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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Michigan Supreme Court Decides Trump Can Stay on Ballot

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      After Colorado’s top court ruled that the former president was disqualified for engaging in insurrection, justices in Michigan considered a similar challenge.The Michigan Supreme Court on Wednesday paved the way for Donald J. Trump to appear on the state’s primary ballot, a victory for the former president in a battleground state. The state’s top court upheld an appeals court decision that found that the former president could appear on the ballot despite questions about his eligibility to hold elected office because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.The Michigan decision followed a bombshell ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which on Dec. 19 determined in a 4-3 opinion that Mr. Trump should be removed from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.Mr. Trump applauded the Michigan ruling in a statement posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “We have to prevent the 2024 Election from being Rigged and Stolen like they stole 2020,” the statement said. Ron Fein, the legal director of Free Speech For People, a group seeking to have Mr. Trump disqualified from running in the 2024 election, said the Michigan Supreme Court ruled narrowly, sidestepping the core questions at the heart of the case. The decision, he said, leaves the door open to challenge whether Mr. Trump can appear on the general election ballot in Michigan. “The Michigan Supreme Court did not rule out that the question of Donald Trump’s disqualification for engaging in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution may be resolved at a later stage,” Mr. Fein said in a statement. Michigan’s primary will be held Feb. 27.The question of Mr. Trump’s eligibility is widely expected to be answered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Some form of challenge to Mr. Trump’s eligibility has been lodged in more than 30 states, but many of those have already been dismissed.The challengers’ arguments are based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies anyone from holding federal office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.A lower-court judge previously decided the ballot eligibility case in Mr. Trump’s favor. Judge James Robert Redford of the Court of Claims in Michigan ruled in November that disqualifying a candidate through the 14th Amendment was a political issue, not one for the courts. A lower court in Colorado had also ruled in Mr. Trump’s favor before the Supreme Court there took up the case.Judge Redford also ruled that Michigan’s top elections official does not have the authority alone to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot. Free Speech for People, a liberal-leaning group that filed the lawsuit, appealed the ruling, asking the state Supreme Court to hear the case on an accelerated timetable.Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state and a Democrat, echoed the request for a quick decision, citing approaching deadlines for printing paper primary ballots. She wrote that a ruling was needed by Dec. 29 “in order to ensure an orderly election process.”Jan. 13 is the deadline for primary ballots to be sent to military and overseas voters; absentee voter ballots must be printed by Jan. 18. The state’s presidential primary is set for Feb. 27.Mitch Smith More

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      Michigan supreme court rules that Trump will stay on state ballot

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      Donald Trump will remain on Michigan’s state ballot after a ruling from the Michigan supreme court on Wednesday, which upheld a lower court order.The move sets the stage for the former president to participate in the Michigan primary despite accusations that he led an insurrection against the United States.The court’s decision not to move forward with a case against Trump sets the court in sharp contrast to the Colorado supreme court, which recently ruled to strip Trump from its state primary ballot because of his role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.In Michigan, as in Colorado, the challengers have invoked section 3 of the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which broadly blocks people from holding government office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US government. Legal experts are divided on whether this provision, written against the backdrop of the US civil war, applies to the office of the president. There are also questions as to whether Trump’s actions around January 6 legally constitute “insurrection or rebellion”.Colorado’s decision is currently paused on appeal. Special counsel Jack Smith has asked the US supreme court to fast-track the decision, but the nation’s highest court – which is dominated 6-3 by conservatives – has declined. However, the court will likely weigh in soon.The Michigan supreme court justices did not give a reasoning for their Wednesday decision.“We are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this court,” the justices wrote in an unsigned, one-paragraph order.However, in a dissent where she largely agreed with the court’s order, Justice Elizabeth Welch said that procedural differences may make the difference in Colorado and Michigan’s election laws. The challengers in the case, she added, may “renew their legal efforts as to the Michigan general election later in 2024 should Trump become the Republican nominee for President of the United States or seek such office as an independent candidate”.Free Speech for the People, the group that brought the lawsuit, stressed that the Michigan supreme court’s decision was made on procedural grounds.“We are disappointed by the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision,” said Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech For People, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. But, Fein added: “The decision isn’t binding on any court outside Michigan and we continue our current and planned legal actions in other states to enforce Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment against Donald Trump.”Michigan is expected to be a battleground state in the 2024 US presidential election. Its primary is set for 27 February 2024. More

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      Michigan Republican Regrets Participation as Fake Trump Elector

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      The Trump supporter is the only one of the 16 fake Michigan electors who has agreed to cooperate with the authorities and had charges against him dropped.One of the Republicans in Michigan who acted as a fake elector for Donald J. Trump expressed deep regret about his participation, according to a recording of his interview with the state attorney general’s office that was obtained by The New York Times.The elector, James Renner, is thus far the only Trump elector who has reached an agreement with the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, which brought criminal charges in July against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors. In October, Ms. Nessel’s office dropped all charges against Mr. Renner after he agreed to cooperate.Mr. Renner, 77, was a late substitution to the roster of electors in December 2020 after two others dropped out. He told the attorney general’s office that he later realized, after reviewing testimony from the House investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that he and other electors had acted improperly.“I can’t overemphasize how once I read the information in the J6 transcripts how upset I was that the legitimate process had not been followed,” he said in the interview. “I felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.”Mr. Renner’s lawyer, Matthew G. Borgula, had no comment.Charges have now been brought against fake electors in three states — Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — and investigations are underway in other states, including Arizona and New Mexico. In Georgia, prosecutors in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, have looked far beyond the electors themselves and charged Mr. Trump, the former president, and many of his key allies over their efforts to keep him in power despite his loss in 2020. Mr. Trump also faces charges over election interference from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.In Michigan, Ms. Nessel, a Democrat, has only charged the electors, but has said her investigation is still open. During their interview of Mr. Renner, her investigators asked about a number of other people involved, including Shawn Flynn, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign on the ground in Michigan, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. (Mr. Giuliani is among those charged in Georgia; both he and Mr. Trump have pleaded not guilty.)It is not clear if they, or Mr. Trump himself, have legal exposure in Michigan. The Detroit News recently reported that Mr. Trump was taped in December 2020 pressuring two members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the election results, providing direct evidence of his role in trying to overturn the Michigan vote.Mr. Renner is a former state trooper and a retired businessman who volunteered as a local party activist in Clinton County, which is near Lansing, the state capital. He had never served as an elector before and typically supported Republican campaigns by passing out signs and distributing fliers. He said he was contacted by the head of the county Republican Party a day or so before the electors had planned to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, was asked to fill in for someone who was dropping out and agreed to do so.Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan brought criminal charges against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors in July.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesSince Michigan had already been certified for Joseph R. Biden, Jr., who won the state by more than 150,000 votes, the Trump electors were barred from convening in the Capitol building, which was largely closed at the time because of the pandemic. They ended up meeting in the basement of the state Republican headquarters.During a pretrial hearing earlier this month for several of the electors, Laura Cox, the former chairwoman of the state Republican Party, testified that she and other local party officials had drafted language for the electors to sign that made clear they were only acting on a contingency basis, in the event that the Trump campaign’s election litigation succeeded. But Ms. Cox was sidelined by Covid on the day of the meeting, and she said the Trump campaign went against her instructions by not including such language.At the same pretrial hearing, Terri Lynn Land, a former Michigan secretary of state who was originally designated as a 2020 Republican elector, said she declined to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, because Mr. Trump had not been certified by state officials. Tony Zammit, a former spokesman for the state party who attended part of the meeting, testified that in his view, the “vast majority” of the electors were not culpable but “going along with what the lawyers were telling them.”Mr. Renner said in his interview with investigators that when he showed up, “I knew nothing about the electoral process.” Three of the electors took the lead at the signing session, he said: Meshawn Maddock, a former co-chair of the state Republican Party; Kathleen Berden, a Republican national committeewoman; and Marya Rodriguez, the only lawyer among the electors. (They have all pleaded not guilty.)In the interview, Mr. Renner said that “I was accepting the individuals that were in authority” knew “what they were talking about.”But he said that he later began studying the House transcripts and official procedure for the electors after he and the other fake Trump electors were sued in civil court this January. And he was alarmed by what he found, he said.“It was only then that I realized that, hold it, there is an official state authorized process for this,” he said. Before that, he said, “I had never been an elector, I had never discussed it with anybody. I was used to a much more informal process at the county level. And so that’s when I became suspicious of what had gone on.”He said he later realized that “what happened was not legitimate.”In Georgia, more than half of the fake Trump electors agreed to cooperate with prosecutors before charges were brought in the case there. In Michigan, all eight charges against Mr. Renner, including forgery and conspiracy counts, were dropped as part of his agreement with Ms. Nessel’s office.Her ongoing investigation means that the legal aftermath of the last presidential election in Michigan will not be over before voting begins in the next one. Pretrial hearings in the electors case are scheduled to last into February; the state’s presidential primary takes place on Feb. 27.“I am very upset, I don’t show it, but I am,” Mr. Renner told investigators, adding that to say he felt “betrayed is an understatement. That’s all I can say.” More

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      A Trump Conviction Could Cost Him Enough Voters to Tip the Election

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      Recent general-election polling has generally shown Donald Trump maintaining a slight lead over President Biden. Yet many of those polls also reveal an Achilles’ heel for Mr. Trump that has the potential to change the shape of the race.It relates to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles: If he is criminally convicted by a jury of his peers, voters say they are likely to punish him for it.A trial on criminal charges is not guaranteed, and if there is a trial, neither is a conviction. But if Mr. Trump is tried and convicted, a mountain of public opinion data suggests voters would turn away from the former president.Still likely to be completed before Election Day remains Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution of Mr. Trump for his alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election, which had been set for trial on March 4, 2024. That date has been put on hold pending appellate review of the trial court’s rejection of Mr. Trump‘s presidential immunity. On Friday, the Supreme Court declined Mr. Smith’s request for immediate review of the question, but the appeal is still headed to the high court on a rocket docket. That is because the D.C. Circuit will hear oral argument on Jan. 9 and likely issue a decision within days of that, setting up a prompt return to the Supreme Court. Moreover, with three other criminal cases also set for trial in 2024, it is entirely possible that Mr. Trump will have at least one criminal conviction before November 2024.The negative impact of conviction has emerged in polling as a consistent through line over the past six months nationally and in key states. We are not aware of a poll that offers evidence to the contrary. The swing in this data away from Mr. Trump varies — but in a close election, as 2024 promises to be, any movement can be decisive.To be clear, we should always be cautious of polls this early in the race posing hypothetical questions, about conviction or anything else. Voters can know only what they think they will think about something that has yet to happen.Yet we have seen the effect in several national surveys, like a recent Wall Street Journal poll. In a hypothetical matchup between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump leads by four percentage points. But if Mr. Trump is convicted, there is a five-point swing, putting Mr. Biden ahead, 47 percent to 46 percent.In another new poll by Yahoo News-YouGov, the swing is seven points. In a December New York Times-Siena College poll, almost a third of Republican primary voters believe that Mr. Trump shouldn’t be the party’s nominee if he is convicted even after winning the primary.The damage to Mr. Trump is even more pronounced when we look at an important subgroup: swing-state voters. In recent CNN polls from Michigan and Georgia, Mr. Trump holds solid leads. The polls don’t report head-to-head numbers if Mr. Trump is convicted, but if he is, 46 percent of voters in Michigan and 47 percent in Georgia agree that he should be disqualified from the presidency.It makes sense that the effect is likely greater in swing states: Those are often places where a greater number of conflicted — and therefore persuadable — voters reside. An October Times/Siena poll shows that voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania favored Mr. Trump, with President Biden narrowly winning Wisconsin. But if Mr. Trump is convicted and sentenced, Mr. Biden would win each of these states, according to the poll. In fact, the poll found the race in these six states would seismically shift in the aggregate: a 14-point swing, with Mr. Biden winning by 10 rather than losing by four percentage points.The same poll also provides insights into the effect a Trump conviction would have on independent and young voters, which are both pivotal demographics. Independents now go for Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 44 percent. However, if he is convicted, 53 percent of them choose Mr. Biden, and only 32 percent Mr. Trump.The movement for voters aged 18 to 29 was even greater. Mr. Biden holds a slight edge, 47 percent to 46 percent, in the poll. But after a potential conviction, Mr. Biden holds a commanding lead, 63 percent to 31 percent.Other swing-state polls have matched these findings. In a recent survey in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for example, 64 percent said that they would not vote for a candidate whom a jury has convicted of a felony.National polls also offer accounts of potential unease. In a Yahoo News poll from July, 62 percent of respondents say that if Mr. Trump is convicted, he should not serve as president again. A December Reuters-Ipsos national poll produced similar results, with 59 percent of voters overall and 31 percent of Republicans saying that they would not vote for him if he were convicted.New data from our work with the Research Collaborative confirm the repercussions of a possible conviction on voters. These questions did not ask directly how a conviction would affect people’s votes, but they still support movement in the same direction. This survey, conducted in August and repeated in September (and then repeated a second time in September by different pollsters), asked how voters felt about prison time in the event that Mr. Trump is convicted. At least two-thirds (including half of Republicans) favored significant prison time for Mr. Trump.Why do the polls register a sharp decline for Mr. Trump if he is convicted? Our analysis — including focus groups we have conducted and viewed — shows that Americans care about our freedoms, especially the freedom to cast our votes, have them counted and ensure that the will of the voters prevails. They are leery of entrusting the Oval Office to someone who abused his power by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to deny or take away those freedoms.We first saw this connection emerge in our testing about the Jan. 6 hearings; criminality moves voters significantly against Mr. Trump and MAGA Republicans.But voters also understand that crime must be proven. They recognize that in our legal system there is a difference between allegations and proof and between an individual who is merely accused and one who is found guilty by a jury of his peers. Because so many Americans are familiar with and have served in the jury system, it still holds sway as a system with integrity.Moreover, recent electoral history suggests that merely having Mr. Trump on trial will alter how voters see the importance of voting in the first place. In the wake of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the 2022 midterms saw turnout at record levels in states where at least one high-profile MAGA Republican was running.The criminal cases are also unfolding within a wider context of other legal challenges against Mr. Trump, and they may amplify the effect. That includes several state cases that seek to disqualify him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Colorado’s top court has already ruled that he is disqualified, though the case is now likely being appealed to the Supreme Court. This constellation of developments — also encompassing the New York civil fraud trial — offer a negative lens through which Americans may view Mr. Trump.Again, this is all hypothetical, but the polls give us sufficient data to conclude that felony criminal convictions, especially for attacking democracy, will foreground the threat that Mr. Trump poses to our nation and influence voters in an election-defining way.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump. Celinda Lake is a Democratic Party strategist and was a lead pollster for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Anat Shenker-Osorio is a political researcher, campaign adviser and host of the “Words to Win By” podcast.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Trump pressured Michigan election officers not to certify 2020 vote – report

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      Donald Trump made a phone call in November 2020 in which he put pressure on two Republican election officers in Michigan not to sign the official document from the state confirming that Joe Biden had won the presidential election there, according to an exclusive report by The Detroit News late on Thursday.The Detroit News outlet has obtained recordings of the call, made on 17 November 2020, where Trump, who was refusing to accept that he had just lost the White House to Joe Biden, and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel talked to Wayne county election officials Monica Palmer and William Hartmann and told them they would look “terrible” if they signed to endorse Trump’s defeat in the crucial swing state, according to the report.Palmer and Harmann were members of the Wayne county board of canvassers, one of the state’s official county teams – each with two Democrats and two Republicans – appointed by state election commissioners for duties such as inspecting ballots and certifying elections for all local, countywide and district offices.Trump told them on the phone call obtained and reported by the Detroit News that: “We’ve got to fight for our country. We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”McDaniel is from Michigan and was also reportedly on the call and told the two board members: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it,” adding “We will get you attorneys.”Trump then added: “We’ll take care of that.”The newspaper further reported that representatives of Palmer, McDaniel and Trump, contacted by the reporter in question through spokespeople, did not dispute a summary of the call that was shared with them. The News said Hartmann died in 2021.On Thursday Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung issued a statement saying that Trump’s call was “taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election”.The call and then Palmer and Harmann’s refusal to add their signatures to Wayne county’s official certification of Biden’s victory at the ballot box was apparently designed to sow doubt about the accuracy of the result.Palmer and Hartmann’s refusal to sign the certification and a failed attempt to withdraw their votes from the day before in which they confirmed Biden’s victory in the county did not impede Biden’s win in Michigan. That was a crucial piece of his 2020 victory on behalf of the Democratic party, with he and now-US vice president Kamala Harris beating Republicans Trump and his Vice-President Mike Pence’s bid for re-election.The report of the phone call has strong echoes of the call Trump made on 2 January 2021, in which he pressed the secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state, too. News of the phone call emerged almost immediately.The pressure on Raffensperger is part of the criminal case against Trump and multiple co-defendants in Georgia, accusing them in a racketeering case of an election interference conspiracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Wayne county tapes in Michigan are understood not to be part at this time of the federal election interference case against Trump brought by special counsel Jack Smith on behalf of the US Department of Justice.Michigan officials are still investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the state in 2020. The primary season for the 2024 presidential election begins in January and Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination as he seeks re-election despite facing dozens of indictments in four criminal cases – two federal cases, in which the US supreme court has now become involved, as well as one in New York and the one in Georgia.Jonathan Kinloch, a Wayne county board of canvassers member, but one of the two Democrats, told the Detroit News that the phone call from Trump and McDaniel that the outlet just reported was “insane”.“It’s just shocking that the president of the United States was at the most minute level trying to stop the election process from happening,” Kinlock told the News. More

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      Kenneth Chesebro Is a Key Witness as ‘Fake Electors’ Face Charges

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      Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to deploy people claiming to be Trump electors in states won by President Biden, is cooperating with inquiries in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.Twenty-four of the so-called fake Trump electors now face criminal charges in three different states, and one of the legal architects of the plan to deploy them, Kenneth Chesebro, has emerged as a witness in all of the cases.Mr. Chesebro, a Harvard-trained lawyer, helped develop the plan to have Republicans in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 present themselves as Trump electors. The scheme was part of an effort to have Congress block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021.Earlier this week, a Nevada grand jury indicted six former Trump electors, including top leaders of the state’s Republican Party, on charges of forging and submitting fraudulent documents.In August, a grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 allies, including three who were fake electors in Georgia. And in July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought charges against all 16 Republicans who acted as Trump electors in her state. (In October, she dropped charges against one of them, James Renner, in exchange for his cooperation.)Interest in Mr. Chesebro intensified after he pleaded guilty in October to a single felony charge of conspiracy in Georgia and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He had originally been charged with seven felonies, including one charge under the state racketeering law.“Everything happened after the plea in Georgia,” said Manny Arora, one of Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers in Georgia. “Everyone wants to talk about the memos and who he communicated with.”The lawyer was referring to memos written by Mr. Chesebro after the 2020 election that outlined what he himself called “a bold, controversial strategy” that was likely to be rejected by the Supreme Court. Since his plea agreement in Georgia, Mr. Arora said, Mr. Chesebro was interviewed in Detroit by Ms. Nessel’s office, and he was also listed as a witness this week in the Nevada indictment.Asked if Mr. Chesebro had agreements in place to avoid prosecution in the various jurisdictions, another one of his lawyers, Robert Langford, said “that would be a prudent criminal defense, that’s typically what you do,” adding that he did not “want to comment on anything happening in any of the states.”Mr. Chesebro is also expected in Arizona next week, where the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has been conducting her own inquiry into the electors plot for several months, people with knowledge of that inquiry said. (Mr. Chesebro’s Michigan and Arizona appearances were reported earlier by CNN and The Washington Post.)Mr. Chesebro worked for Vice President Al Gore during the presidential election recount battle of 2000 but later came to back Mr. Trump. He and another lawyer, John Eastman, are seen as the key legal architects of the plan to use bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump, a development that left some of his old colleagues scratching their heads.“When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him,” Lawrence Tribe, who was Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel and a Chesebro mentor, recently said.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers continue to generally defend his conduct, saying he was simply an attorney offering legal advice during the 2020 election. But Mr. Arora said that the legal team in Georgia decided to take a plea agreement because the document that was signed by the fake electors in Georgia did not include language explaining that what they were signing was a contingency plan, pending litigation.“They didn’t do that in Georgia,” he explained. “Because he was involved in it and that language wasn’t in there, we decided to plead to that count. It wasn’t because the whole thing was fraudulent or that this was a scam.”The three state electors investigations have taken very different approaches.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a broad racketeering case that includes Mr. Trump and top aides like Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff. Ms. Willis reached cooperation agreements with most of the fake electors before charges were brought.The Michigan and Nevada cases center on the electors themselves, rather than those who aided their actions, though Ms. Nessel has said that her inquiry remains open.Underlying claims of widespread election fraud that propelled the alleged fake electors scheme have never been substantiated. New legal filings this week from Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Justice Department who has charged Mr. Trump in his own federal election inquiry, underscore the illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s chronic claims of election fraud, highlighting that as far back as 2012 he was making baseless contentions about President Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.Mr. Trump made similar statements after his 2016 loss in the Iowa caucus, when he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” and after he lost the popular vote in the general election to Hillary Clinton, which he said he won “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” More

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      Muslim leaders in swing states pledge to ‘abandon’ Biden over his refusal to call for ceasefire

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      Muslim community leaders gathered on Saturday in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US, to protest President Biden’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, reiterating that the president’s stance could affect his support in crucial swing states next year.Jaylani Hussein, director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Biden’s unwillingness to call for a ceasefire had damaged his relationship with the American-Muslim community beyond repair. (Cair-Minnesota is not involved in his work on the Abandon Biden effort, which the organization said Hussein is doing in his personal capacity.)“We are not powerless as American Muslims. We are powerful. We don’t only have the money, but we have the actual votes. And we will use that vote to save this nation from itself,” Hussein said. “Families and children are being wiped out with our tax dollars,” he added. “What we are witnessing today is the tragedy upon tragedy.”After Israel resumed its bombing offensive on the territory after a five-day pause, the health ministry said 15,200 Palestinians, roughly two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed thus far. Israel’s air and ground strikes began after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 240 hostage in a cross-border attack on 7 October.From behind a lectern that read “Abandon Biden, ceasefire now”, leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania issued similar warnings that the president could not afford to lose the support of the Arab-American community in states critical to his chances for re-election.A recent poll showed Biden’s support among Arab Americans has plunged from a comfortable majority in 2020 to 17%.Dearborn is home to the highest concentration of Arab Americans in a state that has the highest number, 211,405 , and the highest percentage of Arab Americans, at 2.1%. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by 2.8% of the vote. Arab Americans account for 5% of the vote, according to the Arab American Institute.In Wisconsin, where there are 25,000 Muslim voters, Biden won by about 20,000 votes, Tarek Amin, a doctor representing the state’s Muslim community, said.In Arizona, where Biden won by around 10,500 votes, there are over 25,000 Muslim voters according to the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California San Diego, said Phoenix pharmacist Hazim Nasaredden.About 3.45 million Americans identify as Muslim, or 1.1% of the country’s population, and the demographic tends to lean Democratic, according to Pew Research Center. Like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are also home to significant Arab-American populations and critical to Biden’s re-election mathematics.The #AbandonBiden campaign began in Minnesota in October and has since spread to at least five other states represented at the conference.“The anger in our community is beyond belief,” Hussein, who is Muslim, told the Associated Press. “One of the things that made us even more angry is the fact that most of us actually voted for President Biden. I even had one incident where a religious leader asked me: ‘How do I get my 2020 ballot so I can destroy it?’”While the Biden administration has resisted pressure to call for a permanent halt in fighting, and continues significant weapons transfers to Israel, senior officials are going further in expressing their discomfort with the high level of civilian casualties.The Wall Street Journal reported that the US has provided Israel with 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker busters included in a transfer package of around 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells since 7 October.On Saturday, US vice-president Kamala Harris said that while the US supports Israel’s “legitimate military objectives” in Gaza, the suffering of the civilian population inside the enclave has been too high.“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating,” Harris said at a press conference in Dubai. “It is truly heartbreaking.”At a meeting with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Harris also said that Washington will not allow for the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the current border of the Gaza Strip.“Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza,” Harris said, according to a read-out of the meeting.Against a backdrop of pro-Palestinian protest in the US, Muslim leaders gathered in Dearborn said Biden or likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump were not their only choices next year, and they could choose to sit out the election.“We don’t have two options. We have many options. And we’re going to exercise that,” Cair’s Hussein said. More