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.The former Trump adviser has long insisted he could not comply with the subpoena because Trump had asserted executive privilege and he was obliged to protect his confidential discussions with Trump when he was the president.But Navarro has faced a reckoning in the months since, unable to produce any direct evidence from Trump or Trump’s lawyers supporting his claims, and the judge found in recent hearings that even Navarro’s most compelling pieces of evidence lacked substance.The lack of actual evidence for the executive privilege assertion – even though Navarro swore to it under oath – was cited repeatedly by the judge when he ultimately decided that Navarro could not raise the executive privilege issue at all as a defense at trial.“There was no formal invocation of executive privilege by [Trump] after personal consideration nor authorization to Mr Navarro to invoke privilege on his behalf,” Mehta said, adding Navarro had not met his burden to show a valid assertion.The standard for a valid executive privilege assertion is three-fold, Mehta ultimately ruled: it must be made by the president or an authorized representative, it must be made after personal consideration, and it must be specific to the subpoena in question.One letter addressed to Navarro after his indictment from the Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran saying Navarro had an obligation to protect executive privilege was unsatisfactory because it notably did not say Navarro was authorized to invoke on Trump’s behalf, the judge found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd a second letter addressed to Navarro informing him that Trump had asserted executive privilege over a different subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Trump administration’s Covid response was not applicable to the January 6 committee subpoena, the judge found.Still, even if Navarro had been able to prove a privilege assertion, it was unclear whether he would have been in a different position. Mehta noted, for instance, that Navarro would have still needed to testify about non-privileged topics and produce a log of documents he was withholding.Last February, Navarro was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee after he played an outsized role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and was briefed on a plan to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep”.After he skipped his deposition, the committee moved to hold him in contempt before the full House of Representatives voted to refer him to the justice department for criminal prosecution.Navarro became the second person indicted for his subpoena defiance after former Trump strategist Steve Bannon also ignored his January 6 committee subpoena. Bannon was convicted last year and sentenced to four months in federal prison and $6,500 in fines, but remains free pending appeal. More

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    The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

    What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
    The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

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    Pressure grows on Clarence Thomas after more gifts from rightwing donor

    The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas faced further controversy on Thursday after the release of his financial disclosure form for 2022 provided evidence of more flights and stays with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and judiciary committee member, called the form a “late-come effort at ‘clean-up on aisle three’” which would not “deter us from fully investigating the massive, secret, rightwing billionaire influence in which this court is enmired”.A series of bombshell reports have detailed long relationships between Thomas, rich donors and influential rightwing figures. In the case of Crow, a real-estate baron and collector of Nazi memorabilia, ProPublica has reported gifts of luxury travel and resort stays, a property purchase involving Thomas’s mother and school fees paid for his great-nephew.Thomas is the senior conservative on a court dominated 6-3 by the right, a majority that has handed down epochal rulings including Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the right to abortion.From the left, calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached have proliferated. In the Senate, Democrats have advanced supreme court ethics reform. Given that Republicans have sufficient votes to prevent all such actions – and that the chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed calls to testify – chances of change seem slim.Thomas, 75, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was advised he did not need to disclose trips and gifts from rich donors as they were “hospitality from close personal friends”.His 2022 disclosure form was released on the last day of August after he – and another conservative beset by reporting about donor relationships, Samuel Alito – requested 90-day extensions to the usual deadline. In an unusual move, Thomas’s form included a lengthy defence of previous filings.In one striking contention, the justice claimed protests over the Dobbs decision, after it leaked in May 2022, justified his use of Crow’s private plane for a trip to Texas to speak at a rightwing conference.“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak,” the form said, “the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible.”Thomas’s lawyer, Elliot S Berke, said the justice had “always strived for full transparency and adherence to the law, including with respect to what personal travel needed to be reported”.Berke also criticised “ethics complaints filed against Justice Thomas by leftwing organisations … diametrically opposed to his judicial philosophy” and “leftwing ‘watchdog’ groups … attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy”.In his own statement, Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the watchdog Accountable.US, said: “It’s no surprise that Justice Thomas has kept up his decades-long cozy relationship with billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow with even more lavish jet rides and vacation reimbursements.“For years, Thomas has used his position on our nation’s highest court as a way to upgrade his own lifestyle – and that hasn’t stopped.“… Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas, Leonard Leo, and other key players … may believe they exist above the law, but they don’t. We need accountability and reform now.”Another court observer, Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, addressed the unusual statement appended to Thomas’s declarations form.“Justice Thomas’s lengthy explanation as to why he omitted various gifts and free trips on previous disclosures does not countermand his decades of willful obfuscation when it comes to his reporting requirements,” Roth said.“What’s more, he’s chosen not to update earlier reports with details about the tuition gift, the RV loan” – from Anthony Welters, a healthcare magnate, and first reported by the New York Times – “or his countless private plane fights, all of which were reportable.“It’s time for the Judicial Conference, as required by the disclosure law, to refer these issues to the [US] justice department for further investigation.” More