Presidential Election of 1960

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares129 Views

    What Fani Willis Got Wrong in Her Trump Indictment

    by

    By assembling a sprawling, 19-defendant RICO indictment with 41 counts, District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County has brought the sort of charging instrument that has typically led to monthslong trials, complicated appeals and exhaustion for the participating attorneys. Now, as some co-defendants seek federal removal while others demand speedy trials in state court, we are starting to see the costs of complexity.In federal and state cases, Donald Trump’s legal game plan has always been the same: delay often and everywhere with the goal of winning the 2024 election and hoping the charges go away. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference indictment — just four counts brought solely against Mr. Trump — makes that difficult. On Monday, the judge set the trial for March 4, 2024.By contrast, the Georgia indictment is a sprawling account of a conspiracy among the former president, his closest advisers and state and local Republican officials to change the outcome of the 2020 Georgia election through an escalating series of falsehoods. For many, it is a satisfying political document. But as a legal instrument, its ambitious scope will provide the co-defendants with many opportunities for delay, appeals, and constitutional challenges.And even though Fulton might very will win in the end, a simpler, more direct approach would likely lead to a better result, faster, here’s why.Much of the Georgia indictment is about how Mr. Trump and others tried to get public officials to do implausible things to hand him the election — things like asking state senators to appoint an alternate slate of electors, calling a special session of the General Assembly or asking the secretary of state to “find” the votes Mr. Trump needed to win.The state chose to charge this conduct in two ways. One of them is strong and simple: Team Trump lied to elected officials and tried to forge documents.The other — that they were aware of the officials’ oaths of office and were hoping specifically to get them to violate it — is unusual and hard to prove.Solicitation requires you to ask someone else to commit a felony intentionally. In this case, the oath of office the defendants were being asked to violate was a promise to follow the Constitution and do what’s best for their constituents. It is indeed a crime in Georgia for a public officer to “willfully and intentionally” violate the terms of his oath.Here’s the problem: It’s hard enough to prove that Mr. Trump’s request violates the Constitution, since the Constitution allows states to figure out how to select electors. But then the state must also prove that Mr. Trump knew this would violate the electors’ oath of office.It seems possible that Mr. Trump had no idea what these officials’ oath of office was, maybe even no idea that they swore an oath at all. Under Georgia’s “mistake of fact” affirmative defense, if Mr. Trump has some evidence that he was operating under a “misapprehension of fact” that would justify his actions, the state must disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt.There are a few reasons this could be a strong defense. First, Mr. Trump surrounded himself with individuals who told him what he was doing was legal. Georgia does not normally have an “advice of counsel” defense, but in this context it seems relevant that people he apparently trusted were not telling him this would violate any oath of office.And to put it gently, Mr. Trump is plausibly ignorant on a variety of subjects, ranging from how hurricanes are formed to whether it’s a good idea to use or inject disinfectants as a possible Covid cure. Even if prosecutors can meet the burden of showing that what he requested was unconstitutional — not necessarily an easy thing to establish with a jury of non-lawyers — it may be difficult to prove that Donald Trump knew, or cared, what the Constitution had to say on the subject.Then there’s the Hawaii precedent. Mr. Trump’s advisers were relying on an incident from the 1960 presidential election, when Richard Nixon looked as though he had won the state of Hawaii by a few dozen votes. But the results were so uncertain that three Democrats submitted their Electoral College votes just in case, and when, after a recount, it looked like John F. Kennedy was the actual winner, the Senate (headed by Nixon) unanimously agreed to the alternate slate.Even though no court ever blessed this procedure, or even held that it wasn’t criminal, Mr. Trump’s team could argue with a straight face that they believed their request was legally possible.There’s also the possibility of a First Amendment defense. Typically, people are allowed to petition the government to do things, even unconstitutional things. That a court might, down the line, find those things to be unconstitutional seems like a dangerous basis to criminalize that petitioning.I’d understand bringing these charges to get at some obviously bad and immoral conduct by the president if there were nothing else available. But there are other, much stronger charges in the same indictment without the same constitutional concerns. Take the false statement counts: The very best case that Mr. Trump and his team could cite is United States v. Alvarez, where the Supreme Court held that there is a First Amendment right to lie about having received the Medal of Honor. But the Supreme Court also specifically said that this protection vanishes when lying for material gain, or to the government.Rudy Giuliani told state legislators that election workers were passing around flash drives like “vials of heroin” and that thousands of dead and felonious voters participated, but he can’t claim those statements have constitutional protection. All Mr. Giuliani can do is show the court what evidence supported those statements. There is none. And what’s more, Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil filing that his claims against two Fulton County election workers had been false. Despite claiming that it was for “this litigation only,” that’s an admission.Similarly, the forgery charges simply need to establish a conspiracy to create fake elector votes that could potentially be counted on Jan. 6. It’s irrelevant whether the parties thought it was legal to do this, so long as they knew they were not, in fact, the duly appointed electors.So it is an odd legal choice to drag a jury through weak, disputed counts in a monthslong trial when you could just focus on the counts that are hard to challenge and easy to explain, saving weeks in the process. The RICO count will already require dozens of witnesses and some complicated instructions, so tossing in these oath of office charges seems like a recipe for confusion and delay.And it’s not just the charges that complicate things, but the sheer number of defendants. A judge granted one co-defendant, Ken Chesebro, a speedy trial, which will require Fulton County to bring this case to trial by Nov. 3 or acquit him as a matter of law. (Sidney Powell has also requested a speedy trial.)Ms. Willis reacted by requesting an October date for the entire case, but at least for the moment, a judge has declined her request. This puts the prosecutors in a bind. Mr. Chesebro’s trial would give Mr. Trump a useful preview of the entire case, from voir dire to closing arguments, which could weaken the effectiveness of Ms. Willis’s prosecution of Mr. Trump and the other defendants. It would allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dig into witness testimony and perhaps encourage Georgia Republicans to step in.Additionally, it might be very difficult for Fulton County to actually grant these parties the speedy trial they’ve requested. There is some Georgia authority to suggest that a trial does not “begin” under the statutory speedy trial act until a jury is empaneled and sworn. What happens if Fulton County needs a month, or two months, to actually select the jury that will be sworn?And for all the talk of potentially flipping co-defendants, many of the people in this case don’t have all that much criminal exposure. With no mandatory minimums for prison time and no criminal history, many of the participants could reasonably expect probation, and maybe even a first-offender sentence that would not count as a felony. A simpler case, with fewer co-defendants, would go more swiftly, with less legal uncertainty.As a general, George Washington was known for unworkable battle plans. Where an ordinary commander might send all his troops to one location at one time, Washington would split them into three columns, expecting them to arrive all at one spot with precision timing. It rarely worked out. Despite those mistakes, he’s now best known for winning.For all the potential problems with this indictment, I would still expect Ms. Willis to secure a conviction against Mr. Trump on one or more counts if this case goes to trial as it intends.But there are a dozen ways that things can go sideways, and it is very possible that history will remember the two years that Fulton County took to bring these charges as a wasted opportunity to make a simpler case.Andrew Fleischman is an attorney at Sessions & Fleischman in Atlanta.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    More stories

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      On the Docket: Atlanta v. Trumpworld

      by

      ATLANTA — The criminal investigation into efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss in Georgia has begun to entangle, in one way or another, an expanding assemblage of characters:A United States senator. A congressman. A local Cadillac dealer. A high school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers aiding Mr. Trump, including a former New York City mayor. The former president himself. And a woman who has identified herself as a publicist for the rapper Kanye West.Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta area district attorney, has been leading the investigation since early last year. But it is only this month, with a flurry of subpoenas and target letters, as well as court documents that illuminate some of the closed proceedings of a special grand jury, that the inquiry’s sprawling contours have emerged.For legal experts, that sprawl is a sign that Ms. Willis is doing what she has indicated all along: building the framework for a broad case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud, or racketeering-related charges for engaging in a coordinated scheme to undermine the election.“All of these people are from very disparate places in life,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said of the known witnesses and targets. “The fact that they’re all being brought together really suggests she’s building this broader case for conspiracy.”What happened in Georgia was not altogether singular. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has put on display how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to subvert the election results in several crucial states, including by creating slates of fake pro-Trump electors. Yet even as many Democrats lament that the Justice Department is moving too slowly in its inquiry, the local Georgia prosecutor has been pursuing a quickening case that could pose the most immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.Whether Mr. Trump will ultimately be targeted for indictment remains unclear. But the David-before-Goliath dynamic may in part reflect that Ms. Willis’s legal decision-making is less encumbered than that of federal officials in Washington by the vast political and societal weight of prosecuting a former president, especially in a bitterly fissured country.But some key differences in Georgia law may also make the path to prosecution easier than in federal courts. And there was the signal event that drew attention to Mr. Trump’s conduct in Georgia: his call to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, whose office, in Ms. Willis’s Fulton County, recorded the president imploring him to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to reverse his defeat.A House hearing this past week discussed a phone call in which President Donald J. Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” an additional 11,780 votes.Shawn Thew/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Trump’s staff did not comment, nor did his local counsel. When Ms. Willis opened the inquiry in February 2021, a Trump spokesman described it as “simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.” Lawyers for 11 of the 16 Trump electors, Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow and Holly A. Pierson, accused Ms. Willis of “misusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass and attempt to intimidate the nominee electors, not to investigate their conduct.”Last year, Ms. Willis told The New York Times that racketeering charges could be in play. Whenever people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,’” she said, before explaining that charges under Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act could apply in any number of realms where corrupt enterprises are operating. “If you have various overt acts for an illegal purpose, I think you can — you may — get there,” she said.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Did John F. Kennedy and the Democrats Steal the 1960 Election?

      by

      CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURYKennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960By Irwin F. GellmanFor Richard Nixon, the holiday season of 1960 was a sullen affair. Weeks before, on Nov. 8, he had lost an exceedingly close presidential election to Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Near the end of December, while President-elect Kennedy received national security briefings at his family’s estate in Palm Beach, Nixon hosted a cheerless Christmas party at home in Washington. “We won,” he groused to his guests, “but they stole it from us.”Nixon’s complaint — which, today, has a dismally familiar ring — is the central contention of “Campaign of the Century,” by the historian Irwin F. Gellman. For more than two decades now, Gellman has undertaken a rolling rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. In previous books, he cast a sympathetic glow on Nixon’s years in Congress and reframed Nixon’s relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he served loyally but awkwardly as vice president. In this new volume, Gellman seeks to upend our understanding of the 1960 race, not least the matter of which man won it.There is a cycle to the waging and relating of presidential elections: A campaign, typically, begins with a plan, tumbles into chaos and improvisation, and gets neatened up after the fact by participants and journalists who distill it into a few pat postulations. Much of this is mythology, and it can be hard to root out. To that end, Gellman has, arguably, logged more hours and examined more documents in the Nixon archives than any other historian to date. That doggedness, he says, has yielded new information and insights into the events of 1960. There is much ballyhooing in this book of its author’s willingness to follow facts wherever they lead. “It is long past time,” Gellman proclaims, “to tell the story without a partisan thumb on the scale.”This is a wide-ranging dig. It is directed, first, at Theodore H. White. Gellman regards White’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative, “The Making of the President 1960,” as the original sin, visited upon succeeding generations. Sixty-one years after its publication, White’s siren song of “a heroic senator defeating an unscrupulous partisan” has lost none of its seductive power, Gellman believes; esteemed historians remain in its thrall and in Kennedy’s camp. Taylor Branch, Robert Dallek, David Greenberg, Jill Lepore, Fredrik Logevall — apologists and idolaters all, in the author’s view. He calls each one out by name, accusing some of carelessness and others of “distorting or falsifying facts” — a serious charge that is in no way substantiated.What is surprising about this buildup — this raising of stakes and throwing down of gauntlets — is that “Campaign of the Century” is largely a conventional, Nixon-friendly take on the race. Books of this kind are fewer, to be sure, than books by Kennedy partisans, but Gellman’s is hardly alone on the shelf. Nixon has always had his defenders (including, not least, Nixon himself) and Kennedy his detractors. White, for that matter, has been picked apart for decades by scholars of all stripes. When Gellman writes that Kennedy’s operation was “far more corrupt and ruthless than has been presented” and Nixon’s “far cleaner,” this is less a revelation than a familiar brand of spin.Indeed, Gellman’s thumb is firmly on the scales — or in Kennedy’s eye. From the book’s first pages, Kennedy is cynical and callow, the unscrupulous son of an unscrupulous father. Gellman is at pains to establish that Kennedy was not a family man but a philanderer, that he was not in fine health but was hobbled by Addison’s disease and back problems, and that the news media — besotted by “Kennedy’s youth, his smile,” his winsome wife and child — eagerly overlooked it all. Of course, Kennedy’s infidelities and health issues have long been common knowledge, as have the mores of the midcentury press; even favorable biographies take them into account. Gellman adds nothing here but fresh outrage. In both tone and content, his caricature of Kennedy is an echo of hit jobs like Victor Lasky’s “John F. Kennedy: What’s Behind the Image?,” which was stapled together on the eve of the election and distributed by the Republican Party.Nixon, by contrast, “had no sexual adventures and no long-term health issues.” And while he was, Gellman concedes, capable of an occasionally vicious attack, he is rendered here as a victim — mainly of a hate-filled press corps that portrayed him unrelentingly “in the worst possible light.” There is some truth to this picture: Nixon did provoke (and return) a particular sort of loathing among liberal reporters, even when he was on his best behavior — as he generally was in 1960, a year when he forswore the low road in the pursuit of high office. Unfairness, yes, but the book fails to show that it made a difference in November. In fact the bias, as Gellman notes in passing, ran in both directions: Nixon was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of daily newspapers — among them, the Hearst and Scripps Howard chains — and the publishing empire of Henry Luce.As a political narrative, “Campaign of the Century” is strangely lacking in both politics and narrative. It dutifully records the clashes of candidates but offers little context for their disagreements. The book fails to explain, for example, where the distinction lay between Nixon’s anti-Communism and Kennedy’s, or between their platforms on civil rights. There is, moreover, no analysis of Nixon’s position in the widening breach between Nelson Rockefeller, on the left of the Republican Party, and Barry Goldwater on the right. Gellman places his man in the middle, but gives no sense of whether this moderation was ideological or tactical. All is left a muddle while the author sprints off in pursuit of historians who have overhyped Kennedy’s performance in the televised debates.But the white whale here is proof of a stolen election. This book does not provide it. The case it puts forward is circumstantial — and nothing new. Much is made of “suspicions” in Texas and “irregularities” in Illinois as if such charges are, in themselves, dispositive. In the wake of 2020, we should know better than that. And so should a political historian of the mid-20th century: If fraud was a feature of elections in that era, so were accusations of fraud, wielded as a political cudgel. In 1948, for example, a top Republican official charged three Democratic candidates for Senate with “serious” campaign fraud — more than a week before Election Day. Four years later, pre-emptively again, the Republican National Committee chairman called on federal prosecutors to keep tabs on big-city Democrats — who, he said, would “stop at nothing” to “steal” the election.None of this is to deny that Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago had a history of ballot manipulation or that votes were likely stolen in Texas. But in recent decades, rigorous studies have underscored what judges and review boards concluded in 1960: To the extent that fraud occurred, it was not enough to change the result — least of all in Texas, where Kennedy’s margin exceeded 46,000 votes. The weakness of the case did not stop Nixon’s men from pushing their allegations. But six decades hence — in the absence of new evidence, at a time when false claims of a stolen election pose a mounting threat to our system of self-government — historians ought to think twice before endorsing them. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      How Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics Forever

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics ForeverMartin Luther King Jr. under arrest, Oct. 19, 1960.Credit…Associated PressAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNINE DAYSThe Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 ElectionBy Stephen Kendrick and Paul KendrickThe African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights is replete with dramatic and harrowing stories, many involving intimidation and threats of violence from white supremacist defenders of the status quo. One of the most consequential of these stories is the subject of “Nine Days,” a compelling narrative written by the father-and-son team of Stephen and Paul Kendrick, co-authors of two previous books on race, law and politics.The story begins in mid-October 1960 with Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration (his first) in a Georgia jail cell and ends three weeks later with John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard M. Nixon in the most competitive presidential election of the 20th century. Kennedy’s razor-thin triumph depended on several factors ranging from his youthful charm to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ability to pad the Democratic vote in Chicago. But, as the Kendricks ably demonstrate, one crucial factor in Kennedy’s electoral success was the late surge of Black voters into the Democratic column. In all likelihood, this surge represented the difference between victory and defeat in at least five swing states, including Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, ensuring Kennedy’s comfortable margin (303 to 219) in the Electoral College.This last-minute shift was precipitated by two impulsive phone calls: one from John Kennedy to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern for her jailed husband’s safety; the second from the candidate’s younger brother Robert to Oscar Mitchell, the Georgia judge overseeing King’s incarceration. Arrested on two minor charges — participating in a student-led sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta and driving with an Alabama license after changing his residency to Georgia — King was thought to be in grave danger after a manacled, late-night transfer from an Atlanta jail to a remote rural facility in Klan-infested DeKalb County, and soon thereafter to the state’s notorious maximum-security prison in Reidsville.Coretta King, panic-stricken that her husband might be murdered or even lynched, contacted Harris Wofford, a friend and longtime civil rights advocate working on Kennedy’s campaign. Along with Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and the Black journalist Louis Martin, Wofford was part of a campaign initiative charged with expanding the Black vote for Kennedy by offsetting the senator’s mediocre record on civil rights — somehow without alienating the white South.On Oct. 26, after consulting with Wofford, Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call Mrs. King. The conversation was brief, but the message was powerful: “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.” When Bobby, Jack’s campaign manager, learned what had happened, he was furious, fearing this was a liberal stunt that would destroy his brother’s chance of winning the South. But after cooling down and realizing that the die was cast, he called Judge Mitchell to plead for King’s release on bail.Mitchell agreed, King was soon released and on the last Sunday before the election, the Kennedy campaign blanketed the nation’s Black churches with a flier later known as the Blue Bomb. The choice was clear, the bright blue flier insisted: “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” With Black ministers leading the way, Kennedy won an estimated 68 percent of the Black vote on Election Day, 7 percent higher than Adlai Stevenson’s showing in 1956.No brief review can do full justice to the Kendricks’ masterly and often riveting account of King’s ordeal and the 1960 “October Surprise” that may have altered the course of modern American political history. Suffice it to say that any reader who navigates the many twists and turns and surprises in this complex tale will come away recognizing the power of historical contingency.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More