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    ‘Warped history’: how the US supreme court justified gutting gay rights

    The extreme religious right’s mission to roll back civil rights from abortion to public accommodations is being fueled by false facts and false history. Recent articles in the New Republic have documented the shaky factual foundation behind 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, the case in which the supreme court held that a website design business owned by an evangelical Christian, Lorie Smith, could refuse service to same-sex couples. Even more troubling, the history undergirding the majority’s reasoning is misleading and dangerous to the separation of church and state.Tragically, the religious right knows it has a friendly audience in the six conservative Catholic justices on the supreme court, who have been partners in shaking the foundations of fundamental rights. The justices’ new standard is whether a constitutional right is grounded in “history and tradition”, the latest byword for the bogus doctrine of “originalism”. So they need some history, and apparently any history will do.The legal end to reach a thunderous ruling justifies their debatable means. So the concept of “religious autonomy”, built on a foundation of misleading scholarship, “impact” litigation and, above all, false history, has become the method for restricting rights. Its logic of power rests on its illogic; its warping of the constitution depends on the distortion of history.Tossing aside established historySince the first religious free exercise case in 1878, the supreme court has held that the first amendment protects belief absolutely, but speech and conduct reflecting those beliefs can be regulated if the government’s interest is strong enough.According to the founders, the reason speech and conduct should be subject to the law is the potential for harm. For example, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously remarked, it is illegal to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there are no flames. It is also illegal to cover up child sex abuse or to let a child die from medical neglect despite religious motives. This foundational no-harm doctrine used to apply to all Americans. But now, with its recent decision, the conservative supreme court majority has carved out a gaping exception to the no-harm doctrine for the extremist Christian right, tossing aside established history.For the court to reach its holding that an evangelical website designer has a constitutional right to engage in invidious discrimination against same-sex couples, the majority fraudulently inflated the value of Smith’s speech from expressive conduct (regulatable) to highly valued “pure speech” (untouchable).Two conservative amicus groups, the Becket Fund and the Catholic League, provided the court with the necessary tools to assemble this phony argument by concocting fraudulent histories on the freedom of religious speech.Both the Becket Fund and the Catholic League rely heavily on a 1990 article by the conservative law professor Michael W McConnell that cherry-picks history to make the argument that the constitution mandates religious exemptions from the law. No legitimate scholar outside the realm of the religious right takes McConnell’s arguments seriously – they were thoroughly debunked by Philip Hamburger, Ellis West and myself 20 years ago. As I wrote in 2004, “the power to act outside the law–was not part of the framers’ intent, the framing generation’s understanding, or the vast majority–and the best–of the supreme court’s free exercise jurisprudence.”Unlike what the Becket Fund and the Catholic League wish the justices to believe, the historical truth is that the founders believed that obedience to the rule of law was necessary for true liberty. And it is the true history repeatedly stated in the sermons of the leading clergy of the late 18th-century United States. The most influential of them all, president of Presbyterian College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), the Rev John Witherspoon, who trained more framers than any other educator –including the architect of the constitution, James Madison – stated that the “true notion of liberty is the prevalence of law and order, and the security of individuals”. According to Israel Evans, chaplain of the American army in the Revolution and a friend of George Washington, when a believer “counteract[s] the peace and good order of society” and harms others, “he would be punished not for the exercise of a virtuous principle of conscience, but for violating that universal law of rectitude and benevolence which was intended to prevent one man from injuring another.”The founders believed churches should have the “power to make or ordain articles of faith, creeds, forms of worship or church government”, in the words of the congregational pastor, Rev Elisha Williams, rector of Yale University. Yet the ecclesiastical domain had to give way when others are hurt. As the founder Baptist Rev John Leland stated, the civil law is intended to constrain the actions that harm others and the public good: “[D]isturbers … ought to be punished.” Leland was close to Madison and Thomas Jefferson and influenced their views on separation of church and state. “Never promote men who seek after a state-established religion; it is spiritual tyranny – the worst of despotism,” Leland wrote.In short, the founders definitively rejected the notion that religious believers have special rights to avoid the duly enacted laws that apply to everyone else. The inconvenience of this deeply rooted historical fact must be glossed over by the Becket Fund and the Catholic League, because acknowledging it would undermine their entire argument.Exaltation of religious speech through revisionismThe argument for placing religious speech on a pedestal above all other speech is especially suspect. The Becket Fund argues that the freedom of religious speech has historically occupied a “preferred position” in the “constitutional order”, over other forms of speech. By “preferred” they mean untouchable by law. They even concoct a new label for valuable speech: “core religious speech”. The Fund’s so-called “history” argues that the freedom of speech started with the freedom of religious speech for churches, which then devolved to freedom of speech for legislators, and then finally individuals. The history they tick off is in fact a history of the suppression of religious dissenters’ speech, which was often brutal. From that bloody history, they conclude that at the founding, “the framers elected to follow a broad view of freedom of speech”.Yet their history is just spin. First, it’s not supported in the history of the first amendment itself. As they have to admit, “neither the debates in Congress nor the ratification debates within the several states shed light on the exact scope of the right protected, much less to what extent religious speech was covered.” Second, the first amendment’s free speech and press clauses were ratified in an era of vibrant political speech aired by a vital press. It is clear the founders believed that the press and political speech were highly valued, not ranked below that of religious speech in some recently invented imaginary hierarchy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToday, the first amendment holds that political and religious speech are highly valued (though not one over the other), but at the time of the framing, the framers knew that when they limited the first amendment to the federal government, the state anti-blasphemy laws would stand. They placed political speech above dissenters’ religious speech. Thus, the first amendment was consistent with putting in jail those who criticized Christianity. Indeed, there were prosecutions for blasphemous and sacrilegious speech until Burstyn v Wilson in 1952, which held such a law unconstitutional. Of course, that is religious speech suppression. So much, in the light of the founders, for religious speech’s “preferred position” by history. What they really mean, based on their twisted interpretation, is that Christian speech has a preferred position.The Catholic League in fact leans into the fantastical concept of exalting a subset of religious speech over all other religious speech when it bizarrely attributes to the framers their acceptance of what they claim as Madison’s supposed view “that the governor of the universe supersedes any earthly authority, religious convictions were understood to command greater deference than mere personal opinions”.Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion elevates certain religious speech exactly as the Becket Fund and Catholic League suggest, and achieves this feat by intentionally misapplying free speech doctrine at its most basic. As a matter of law prior to this court, 303 Creative’s website design would have been expressive conduct. 303 Creative’s commercial speech is not the traditional, highly protected speech the court has recognized again and again: it’s not speech in a public park or on a public sidewalk or a parade. The speech is by a commercial business, whose product has expressive elements to it, which means it is expressive conduct, on which the public accommodation laws impose merely incidental burdens. However, the majority pulls a proverbial rabbit out of its hat by saying that the parties “stipulated” the commercial speech is “pure speech” – and so it must be. But that’s not how free speech cases are decided. The courts decide whether expression is traditionally highly protected, lesser valued speech, expressive conduct, or unprotected altogether. Hiding behind the parties’ stipulation is in derogation of the court’s duties and constitutional nonsense.Having transformed commercial expressive conduct into highly protected speech, Gorsuch nudged the law closer to McConnell’s debunked thesis of mandatory exemptions, which downplays any government interest. Gorsuch takes 12 pages to even acknowledge Colorado’s interest in public accommodations law, granting it one full paragraph and a quick tip of the hat: “The vital role public accommodations laws play in realizing the civil rights of all Americans.” Then he segues to suggesting that newer rights in the public accommodations laws haven’t been fully examined in the law. It’s easy to read between the lines: the majority is suggesting that LGBTQ+ discrimination isn’t nearly as bad as race discrimination; it’s a second-order interest. This is exactly what the Institute for Faith and Family argued with some dubious 14th amendment assertions. The disgraced John Eastman, writing for the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, would have moved all the way to McConnell’s conclusion, arguing no state interest could possibly overcome the exalted speech of the wedding website. The court got very close.Dangerous movesThese are dangerous moves by the court that unleash biased and destructive religious speech and conduct. The founders would not recognize the lawless world this court is building.Let’s be frank. The extreme right Christian groups supporting 303 Creative are still burned up about the Obergefell decision, which enshrined gay marriage as constitutional. They have manufactured a fictional guarantee to so-called “pure speech” and trivialized the anti-discrimination laws to make up for the fact they lost the war on LGBTQ+ marriage.The majority’s decision in 303 Creative is, in fact, an expression of the Christian right’s constitutional sour grapes. The supreme court majority has deconstructed the first amendment to fit their Bibles.
    Marci A Hamilton is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania More

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    Trump’s jail spectacle is historic, but it won’t harm him politically

    One by one this week, they’ve made their way to 901 Rice Street, the address of the notorious Fulton county jail. Lawyers, government officials, a former state party chair and others have all surrendered to authorities after being charged as part of an alleged criminal effort to overturn the 2020 election.On Thursday, the head of that enterprise, Donald Trump, himself surrendered, marking another historic moment for a president who has reshaped the rules of American politics. This is the closest that Trump has been to a jail cell to date and serves as a blunt reminder that no American or former president is above the law.Like nearly everything Trump does, his surrender was orchestrated to be a spectacle. He deliberately timed his surrender, 7.30pm, to maximize cable news coverage. Reporters camped outside the jail all day on Thursday as temperatures reached mid-90s F and Trump supporters gathered for a demonstration. There was wall-to-wall news coverage of Trump’s motorcade and arrival at the jail. While politicians typically try and shift attention away from their criminal legal troubles, Trump has embraced it, feeding into the circuit by advertising his surrender time.Despite Trump’s brashness, the gravity of the moment is underscored by the venue where Trump surrendered. In his other three cases, Trump has surrendered in courthouses and then quickly appeared in a courtroom for an arraignment. On Thursday, he’ll turn himself in at a jailhouse that has been so beset by horrific conditions that it’s under investigation from the Department of Justice. For the first time, he’ll have to post a cash bond – $200,000 – to guarantee his release.In the other three instances, Trump has avoided the indignity of a mugshot. On Thursday, he got one that will be released to the public. For a man who cares deeply about perception, the image released on Thursday by the Fulton county sheriff will be inescapable, forever establishing him as the only president to ever be criminally prosecuted with a mugshot. It is also likely to be one that is forever part of America’s story – a snapshot of the president and a movement who tried to bend American institutions and tested the contours of American governance and the rule of law at every opportunity.In a sense it marks the end of a two-year chapter of investigating Trump’s efforts to lead a coup to overturn the 2020 election results. It also marks the beginning of the next chapter – the trials to convict him.Still, it would be a mistake to assume that the mugshot and the spectacle of Trump’s surrender at jail on Thursday will harm Trump politically. Instead, it is only likely to more deeply entrench support from those who back Trump and believe he is being persecuted.As both a candidate and president, Trump has made the politics of grievance, the feeling of being persecuted and wronged, central to his political identity. Trump is already using his indictments to rally his supporters. When he surrendered in New York earlier this year, officials waived a mugshot. Trump’s campaign quickly released a fake one and began fundraising with it instead.The booking, and the indictment that came before it, is also the latest step in what is likely to be a sustained and nasty battle, both in the public domain and in court, between Trump and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney. Trump has already attacked Willis, a Democrat and the first Black woman to hold her office, saying – of all things – that she is racist. Willis has not responded to those attacks, and urged those in her office to ignore them, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in the coming days, weeks or months,” she wrote in an email earlier this month. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any.”Trump allies, both in Georgia and in Washington DC, have already begun separate efforts to make Willis’s work as difficult as possible. But Willis, who has a reputation for being an aggressive prosecutor, hasn’t blinked. So far, she’s headed off last-ditch efforts by Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, two of Trump’s co-defendants, to avoid surrendering.For all the fanfare of Trump’s surrender, the most significant developments may be what happens far away from Rice Street and the Fulton county courthouse. Trump wields a commanding lead in the polls for the Republican nomination for president.Asked during the first Republican debate on Wednesday if they would support Trump if he was the nominee, nearly all of the candidates said yes. More

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    Rudy Giuliani mugshot released after he surrenders in Trump Georgia case – live

    Hugo Lowell reports:
    Just in: A federal judge has denied former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ request for an emergency order to prevent his arrest at Fulton County jail while he tries to have his case removed to federal court.
    Furthermore:
    A federal judge has denied former Trump Justice department official Jeff Clark’s request for an emergency stay to avoid having to surrender at Fulton County jail, after he filed to have his case removed to federal court. Clark has until Friday at noon to travel to Atlanta for booking.
    In a fundraising email to supporters, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott offers a (very basic) taste of what he might offer on the debate stage in Milwaukee tonight.“If you had told 7-year-old Tim Scott he would one day be on a presidential debate stage, he would NOT believe you,” the email says.Seven-year-old Tim might also not have believed that his grown-up self would take his debate stage bow with just 1% support, a mere 51 points behind the frontrunner, Donald Trump. But I digress.The email continues: “I’m a child of divorce. When I was 7, my mom, my older brother, and I moved into a two-bedroom rental house that we shared with my grandparents.“My Mama and Granddaddy told me you can be bitter or you can be better. You can be a victim or you can choose victory. Well Friend, I’m ready to choose victory!“Tonight, I’ll share why the truth of my life disproves the Left’s lies and why I believe America can do for anyone what she’s done for me.”What Scott might do in the primary remains of course to be seen. He has big support from the Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and with a big debate performance, who knows.But the signs are not particularly rosy, even when one zeroes in on Iowa, the first state to vote and one where evangelical Christians, a key Scott constituency, are strong.At the weekend, a major poll from NBC News and the Des Moines Register gave the senator third place. That was better than his position in national averages, linked to above. But though Scott had 9% support, Ron DeSantis of Florida had 19% and Trump – thrice-married and an adjudicated rapist yet still the No1 choice for Christian conservatives – had 42%.Our Washington bureau chief reports from Milwaukee, ahead of tonight’s Republican debate …Donald Trump is missing from the first Republican primary debate but his supporters are not. Nine hours before kick-off, they were roving outside the venue wearing “Make America great again” caps and brandishing signs mocking the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Some of the former president’s allies in the US Congress, such as Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are also on here. Sitting in a hotel lobby, Greene told the Guardian that she backs Trump’s decision to stay away.“I told him to skip it,” the far-right congresswoman and conspiracy theorist said. “It’s a waste of his time.“He’s winning by over 60%, poll after poll depending on what state you’re looking at and the national poll. It’s a complete waste of his time to step out on a stage and be the centre of the attacks when he has a four-year record as president that everybody wants back and none of those people on the stage have anything that they can compare to him.”There has been speculation that Trump could choose Greene as his running mate.She said: “Well, I’d have to think about it and consider it. It’s talked about frequently and I know my name is on a list but really my biggest focus right now is serving the district that elected me.“That’s of course a decision that President Trump has to make. I don’t know who that person is going to be and I don’t even think they’re going to be on that debate stage. I’ll argue that. But, of course, that’s up to him. But I would be honoured and consider it. But my most important job is, of course, to serve the American people and I’ll help him do whatever in any way I can.”Greene said the three Republicans she talks to most frequently are Trump, Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, and James Comer, chairman of the House oversight committee. Do they all seem to be on the same page?“A lot of times, yeah. Not all the time but a lot of times. It just depends on the issue.”Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton county jail on Thursday evening on racketeering and conspiracy charges, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. It is Greene’s home state but she dismisses the sweeping indictment as “garbage” and has not read it.“I wouldn’t waste five seconds of my time,” she said.Booking pictures of those Trump aides and allies who have so far surrendered in Georgia have now been released.Here is the official booking picture of Giuliani:Here are some for more of the co-defendants:Some levity, of a sort, for those wanting a slightly different angle on what until relatively recently would have been the outlandish, outrageous prospect of a former US president being booked at an Atlanta jail on charges including racketeering and conspiracy, related to an attempt to overturn an election.Bookies are offering punters the chance to bet on what Donald Trump’s recorded weight will be when he surrenders at the Fulton County Jail tomorrow. As the Daily Beast puts it, perennially pleasingly snarky…
    The line currently sits over/under 278.5lb, a far cry from the 244lb White House physician Sean Conley recorded for Trump in 2020.
    As the Beast also notes, part of punters’ interest in the former president’s avoirdupois is fueled by the purest schadenfreude, if I might overdo the pretentious italics. Trump, of course, has a habit of abusing his opponents, critics and enemies – see Christie, Chris and O’Donnell, Rosie, passim – about their body mass index.Trump’s height will also be taken. His 2020 White House physical said he was 6ft 3in tall. There is speculation, widespread, that the truth is different:Here’s a slightly fuller version of comments from Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor turned Trump attorney, after his surrender in Atlanta on charges including conspiracy and racketeering.Speaking to reporters, and laughing as he did so, Giuliani said he was “very, very honoured to be involved in this case because this case is a fight for our way of life”.“This indictment is a travesty,” he said. “It’s an attack on not just me, not just President [Donald] Trump, this is an attack on the American people. If this could happen to me, who is probably the most prolific prosecutor maybe in American history and the most effective mayor for sure, it can happen to you.”Giuliani was indeed a prolific prosecutor, back in New York before he became mayor and briefly, after leading New York on and after 9/11, dreamt of a rise to the White House.As US attorney in Manhattan, he memorably cracked down on organised crime by using racketeering statutes.It’s safe to say his current predicament in relation to similar such statutes … has been noticed by quite a few observers.I typed “Giuliani irony” into Google, and this and this and this came up. And more.Here, meanwhile, is some further reading about what Michael Cohen, another Trump attorney who turned on his old boss after being sent to jail, had to say the other day about Trump, Giuliani and the concept of payment for legal services rendered …Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota and GOP presidential candidate, said he will consult a physician before deciding if he will participate at tonight’s debate, after injuring his leg at a basketball game yesterday.Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, Burgum said his debate walkthrough went well despite tearing his achilles tendon.Fulton County officials have released the mug shot of Kenneth Chesebro, the alleged architect of Donald Trump’s fake electors plot.Chesebro surrendered at the Fulton county jail earlier on Wednesday.Here’s the mug shot, as shared by CBS’ Scott MacFarlane:Rudy Giuliani claims he is being indicted because he was a lawyer for Donald Trump.The former New York mayor accuses the FBI of having “stole(n) my iCloud account the day that I began representing Donald Trump”.Rudy Giuliani says the Fulton county district office’s case against him, Donald Trump and his co-defendants is “an attack on the American people”.“If they can do this to me, they can do this to you,” he tells reporters.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis “will go down in American history for having conducted one of the worst attacks on the American constitution”, Giuliani says.Rudy Giuliani is speaking to reporters after he surrendered to authorities at the Fulton county jail on charges that he helped lead a racketeering enterprise and conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.Asked if he regretted attaching his name to Donald Trump, Giuliani replied:
    I am very, very honoured to be involved in this because this case is a fight for our way of life.
    This indictment is a travesty. It’s an attack on not just me, not just President Trump, not just the people in this indictment, some of them I don’t even know.
    Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis sharply rejected efforts by two of Donald Trump’s co-defendants – former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark – to move their sprawling racketeering cases to federal court.From my colleague Sam Levine:Rudy Giuliani left Manhattan in the morning to travel to Atlanta with his lead lawyer, John Esposito, on a private jet, though the source of the funding for the plane remains uncertain given Giuliani has struggled financially in the wake of mounting legal bills.Giuliani’s financial trouble stemming from having to retain lawyers for the congressional and federal criminal investigations into efforts to subvert the 2020 election results have become particularly acute in recent weeks, according to two people familiar with the matter.The money problems have been exacerbated by Giuliani’s recent setbacks in court – including in a defamation case against two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of stealing ballots – and the suspension of his law license over his election subversion efforts means he has few income streams.The situation has led to Giuliani listing his Manhattan apartment for sale for more than $6m. He also travelled to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in April to ask the former president to help pay his legal bills after Trump rejected his earlier entreaties for support, the people said.When that trip failed to convince Trump to have his Save America political action committee pay for Giuliani’s legal bills, in the way that Trump has doled out $21m for aides’ legal bills tied up in the criminal investigations, Giuliani’s son Andrew made his own trip to see Trump.Trump has never explained why he has consistently refused to help Giuliani, but people in his orbit point to Trump’s complaints that Giuliani was defeated in almost every 2020 election lawsuit that he brought.But the meeting with Andrew Giuliani appears to have helped, and Trump agreed to attend two fundraisers, the people said. Trump will host a $100,000-per-person fundraiser at his Bedminster club in New Jersey next month, according to an invitation reviewed by the New York Times.Rudy Giuliani’s surrender to authorities at the Fulton county jail marks a jarring moment for Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor who made his name with aggressive racketeering cases, now facing a racketeering charge himself.Alongside Donald Trump, Giuliani faces the most charges in the sprawling 41-count indictment handed up by a grand jury last week that described how he played a principal role in marshalling fake slates of electors among other schemes to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.The bond for Giuliani was set at $150,000 after his lawyers met with the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis earlier in the day. The amount was slightly less than the $200,000 bond for Trump but more than the $100,000 bond for another former Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell.Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his family are on vacation in Lake Tahoe.The president, first lady and members of the Biden family “are taking a Pilates class followed by a spin class”, the White House said earlier.AP’s Seung Min Kim shared a photo of Biden after his pilates and spin classes:Democrats will be denied political oxygen on Wednesday night but hope to turn this to their advantage by framing all the Republican candidates as Donald Trump-adjacent extremists.At a press conference on the top floor of a downtown Milwaukee hotel, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said:
    Tonight, in prime time, Americans will have an opportunity to see in action the most extreme, the most divisive, the most chaotic slate of presidential candidates in history when these Maga 2024 Republicans take the debate stage here in Milwaukee, and I don’t know if it’s going to be a debate, but more like a circus.
    They may try to differentiate themselves but the truth is that every single one of these candidates from Donald Trump on down are extreme.
    Harrison went on to list the candidates one by one, setting out their positions on abortion, pushing conspiracy theories and past associations with the Tea Party or Trump.
    No matter who you pick, this group is as extreme as it gets. A bag full of Maga apples and they are all rotten. They are wildly out of step with the American people.
    He attempted to draw a contrast between the two parties. “We believe that our better days as a nation are ahead of us, not behind us. They believe that our better days are behind us and that is the difference in this election.
    Joe Biden wakes up every day thinking about how to make the lives of the American people better. They wake up every day thinking about how do I get back in power? That is the difference between the Democratic party led by Joe Biden and a Republican party led by Maga extremists.
    Satya Rhodes-Conway, the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, accused Republicans of pushing a national abortion ban. “Let me be crystal clear about this: the 2024 Maga Republican presidential candidates are running on their extreme anti-choice records,” she said.
    I’m sure that they’re going to talk about freedom on the debate stage tonight. But what about the freedom to make my own health care decisions? I guess that their version of freedom doesn’t include women.
    Rhodes-Conway added:
    Here’s the bottom line: the American people don’t want anything to do with their abortion bans. Voters in states all across this great country, including right here in Wisconsin, have made it clear that the craven abortion bans are wildly unpopular and out of step with the American public.
    Rudy Giuliani has turned himself in at the Fulton county jail over charges tied to his efforts to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election.The former New York City mayor and longtime Trump ally faces 13 charges that include racketeering, soliciting lawmakers to violate their oaths of office, making false statements and conspiracy counts dealing with the recruitment of fake electors.Here’s a look at the Fulton county jail records, as shared by NBC’s Blayne Alexander:Rudy Giuliani has arrived at the Fulton county jail and surrendered to authorities, according to the county sheriff’s website.The former New York mayor and lawyer for Donald Trump faces charges in the sprawling Georgia elections racketeering case. At a meeting earlier today with Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’ team, Giuliani’s bond was set at $150,000.“I’m feeling very, very good about it because I feel like I am defending the rights of all Americans, as I did so many times as a United States attorney,” Giuliani told reporters in New York this morning. More

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    Donald Trump to surrender at Fulton county jail on Thursday night

    Donald Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton county jail on Thursday evening on racketeering and conspiracy charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia, according to two people briefed on the matter.The former president – seeking to distract from the indignity of the surrender by turning things into a circus – in essence had his lawyers negotiate the booking to take place during the prime viewing hours for the cable news networks.Trump has posted on his Truth Social platform that he would be arrested on Thursday, but the prime-time scheduling was finalized in recent days after his lawyers met with the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, at her office on Monday.The former president became a criminal defendant in a fourth case last week when a grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment that accused Trump and 18 co-defendants of engaging in a criminal enterprise and committing election fraud in trying to reverse his 2020 defeat.Trump returned to his instinct to maximize television ratings to his benefit for his surrender to authorities in Atlanta, the people said, and could extend the coverage of the proceedings by speaking afterwards in front of cameras and reporters.The strategy to turn surrenders in each of his four criminal cases into spectacles has been an effort to discredit the indictments, as well as to capitalize on the information void left by prosecutors after such events to foist his own spin on the charges.While he would prefer not to be charged, once indicted, Trump has moved to present himself as defiant and lament to his supporters that he supposedly is the victim of partisan investigations, for which he needs their political and financial support.A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The surrender itself is expected to be mundane. At the Rice Street jail north-west of downtown Atlanta, where defendants charged in Fulton county are typically taken, the booking process involves a mug shot, fingerprinting and having height and weight recorded.Trump asked his lawyers and the US secret service to get him an exemption from being photographed, the people said, though it was not clear whether he will get special treatment. The Fulton county sheriff, Patrick Labat, has previously said Trump would be treated no differently.The other 18 co-defendants in the 2020 election subversion case appear to be receiving regular treatment based on online jail records for the former Trump election lawyer John Eastman and others, who had their height, weight and personal appearance made public.Once the booking is complete, Trump is expected to be released immediately on conditions that include stringent witness intimidation restrictions that have not been put in place for his co-defendants, court filings show, until he is due back in state court for arraignment.The Trump legal team could file a motion to remove the case to federal court before then, under a federal statute that allows for such venue changes if the case involves federal officials’ actions taken “under color” of their office – as in, if it was part of official duties.Trump could face major difficulties with that argument, however, since he would have to show that taking steps to change the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia amounted to him acting in his official capacity as president, legal experts have said. More

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    Trump lawyers ask judge to push January 6 trial to April 2026

    Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the judge in Washington DC overseeing his federal election interference trial to push back the start date to April 2026, almost 18 months after the next presidential election and more than two years from the trial date proposed by the US government.The former president’s legal team filed the request to the US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, after Trump was indicted earlier this month on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructed an official proceeding and engaged in a conspiracy against rights.Federal prosecutors in the office of the special counsel Jack Smith had proposed to schedule the trial for the start of January 2024, saying there was a significant public interest in expediting the prosecution.“A January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial,” prosecutors wrote, adding: “It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case in which the defendant – the former president of the United States – is charged with three criminal conspiracies.”In their court filing on Thursday, Trump’s attorneys argued a years-long delay was necessary due to the “massive” amount of information they will have to review and because of scheduling conflicts with the other criminal cases Trump is facing.“If we were to print and stack 11.5 million pages of documents, with no gap between pages, at 200 pages per inch, the result would be a tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky. That is taller than the Washington Monument stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare,” Trump’s team wrote.In their 16-page filing, the lawyers also argued that putting Trump, who is a candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination in a bid to reclaim the White House, on trial this coming January would mark a “rush to trial”.They argue that would violate his constitutional rights and be “flatly impossible”, adding: “The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.”Chutkan has said she wants to set a trial date at her next scheduled hearing on 28 August.Twice impeached and now indicted in four cases, Trump faces criminal charges in New York, Florida, Washington DC and Georgia over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.He also faces a civil trial beginning this October in the investigation into his business interests led by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.And on Friday, the New York judge Lewis Kaplan declared that Trump had filed a “frivolous” appeal against his decision not to dismiss the first of writer E Jean Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits against him. She is seeking $10m and a jury in May found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5m in damages. More

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    Georgia Republican lawmaker moves to impeach Trump prosecutor Fani Willis

    A Republican state senator in Georgia has moved to impeach the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis.The move comes in the wake of Willis’s delivery of a 41-count indictment against the former president Donald Trump and his operatives on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to reverse Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in the state.On Thursday, Colton Moore wrote a letter to Governor Brian Kemp in which he called for an emergency review of Willis’s actions.“We, the undersigned … hereby certify to you … that in our opinion an emergency exists in the affairs of the state, requiring a special session to be convened … for all purposes, to include, without limitation, the review and response to the actions of Fani Willis,” Moore wrote.Moore, who represents senate district 53, posted his letter on Twitter alongside the caption: “As a Georgia state senator, I am officially calling for an emergency session to review the actions of Fani Willis.“America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically TARGET political opponents,” he added.In a statement reported by the rightwing media outlet Breitbart, Moore said: “We must strip all funding and, if appropriate, impeach Fani Willis.”Moore appears to have also launched a website for the official petition of Willis.“Corrupt district attorney Fani Willis is potentially abusing her position of power by pursuing former president Donald J Trump, and I am calling on my colleagues in the Georgia legislature to join me in calling for an emergency session to investigate and review her actions and determine if they warrant impeachment.“The politically motivated weaponization of our justice system at the expense of taxpayers will not be tolerated. I am demanding that we defund her office until we find out what the hell is going on. We cannot stand idly by as corrupt prosecutors choose to target their political opposition,” the website read underneath a headline of “God. Guns. Liberty. Leadership.”Moore’s announcement triggered praise from several conservatives online, with one person writing: “Finally a Republican with courage. So refreshing to see someone FIGHT instead of sit back and say ‘there’s nothing we can do.’”Another user wrote: “Finally, a Republican with a backbone.”“Republicans who walk the walk are my kind of Republicans,” someone else wrote.Following Willis’s delivery of the 41-count indictment, the Fulton county district attorney, who is African American, has faced a wave of racist abuse online including from Trump, who, using a thinly veiled play on the N-word, wrote on Truth Social: “They never went after those that Rigged the Election … They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” More

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    Giuliani championed organised crime act Rico. Now he’s charged under it

    Rudy Giuliani has dined out for years on his aggressive use of Rico, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which he wielded with dramatic effect against New York mobsters in the 1980s.For his pains, he was granted an award by the Italian government. Later, as New York City mayor, he turned his use of the anti-racketeering law into a vote-getter, presenting himself as the hero of Rico.As an in-joke, he handed the keys of the city to the cast of the Sopranos. Then he went on Saturday Night Live and bragged about “sticking it to organised crime”.He may not be laughing so loudly now.On Monday night Giuliani, Donald Trump and 17 other co-defendants were slapped with organised crime charges in Georgia under the state’s Rico law, for allegedly having been part of a vast conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The hero of Rico had been hoist with his own petard.The grand jury indictment charges all of the 19 co-defendants, Giuliani included, with “racketeering activity” in Georgia and other states. It alleges that they acted together as a “criminal organisation” which engaged in illegal activities including forgery, filing false documents and conspiracy to defraud the state.The irony that Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county who is leading the prosecution, chose to hit the hero of Rico with a Rico rap has not been lost on Giuliani watchers. Appointed as US attorney for the southern district of New York in 1983, he did not so much invent the anti-racketeering law, which was enacted in 1970, as become an early adopter in its use against organised crime.His most famous case, the 1986 prosecution known as the “commission” case, targeted eight defendants at the very top of one of the most powerful New York mafia families. “The verdict reached today has resulted in dismantling the ruling council of La Cosa Nostra,” Giuliani said after the convictions were secured in a 10-week trial.His victory demonstrated the huge potential of Rico as a prosecutorial tool against crime gangs. Instead of the traditional approach of picking out individual foot soldiers, one arduous case at a time, Rico allowed prosecutors to take out the entire upper leadership of the criminal enterprise in a single devastating blow.Giuliani may well be ruing his much-vaunted success. The “commission” case put Rico on the map, and since 1986 it has spread widely at both a federal level and across state jurisdictions – Georgia included.The Fulton county indictment makes a specific point of highlighting aspects of Giuliani’s behavior in the thick of the 2020 election that it alleges amounted to racketeering. It recounts some of the more lurid lies that he disseminated in front of the Georgia lawmakers in an attempt to persuade them to subvert Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the state.The falsehoods included his claim that 10,315 dead people had voted in the presidential election; that fraudulent ballots had been counted five times in a counting center; and that two poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, had passed around USB ports “as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” seeking to infiltrate the voting machines.In July, Giuliani admitted in court that his comments about Freeman and Moss were false. Moss testified to the January 6 committee that the supposed USB ports she had exchanged with her mother were in fact ginger mints.The indictment presents all these incidents not just as lies, but as the actions of a member of a criminal racketeering enterprise, designed to further the conspiracy and achieve its goal of keeping Trump in the White House despite his electoral defeat. That Giuliani should have exposed himself to a Rico prosecution in this way is puzzling to those who have followed his legal career.“Of all the defendants, Giuliani knows Rico better than anyone, he lived with it for decades,” said Michael Discioarro, a former prosecutor in the Bronx. “Rudy knows darn well where the line is drawn, and it’s surprising to me that he even put himself in that position.” More

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    Of the criminal cases against Trump, Georgia’s may be the most important | Moira Donegan

    Whether they like it or not, the three prosecutors who have now indicted Donald Trump in four different cases – the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is bringing charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; the special counsel Jack Smith, who is bringing federal charges against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents and January 6 cases; and now Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is bringing state charges against Trump regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia – are now the former president’s political opponents. They pose a greater risk to his political future than any of his primary rivals.This, at least, is how Trump is behaving as his presidential campaign lumbers toward 2024: as if he’s running against the prosecution. For one thing, Trump is acting like the prosecutions are political attacks. In the lead-up to the Georgia indictment, he aired TV ads attacking Willis. And for another, the cases are costing him a tremendous amount of money. A Pac that the former president is using to pay his mounting legal fees, Save America, recently requested a refund of a donation it had made to another group supporting Trump’s re-election effort. The money couldn’t go to campaign efforts, as had been planned, because it was needed to pay the legal fees. That’s how rapidly lawyers’ bills are adding up for the former president and his long list of indicted allies.That list got a lot longer late Monday night, when Willis’s office unsealed an indictment charging Trump and 18 others on charges derived from Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico. Trump himself was charged with 13 felony counts stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including not just racketeering but also soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, and numerous conspiracy and false statements charges.The wide-ranging indictment is the result of a two-and-a-half-year investigation undertaken using a special grand jury, and charges stem from incidents ranging from election day 2020 to September 2022, when defendants allegedly perjured themselves in testimony to the grand jury in an attempt to cover up the scheme. The query began after the release of audio of a call in which Trump urged the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to invalidate votes for Biden in majority-Black Atlanta and “find 11,780 votes” to allow Trump to win the state.Willis has taken a broad view of her mandate, taking advantage of state law’s expanded purview to charge much more expansively in Georgia than Jack Smith has under federal law. Willis has said in the past that she uses Rico charges to tell a complete story of a criminal enterprise to a jury, and the indictment is designed to allow her prosecutorial team to bring in out-of-state conduct in order to add context to the broader effort to overturn the election. The indictment depicts the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia and elsewhere as a criminal enterprise engaged in a conspiracy to commit illegal activity and then cover it up, with Trump as the syndicate boss.In addition to false statements about election fraud made by the likes of Rudy Giuliani to the Georgia legislature, the indictment also surveys conduct in places as far afield as Pennsylvania and Arizona; includes charges related to the false electors scheme in Georgia; and details a bizarre incident on 7 January 2021 in which a firm employed by the conspiracist Trump lawyer Sidney Powell illegally confiscated confidential election data from voting machines in rural Coffee county with the help of one of those fake electors, the Georgia state Republican official Cathy Latham.Giuliani, Powell and Latham are all co-defendants, along with figures such as the disgraced law professor John Eastman, the fake electors scheme architect Kenneth Chesebro, the Department of Justice official Jeff Clark, the Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, the former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, and the then Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer. In addition to the 19 defendants, the indictment lists 30 unindicted co-conspirators.Willis has said that she plans to try all defendants at the same trial. That’s a recipe for chaos: 19 defendants means that there will be multiple defense teams, using multiple strategies to throw sand in the procedural gears of the court and delay, delay, delay. But it also creates many vulnerabilities for the former president: there will be a lot of opportunities for people to flip, and testify against Trump. And those co-defendants may have even more incentive to turn on their old boss than in the other cases, because in Georgia, the Rico charge faced by Trump and other defendants carries a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.Of the criminal cases against Trump, this is the most expansive and ambitious. It may also be among the most significant for the country. As a state charge, it cannot be crushed if Trump returns to power; in Georgia, due to a history of corruption and Klan affiliations among state officials, the governor does not have pardon power, and so Trump cannot look to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for reprieve. Alvin Bragg’s hush money case seems the weakest of the charges, and Jack Smith’s documents case appears to be the strongest. But though Trump’s flouting of the law both in and outside of office has been prolific, it is his attempts to overturn the will of the voters and illegally retain power that are the most dangerous for our country, most offensive to our nation’s shared aspiration to democratic self-rule.The fact that the scheme has not been punished – and that it seemed, for a while, as if neither Congress nor prosecutors would have the courage and political will to punish it – was a profound insult to American citizens. The coming months promise to be chaotic, vitriolic and stupid. Trump will try to spin the indictments as evidence of his martyrdom; his Republican allies will rally to his defense in whichever way they think will improve their own electoral prospects while also keeping them out of jail; journalists will be tasked with repeating, over and over, the bare facts, trying to etch out a legible sketch of reality for their readers amid the onslaught of cynical fictions.But the upcoming trials of Donald Trump, some of which appear to be on track to happen at the height of the presidential election, might also offer a thorough reckoning with what happened after the 2020 election, and an opportunity, for the first time, to truly hold the perpetrators accountable. That, at least, is much needed.Another specter hangs over this latest indictment of Trump, however. The conspiracy that followed the former president’s 2020 election loss seems to have been a scheme not just to stay in power but to spare the man humiliation. “I don’t want people to know that we lost,” the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump told his advisers. “This is embarrassing.”If Trump loses again in 2024, he will face not only the prospect of embarrassment, but the prospect of jail time. We should all fear what he might do to avoid it.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More