Presidential Election of 2020

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Judge Pauses Trump Election Case Amid Appeal of Immunity Issue

      by

      The decision by the judge to freeze the case came as the former president’s lawyers asked an appeals court to move slowly in considering his claims that he is immune from prosecution.A federal judge on Wednesday put on hold all of the proceedings in former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election as his lawyers asked an appeals court to move slowly in considering his claim that he is immune from prosecution in the case.The separate but related moves were part of an ongoing struggle between Mr. Trump’s legal team and prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, over the critical question of when the trial will actually be held. It is now scheduled to begin in Washington in March.On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked the federal appeals court to avoid setting an expedited schedule as it considered whether to dismiss the election subversion charges based on the former president’s sweeping claims of executive immunity.In a 16-page filing that blended legal and political arguments, the lawyers asked a three-judge panel of the court not to move too quickly in mulling the question of immunity, saying that a “reckless rush to judgment” would “irreparably undermine public confidence in the judicial system.”“The manifest public interest lies in the court’s careful and deliberate consideration of these momentous issues with the utmost care and diligence,” wrote D. John Sauer, a lawyer who is handling the appeal for Mr. Trump.On Wednesday afternoon, the trial judge overseeing the election case, Tanya S. Chutkan, handed Mr. Trump a victory by suspending all “further proceedings that would move this case towards trial” until the appeal of the immunity issue is resolved.Mr. Trump’s lawyers had requested the pause when they first decided to challenge Judge Chutkan’s rejection of the former president’s immunity claim. Mr. Trump had argued in his initial motion to dismiss the case that he was “absolutely immune” to the election interference charges because they were based on actions he took while he was in office.The former president’s filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came two days after prosecutors working for Mr. Smith asked the same judges to fast-track the appeal. The prosecutors argued that keeping the underlying case moving forward would vindicate the public’s interest in a speedy trial.Mr. Smith has also filed a parallel request to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to consider the immunity issue even before the appeals court does and to issue their decision quickly. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have until Dec. 20 to respond to that request.In another move on Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a separate case with a bearing on Mr. Trump’s prosecution. The court said it would consider whether the former president and hundreds of people who have been prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol can be charged in those cases under a federal law that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct or impede an official proceeding.Winning the appeal of the immunity issue has been only one of Mr. Trump’s goals. All along, he and his lawyers have had an alternate strategy: to delay the trial on election interference charges for as long as possible.If Mr. Trump is able to postpone the trial until after next year’s election and ultimately wins the race, he will have the power to simply order the charges to be dropped. Holding a trial after the race would also mean that voters would not have had a chance to hear any of the evidence that prosecutors collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the previous election.Mr. Smith’s team has never explicitly suggested that they are worried that if Mr. Trump is re-elected he will use his political victory as a means to quash his legal problems. Instead, they have framed their concerns about the scheduling of the case in a different way, saying they are seeking to protect the enormous public interest in seeing the case resolved in a timely fashion.Mr. Sauer rejected that position in his filing to the appeals court, accusing Mr. Smith of using the case to damage Mr. Trump’s candidacy.“The date of March 4, 2024, has no talismanic significance,” he wrote. “Aside from the prosecution’s unlawful partisan motives, there is no compelling reason that date must be maintained.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers have long complained that the trial is itself a form of election interference. They say that the scheduled start date of March 4 is just one day before Super Tuesday, the most important date in the primary election season.Mr. Trump’s legal team has used its immunity appeal to launch political attacks against Mr. Smith and the Biden administration and cast the indictment as a partisan effort to derail Mr. Trump’s third bid for the White House.“The prosecution has one goal in this case: to unlawfully attempt to try, convict and sentence President Trump before an election in which he is likely to defeat President Biden,” Mr. Sauer wrote. In his appellate papers, Mr. Sauer also complained that the sped-up schedule Mr. Smith has asked for would require Mr. Trump’s legal team to “work round-the-clock through the holidays.” “It is as if the special counsel growled, with his Grinch fingers nervously drumming, ‘I must find some way to keep Christmas from coming,’” Mr. Sauer wrote, quoting the famous Dr. Seuss book.In a sign of how just how fast they would like to move, prosecutors responded to Mr. Sauer’s filing within a matter of hours.“The public’s need for a speedy resolution of these important legal issues,” they wrote, “take precedence over personal scheduling issues.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump ‘Could Tip an Already Fragile World Order Into Chaos’

      by

      Two weeks ago, The Washington Post published “A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable. We Should Stop Pretending,” by Robert Kagan.Four days later, The Times published “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, one in an ongoing series of articles.On the same day, The Atlantic released the online version of its January/February 2024 issue; it included 24 essays under the headline “If Trump Wins.”While the domestic danger posed by a second Trump administration is immediate and pressing, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — sometimes referred to as the “alliance of autocracies” — have an interest in weakening the global influence of the United States and in fracturing its ties to democracies around the globe.“Clearly, this coalition threatens global security and deterrence and requires policies suited to the assaults Russia and China regularly conduct,” Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote in a recent column published in The Hill, “The ‘No Limits’ Russo-Chinese Alliance Is Taking Flight.”In a 2020 essay, Michael O’Hanlon, the director of foreign policy research at Brookings, pointed out that “many Americans” question whethera global economy and alliances around the world are good for them. As the election of Donald Trump had proved in 2016, numerous voters are willing to rethink our place in the world. If we do not listen to that message, the entire domestic basis for a strong United States and an engaged foreign policy leadership role could evaporate.This conversation, “more than any other,” O’Hanlon wrote, “is the debate we need to have as a country.”If Donald Trump is re-elected, how will the former president — who has openly praised dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who has questioned the value of NATO and who has denigrated key allies — deal with the “the 4 plus 1 threat matrix — the five main threats of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and transnational violent extremism or terrorism”?To gauge the range of possible developments in a second Trump administration, I asked specialists in international affairs a series of questions. On the basic question — how damaging to American foreign policy interests would a second Trump administration be? — the responses ranged from very damaging to marginally so.Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, is quite worried.Asked if Trump would withdraw from NATO — a major blow to European allies and a huge boost for Vladimir Putin — Stelzenmüller replied by email:Very likely. We know that from [former ambassador to the United Nations, John] Bolton’s book and from recent reporting out of Trump’s inner circle. Sumantra Maitra’s dormant NATO article, much read at NATO, suggests a suspension or withdrawal-lite option — but even that would fatally undercut the credibility of Article V.(Article V of the NATO agreement asserts that “the parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them.”)Sumantra Maitra is a visiting senior fellow at Citizens for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank. His essay calls for retrenchment of America’s financial and logistical support of NATO, just short of withdrawal:A much more prudent strategy is to force a Europe defended by Europeans with only American naval presence and as a logistics provider of last resort with the U.S. reoriented toward Asia. West Europe will not be serious about the continent’s defense as long as Uncle Sam is there to break the glass during a fire.Stelzenmüller wrote that she sees little or no chance that a Trump administration would join an alliance of Russia, China, North Korea and other dictatorships, “but would Trump see himself as a friend of the authoritarians? Absolutely.” Under Trump, “the spectrum would clearly shift to a much more transactionalist, pro-authoritarian or even predatory mode. That alone could tip an already fragile world order into chaos.”Sarah Kreps, a political scientist at Cornell, suggested that “if past is prologue, we could expect Trump to harp on the issue of free riding but not actually do anything different. He’ll probably do a lot of heckling that’s unmatched by actual policy change.”In this context, Kreps continued, “it will be left to the career diplomats to do the heavy lifting behind the scenes to provide the alliance glue while Trump is hammering the capitals about burden sharing.”How about NATO?“The alliance has such deep roots now and has ebbed and flowed in terms of its strength, but the structural factors present right now will be more powerful than any individual president.”I asked Kreps whether it was conceivable that Trump could join a Russia-China-North Korea coalition.“Again, past being prologue here, we have good reason to think that he talks friendly to autocrats, but won’t act.”How would Trump change the role of the United States in foreign affairs?“I would expect to see more of what we saw in the last administration: a lot of bluster, a lot of braggadocious declarations about how countries are taking the United States seriously now, but not a lot of change.”Kreps was the least alarmed of those I contacted concerning a second Trump administration.Philipp Ivanov, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, staked out a middle — but hardly comforting — ground. In an email, he wrote that because of their conflicting interests, “it’s highly unlikely China, Russia, North Korea and Iran will ever form an alliance.”Instead, he described their ties as “a network of highly transactional bilateral relationships — a marriage of convenience — that lacks basic trust, let alone the kind of common strategic vision and military interconnectedness that characterize the U.S. alliances.”Their only commonality, Ivanov argued,is an autocratic or dictatorial governance and a shared objective to disrupt and undermine U.S. power. All four actors realize that individually or together they cannot seriously challenge American hegemony or compete with its alliance system, but they can wreak havoc, threaten and weaken resolve in their respective spheres of interest.The re-election of Trump would, in Ivanov’s view,undermine the significant efforts of the Biden administration to rebuild, strengthen and reimagine American alliance system in Europe and Asia — from rallying the Europeans to support Ukraine to a comprehensive strengthening of strategic and military relations with Korea, Australia, Japan and Philippines to balance Chinese power.Ivanov believes Trump would face insurmountable obstacles if he attempted to withdraw from NATO, but thatUnder Trump, America’s international image in a democratic world is likely to suffer. The biggest risks to U.S. foreign policy are Trump’s disdain for alliances, transactional approach to foreign and security policy, overly aggressive approach to China and Iran, and a more forgiving attitude to Putin and Kim.Pyongyang, Moscow, Beijing and Tehran will cheer his re-election, but its leaders will be quietly anxious about his next moves.Jonathan M. Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, who is now a scholar at the Middle East Institute, put it this way:Trump’s election would, of course, help Russia, threaten Ukraine and threaten western alliances, starting with NATO itself. Trump has it in for Ukraine, as reflected in the fraying of Ukrainian support within the elements of the Republican congressional caucus that is closest to Trump.Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for autocrats. He also already threatened to pull out of NATO during his first term, and attacked democratic European leaders almost as often as he praised the autocratic leadership of China, North Korea, and Russia.Trump is an authoritarian nationalist. He fits right into the mold of the “autocrats,” as his teasing statement to Sean Hannity — and in a very recent Iowa town hall — that he would only behave in a dictatorial fashion on ‘day one’ of his presidency.While it is inconceivable that Trump could realign the United States with China, Russia and North Korea, Winer wrote, “what he could do is make the U.S. ‘neutral,’ just as the American First movement professed ‘neutrality’ in relation to the fascist threat prior to Pearl Harbor.”Some experts pointed out that Trump could make specific policy decisions that might not appear significant to Americans, but that have great consequence for our allies — consequences that could lead in at least one case to further nuclear proliferation.Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote to me in an email that “many in the Republic of Korea national security community are concerned about the North Korean nuclear weapon threat and whether they can really trust the United States security commitment in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, which hit the ROK much harder than I think most Americans realize.”Bennett cited the “fear that if Trump is elected president in 2024, he will talk about removing some U.S. forces from Korea. Whether or not such action actually begins, there is a risk that the Republic of Korea would react to such talk by once again starting a covert nuclear weapon development effort.”James Lindsay, senior vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, referring in an email to the perceived threat emanating from the “alliance of autocrats,” observed:If “alliance” is only intended to mean general cooperation among China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, then that is clearly happening. North Korea and Iran are supplying Russia with artillery shells and drones. Russia is supplying China with energy. China is supplying Russia with political cover at various international venues over the war in Ukraine.Lindsay argued:Trump could effectively gut NATO simply by saying he will not come to the aid of NATO allies in the event they are attacked. The power of Article V rests on the belief that alliance members, and specifically, the most powerful alliance member, will act when called upon. Destroy that belief and the organization withers. Walking away from Ukraine would damage the alliance as well even though Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Member countries would read it as a signal that Trump is abandoning Europe.One of the major risks posed by a second Trump administration, Lindsay wrote, is thatTrump’s hostility toward alliances, skepticism about the benefits of cooperation writ large, and his belief in the power of unilateral action will lead him to make foreign policy moves that will unintentionally provide strategic windfalls to China, Russia, Iran or North Korea. The scenario in which he withdraws the United States from NATO or says he will not abide by Article V is the most obvious example. His intent will be to save money and/or free the United States from foreign entanglements. But Vladimir Putin would love to see NATO on the ash heap of history.Lindsay described decisions and policies Trump may consider:It’s easy to imagine other steps Trump might take, given his past actions and current rhetoric, that would similarly give advantage to Beijing, Moscow, Tehran or Pyongyang: abandoning Ukraine; questioning the wisdom of defending Taiwan; terminating the alliance with South Korea; ignoring Iranian aggression in the Middle East; recognizing North Korea as a nuclear power; and imposing a 10 percent, across-the-board tariff on all goods.On a larger scale, it would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which a second Trump term would represent a major upheaval in the tenets underlying postwar American foreign policy.Mark Medish is a former senior director of the National Security Council for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs. He argued in an email that “Trump’s rise represented a repudiation of the so-called ‘bipartisan consensus.’ For decades during the Cold War, there was a broad agreement in the US elite and our political culture that we had a clear enemy, the U.S.S.R. and the rest of the Communist bloc.”While there was significant disagreement within this consensus, Medish wrote, “we always knew who the enemy was, whether the Soviet Union or the perpetrators of 9/11.”During the 2016 campaign and his term in office, according to Medish, Trumptook on the establishment and attacked this bipartisan consensus, pointing to failures from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. The outside world, particularly our rivals and enemies, perceived this shift as a turning point toward U.S. detachment and decline and made them eager to push the envelope — to test whether the U.S. had indeed lost its “strategic depth.”Trump’s re-election, according to Medish, “would provide further evidence — in the eyes of Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran — of U.S. disarray and the decline of the West.”Medish made the claim that “the challenge for the U.S./West is less military/economic than political. If the political and institutional center does not hold, the rest does not matter so much.”Why?Because our unmatchable power and vitality has been civilizational — the West has thrived through organic growth and it has prevailed globally by attraction, not primarily by force or threats. We are not the Roman Empire, we are the Roman Republic. Trump is a Rubicon-crosser not only on foreign policy, but also domestically. This disruption is the biggest threat to our security.Paul Poast, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, forthrightly agreed that “there is absolutely a push against the U.S.-led ‘liberal international order’ and that this push is being led by China, Russia, along with ‘junior partners’ like North Korea and Iran.”Poast, however, disagreed with many of his colleagues on the prospects for NATO under a second Trump administration.Trump had actually become a “NATO fan” by the end of his term. The key is whether NATO allies, and specifically the next Secretary General, take measures that appease Trump’s demands. In many respects, Trump would just be taking to the extreme what the U.S. has long done with NATO: push and manipulate the allies to do what is in the U.S.’s interest.I asked Robert Kagan what foreign policy might look like in a second Trump administration.“What will Trump do? Who knows?,” Kagan replied. “Who knows whether Trump himself has a foreign policy.” Trump “will certainly not have pro-liberal prejudices as most previous U.S. presidents have, at least since World War II. He will make common cause with right-wing forces in Europe, as he did in his first term.”Kagan’s conclusion?“Trump’s foreign policy will be unpredictable because we haven’t had a dictator as commander in chief. It will be uncharted territory.”During Trump’s term in office, virtually everyone — his adversaries, his allies, the media — consistently underestimated his willingness to break rules. He is a man without borders, without conscience, without dignity, ethics or integrity, committed only to what he perceives to be in his own interest. He admires dictators who rule without constraint, and if he believes it would be to his advantage to join them, there is nothing — in his mind or his character — that would stop him.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

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Election Worker Defamed by Giuliani Recounts Emotional Toll

      by

      In federal court, Shaye Moss detailed how Rudolph Giuliani’s baseless claims that she had stolen votes from Donald Trump ignited threats and left her depressed and fearful.On Dec. 4, 2020, Shaye Moss, at the time an election worker in Fulton County, Ga., was summoned to her supervisor’s office, where she thought she would be getting a promotion for her hard work on Election Day, after a month of positive feedback.Instead, Ms. Moss was shown videos filled with “lies” and unfounded accusations that she and her mother, a co-worker, had tried to steal votes in the vital swing state from President Donald J. Trump, she testified in Federal District Court in Washington on Tuesday.From the moment she got that heads up, her life was altered. Soon, she and her 14-year-old son were inundated with threats, racist messages and calls. “Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920” was one warning she received on Facebook.“That was the day that everything changed,” Ms. Moss told a jury in a civil trial to determine what damages Rudolph W. Giuliani should pay for defaming her and her mother, Ruby Freeman, by spreading the baseless reports that they had tried to cheat Mr. Trump out of votes. “Everything in my life changed. The day that I changed. The day that everything just flipped upside down.”Georgia officials quickly debunked the accusations, and a yearslong investigation cleared Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman of any wrongdoing. But Ms. Moss is unrecognizable to herself, crippled by fear, anxiety and depression, she said during hours of emotional testimony.“I’m most scared of my son finding me and, or my mom, hanging in front of my house in front of a tree,” she said, fighting back tears, as Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, sat nearby, showing no emotion.“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up, that I just disappear,” she said.It was the second day of the trial, and her testimony brought to life the impact of the falsehoods that Mr. Giuliani helped to promote in the aftermath of Election Day 2020. At the time, Mr. Giuliani was serving as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and helped lead the efforts to keep him in office after he lost the 2020 election.The women are seeking compensatory damages between $15.5 million and $43 million, an amount Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer on Monday said was the civil equivalent of the death penalty.The judge presiding over the case, Beryl A. Howell, previously ruled that Mr. Giuliani had spread lies about the women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them and engaged in a conspiracy with others.Throughout her testimony, Ms. Moss described the pain inflicted on people she loves, particularly the racism embedded in the accusations and threats she said were spurred by Mr. Giuliani. The relentless calls and texts to Ms. Moss’s son interfered with his school work. She said he ended up with failing grades in his first year of high school.“He didn’t deserve that,” she said through tears.When Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, questioned Ms. Moss, he tried to make the point that the racist comments could not be directly linked to his client, a notion Ms. Moss strongly rebutted. She said Mr. Giuliani assumed that all of the Fulton County election workers were Democrats because they were all Black.“I feel like that is the beginning of the race issue,” she said, adding that he did not go on “BET Nightly News” to talk about his conspiracy theory, but instead went to media platforms where “he knew his people would believe his lies.”Mr. Giuliani has yet to testify in court, but despite the judge’s ruling — and his own previous acknowledgment that he had made false and defamatory accusations about the women — repeated his accusations on Monday evening as he left the courthouse.“Everything I said about them is true,” Mr. Giuliani told journalists. “They were engaging in changing votes.”On Tuesday morning, Judge Howell told Mr. Sibley that comments like those could be considered another defamation claim.When she asked if Mr. Sibley knew about his client’s statements, Mr. Sibley deflected and said he was not with him at the time, while Mr. Giuliani nodded his head in affirmation behind him. Judge Howell then asked Mr. Giuliani directly if he made those statements, and he said, “yes.”Mr. Sibley also suggested that the long days in the courtroom could be taking a toll on Mr. Giuliani, 79. Judge Howell asked Mr. Sibley if he was concerned about his client’s age and mental capacity issues. Mr. Sibley said he had not seen evidence of that yet.Judge Howell said she had observed Mr. Giuliani paying close attention and being responsive.“He’s following everything I’m saying quite closely,” she said Tuesday morning.Mr. Giuliani has rankled Judge Howell several times throughout the case. He refused to turn over routine documents about his net worth and wide reach on social media. He skipped one of the final hearings on the case. And on the first day of the trial, he was late to the courtroom.On Tuesday, Judge Howell said, “Mr. Sibley has a hard job.”Mr. Sibley told the jury, “My client, as you saw last night, likes to talk a lot, unfortunately.”The trial is expected to last a week and include testimony from Ms. Freeman and Mr. Giuliani. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Rudy Giuliani Could Face $43 Million in Damages in Defamation Trial

      by

      Two Georgia election workers are seeking as much as $43 million for false assertions from Rudolph Giuliani that they had sought to swing the 2020 outcome against Donald Trump.Rudolph W. Giuliani’s lawyer told jurors on Monday that the tens of millions of dollars in damages two Georgia election workers are seeking from him in a defamation suit “will be the end of Mr. Giuliani,” likening an award of that scale to a civil death penalty.The lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, made the assertion in his opening statement on the first day of Mr. Giuliani’s civil trial in Federal District Court in Washington.The judge, Beryl A. Howell, has already ruled that Mr. Giuliani, who served as personal lawyer to President Donald J. Trump and helped spearhead the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office after his loss in the 2020 election, defamed the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.Mr. Giuliani was found to have intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them and engaged in a conspiracy with others when he publicly accused them of election fraud related to their work counting absentee ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta for the Fulton County Board of Elections on Nov. 3, 2020.A jury of eight will determine how much Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and a former federal prosecutor, should have to pay them for the harm he caused.Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss are seeking compensatory damages between $15.5 million and $43 million. The trial is expected to last a week. Mr. Giuliani, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss all plan to testify.Michael J. Gottlieb, a lawyer for Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, who are mother and daughter, said Mr. Giuliani’s false accusations led to a “campaign of defamation and emotional terror” against them. He said the women had to move out of their homes for safety and security because of the thousands of threats that followed.“Their names have become synonymous with crime, cheating and fraud,” Mr. Gottlieb said in his opening statement. “How much is somebody’s reputation worth?”The women’s lawyers showed the jury social media posts, laden with expletives, racial slurs, accusations of treason and threats, some calling for them to be lynched.Sitting across from Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss in the courtroom, Mr. Giuliani sighed, put his hand on his forehead and at times shook his head as Judge Howell described his actions after the election to the jury.And he nodded his head as he watched footage of himself maligning the women in December 2020, when he said, “The F.B.I. hasn’t arrested anybody,” and “they just walk around free.”Even as Georgia officials quickly debunked Mr. Giuliani’s assertions in 2020, he repeated them so often that Ms. Freeman became one of Mr. Trump’s favorite targets.Georgia’s State Election Board conducted a yearslong investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s claims and officially cleared Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss last summer.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer said Monday that there is no question that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss did not deserve what happened to them. But, he said, the harm inflicted on them was not all the fault of Mr. Giuliani.“You’re going to see a lot of evidence of harm, but not much evidence that Mr. Giuliani was the cause,” he said.The plaintiffs’ first witness was Regina Scott, a consultant who led a team hired to track the threats against the women. She described how analysts collected and cataloged thousands of screenshots that included mentions of their names. Ms. Scott’s risk-consulting firm, Jensen Hughes, found that in most cases the election workers’ names were mentioned in a negative context.When he cross-examined Ms. Scott, Mr. Sibley was quick to point out that there was nothing in a majority of the posts clearly linking the comments to Mr. Giuliani.Even though Judge Howell already ruled that Mr. Giuliani defamed the two women, their lawyers are presenting evidence of the attacks against them to try to convince the jury that their compensation should be significant.But any amount is likely to throw Mr. Giuliani deeper into financial distress. He already owes money to lawyers who have represented him in other matters related to his post-election efforts to undermine President Biden’s victory in 2020. Disciplinary actions against him prevent him from working as a lawyer, and he faces disbarment.He is also being sued by Dominion Voting Systems because of unfounded claims he made that the company was part of a scheme to rig the 2020 election against Mr. Trump.Mr. Giuliani, along with Mr. Trump, has also been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case on charges that they tampered with the state’s election.Mr. Giuliani has previously annoyed Judge Howell because he was a no-show for one of the final court hearings in the case. He also refused to comply with routine trial obligations, including providing documents that would disclose his net worth and estimate the breadth of his media reach through his podcast and other programs. And last week, the judge chided Mr. Giuliani for asking that she, not a jury, hear the trial.And arriving late to the courtroom on Monday did little to help Mr. Giuliani with the judge. After waiting for him to show up, Judge Howell sent someone to collect Mr. Giuliani from where he was standing with other members of the public in the security line to enter the courthouse. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Special Counsel Asks Supreme Court to Decide if Trump Is Immune From Prosecution

      by

      The special counsel, Jack Smith, urged the justices to move with exceptional speed, and they quickly agreed to fast-track the first phase of the case.Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to rule on Mr. Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution. The justices quickly agreed to fast-track the first phase of the case.Mr. Smith’s request was unusual in two ways: He asked the justices to rule before an appeals court acted, and he urged them to move with exceptional speed.“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin,” Mr. Smith wrote.On Monday evening, just hours after Mr. Smith filed papers in the Supreme Court, the justices granted his initial request: to put their consideration of whether to hear the case on a fast track. The court ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file their response to the petition seeking review on an abbreviated schedule, by Dec. 20.Mr. Smith’s filings represented a vigorous plea to keep the trial on track by cutting off an avenue by which Mr. Trump could cause delays.A speedy decision by the justices is of the essence, Mr. Smith wrote, because Mr. Trump’s appeal of a trial judge’s ruling rejecting his claim of immunity suspends the criminal trial. The proceeding is scheduled to begin on March 4 in Federal District Court in Washington.Any significant delays could plunge the trial into the heart of the 2024 campaign season or push it past the election, when Mr. Trump could order the charges be dropped if he wins the presidency.“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” Mr. Smith wrote. “This is an extraordinary case.”The trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while in office.In her ruling two weeks ago, she condemned his attempts to “usurp the reins of government” and said there was nothing in the Constitution or American history supporting the proposition that a former president should not be bound by the federal criminal law.Mr. Trump appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He also asked Judge Chutkan to freeze the election interference case in its entirety until the appeal was resolved.In his Supreme Court brief, Mr. Smith conceded that the election case could not be decided until after the appeal of the immunity issue was resolved. On Sunday, his team filed papers to Judge Chutkan asking her to keep the March 4 trial date and saying she could still work on certain aspects of the case even as the appeal was being heard.In what appeared to be an attempt to cover all bases, Mr. Smith’s team also filed a request to the appeals court in Washington on Monday to decide the immunity question quickly. Winning the appeal of the immunity decision was only one of Mr. Trump’s goals in challenging Judge Chutkan’s ruling. All along, he and his lawyers have had an alterative strategy: to delay the trial for as long as possible.If the trial were put off until after the election and Mr. Trump were to win, he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges. Holding a trial after the presidential race was over would also mean that voters would not get to hear any of the evidence that prosecutors have collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the last election before weighing in on whether to elect him again in 2024.Even if Mr. Trump’s lawyers are unable to postpone the trial until after the presidential race was decided, they are hoping to push it off until the heart of the campaign season in August or September.That would present Judge Chutkan with a difficult decision: Should she hold the trial at a time Mr. Trump could be out holding rallies and meeting voters and suffer what are sure to be his vociferous complaints or make the decision herself to delay the trial after the race is over?Mr. Smith urged the justices to move fast.He asked the court to use an unusual procedure to leapfrog the appeals court, “certiorari before judgment.” It has been used in cases involving national crises, like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.The procedure used to be rare. Before 2019, the court had not used it for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. As of late last year, he found, the court has used it 19 times since.Among recent examples in which the court bypassed appeals courts were cases on abortion, affirmative action and student debt forgiveness.A statement from Mr. Trump’s campaign called the request by Mr. Smith a “Hail Mary” attempt to get to the Supreme Court and “bypass the appellate process.”Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, said the procedure remained unusual.“It’s always a long-shot bid for the Supreme Court to hear a case like this, without waiting for the process to play out in the lower courts,” he said. “That said, Smith is rightly concerned about a slow appeals process that may interfere with a trial date and run even closer to Election Day. It seems unlikely it will persuade the Supreme Court to intervene, but it is worth asking given the risks of delay.”Mr. Smith’s request was based on an argument that prosecutors have used several times in the election interference case: that the public itself, not just the defendant, Mr. Trump, has a fundamental right to a speedy trial.As in the Nixon tapes case, Mr. Smith wrote, “the circumstances warrant expedited proceedings,” adding: “The public importance of the issues, the imminence of the scheduled trial date and the need for a prompt and final resolution of respondent’s immunity claims counsel in favor of this court’s expedited review at this time.”Mr. Smith asked the Supreme Court to consider a question it has never addressed before: whether the Constitution confers presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.Mr. Smith acknowledged that the Supreme Court said in 1982 that former presidents enjoy some special protections, at least in civil suits — ones from private litigants seeking money — and that the Justice Department has long taken the view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.“But those principles cannot be extended to provide the absolute shield from criminal liability that respondent, a former president, asserts,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Neither the separation of powers nor respondent’s acquittal in impeachment proceedings lifts him above the reach of federal criminal law. Like other citizens, he is accountable for criminal conduct.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers rely heavily on the 1982 decision, also involving Nixon, Nixon v. Fitzgerald. It was brought by an Air Force analyst who said he was fired in 1970 in retaliation for his criticism of cost overruns. By the time the Supreme Court acted, Nixon had been out of office for several years.By a 5-to-4 vote, the justices ruled for Nixon. “In view of the special nature of the president’s constitutional office and functions,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote for the majority, “we think it appropriate to recognize absolute presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”Other Supreme Court precedents seem to be of no help to Mr. Trump.In Clinton v. Jones in 1997, the court unanimously allowed a sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton to proceed while he was in office, discounting concerns that it would distract him from his official responsibilities. That was also a civil case.And more recently, the Supreme Court ruled by a 7-to-2 vote in Trump v. Vance in 2020 that Mr. Trump had no absolute right to block the release of his financial records in a criminal investigation.“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.In separate court papers filed on Monday, prosecutors working for Mr. Smith told Judge Chutkan that they intend to call expert witnesses during the election interference trial who will testify about the movement on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s supporters from his incendiary speech near the White House — during which he urged them to “fight like hell” — to the Capitol.Prosecutors said they also planned to call a witness who could talk about the specific times that day when Mr. Trump’s Twitter account was in use.That could mean that the government will seek to provide the jury with the connections between Mr. Trump’s speech and his Twitter messages on Jan. 6 and the movement of the mob toward the Capitol. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Prosecutors Ask Judge to Deny Trump’s Request to Freeze Election Case

      by

      The special counsel Jack Smith told the judge she should keep the trial’s start date in March and continue making decisions as the former president appeals one of her rulings.Federal prosecutors on Sunday asked the judge handling former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election to reject his request to freeze the case in its entirety as Mr. Trump appeals her recent ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.The prosecutors told the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, that even as the former president’s appeal of the immunity decision moved forward, she should continue working on several of the unresolved legal issues in the case and not postpone the trial’s current start date of March 4.“During the pendency of the appeal, any number of matters could arise in this case that are not involved in the appeal,” wrote Molly Gaston, a top deputy to Jack Smith, the special counsel who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s federal prosecutions. “The court should not enter an order preventing it from handling them.”“For its part,” Ms. Gaston went on, “in light of the public’s strong interest in a prompt trial, the government will seek to ensure that trial proceeds as scheduled.”The three-page filing by Ms. Gaston came just days after Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to pause all of the dates and deadlines associated with the proceeding until the appeal of her decision denying their immunity claims is resolved.The expansive stay Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for would in essence stop the case in its tracks. The appeal is the centerpiece of a long-planned strategy by the former president’s legal team to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington until after the 2024 election.This month, Judge Chutkan turned down Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while he was in office.In her ruling, she condemned his attempts to “usurp the reins of government” and said there was nothing in the law, the Constitution or American history upholding the idea that a former president should not be bound by the federal penal code.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have already moved to challenge that decision in front of a federal appeals court in Washington and plan to keep appealing it all the way to the Supreme Court, if needed. But winning the argument is only one of their goals. They are also hoping to eat up time and postpone the case from going to trial for as long as they can.If the trial were to be put off until after the election and Mr. Trump were to win, he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges. Holding a trial after the presidential race was over would also mean that voters would never get to hear any of the evidence that prosecutors have collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the last election before weighing in on whether to elect him again in 2024.Mr. Smith’s team has suggested in court papers that it knew Mr. Trump would seek to use the immunity appeal to delay the case. Last month, the prosecutors specifically asked Judge Chutkan to make her decision on the question quickly so that the appellate process could get underway.But in her filing on Sunday evening, Ms. Gaston suggested there was no reason Judge Chutkan could not make rulings on other outstanding issues in the case as the appeal went forward. Among those issues is an unresolved motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to have the election charges dismissed because they represent what they have described as a partisan attack against him by President Biden.While the defense and the prosecution have been sparring for months over the timing of the election interference trial, they have more recently been fighting over something else: a number of “speculative and conspiratorial” theories, as the government has called them, that Mr. Trump has indicated he may raise during the trial.On Saturday night, in a separate set of court papers, prosecutors pushed back against those theories, which could serve as the basis for one of Mr. Trump’s lines of defense at trial: suggesting, that in reassuring the public that the 2020 election was conducted fairly, the so-called deep state was in fact misleading the nation, an assertion that lacks any credible basis.In the papers filed on Saturday, Thomas P. Windom, another one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, dismissed the notion — first brought up last month by Mr. Trump’s lawyers — that the SolarWinds computer hack engineered by Russia might have affected the results of the election.Mr. Windom also rejected as “bewildering” Mr. Trump’s claim that a statement issued by the country’s top cybersecurity official saying that the 2020 election had been safe was “part of a partisan effort to provide false assurances to the public.”Mr. Windom had little patience for yet another conspiratorial claim raised by Mr. Trump: that a cabal of politically motivated intelligence and national security officials had worked together after the election to convince him that no voting machines had been compromised and that the vote count had in fact been accurate.Calling the idea “theatrical,” Mr. Windom said prosecutors never found a shred of evidence during their long investigation that “a domestic or foreign actor flipped a single vote in a voting machine.”He also revealed how deeply the inquiry delved into the country’s national security community, noting that investigators interviewed the former director of national intelligence, the former national security adviser and his deputy, the former secretary of defense and the former leadership of the Justice Department. Asked if they were aware of any evidence of meddling in the election results, “the answer from every single official was no,” Mr. Windom’s filing said. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Giuliani to Go on Trial for Damages in Defamation Case

      by

      A federal jury will be selected to decide how much Rudolph Giuliani should pay for spreading lies about two Georgia election workers as he fought to keep Donald Trump in office.There will be no good news — only shades of bad — for Rudolph W. Giuliani when he appears in court on Monday for a trial to determine how much he will have to pay two Georgia election workers he lied about after the 2020 presidential race.Nearly two years ago, the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, sued Mr. Giuliani for defamation, accusing him of some of the most pernicious falsehoods to have emerged from his attempts to keep his friend and client, Donald J. Trump, in office. Over and over, the women claimed, Mr. Giuliani dishonestly asserted that they had tried to cheat Mr. Trump out of a victory by manipulating ballots they were counting at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.After fighting the case for months, Mr. Giuliani reversed himself this summer and, seeking to avoid crippling legal fees, abruptly acknowledged that his serial attacks against the women were false. Weeks later, a federal judge agreed with him and entered a judgment holding him liable for defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.Now Mr. Giuliani will have to endure a trial on the single question of whether he should have to pay what could be more than $40 million in damages. The proceeding, in Federal District Court in Washington, is scheduled to start with jury selection on Monday morning and is expected to continue through the week with testimony from both the plaintiffs and Mr. Giuliani.The trial could not have come at a poorer moment for Mr. Giuliani, who is near the edge of financial ruin. He is being hounded for money, including by his onetime lawyer, and cannot currently work as a lawyer himself because of disciplinary actions against him.Mr. Giuliani is confronting disbarment for what a Washington legal ethics panel has called his “unparalleled” efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat to President Biden. And he has been sued by Dominion Voting Systems for outlandish claims that the company helped to rig the presidential race against Mr. Trump.Moreover, he has been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case with the former president on charges of tampering with that state’s election.But even in this flood of trouble, the Washington defamation trial will be a landmark moment: the first time that a jury will consider not if, but how, to punish Mr. Giuliani for the role he played in helping Mr. Trump spread lies about his loss in the election.It will also offer the spectacle — perhaps to be repeated at other times and places — of the former white-knight lawman and celebrity mayor of New York being hauled into a courtroom to be held accountable for seeking to subvert the democratic process.At the heart of the trial will be the testimony of Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, who are mother and daughter. When they take the stand, they are expected to discuss the expansive threats they experienced after Mr. Giuliani appeared on several podcasts and television shows falsely asserting, among other things, that they had brought illegal ballots into the counting center in a suitcase and had used a flash drive to alter votes in digital tabulation machines.Shaye Moss was comforted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, as she testified last year in a House committee hearing about the election lies Mr. Giuliani spread.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesEven though these claims were quickly debunked, some of them were echoed by Mr. Trump, whose campaign promoted them on its Twitter account. Mr. Trump also mentioned Ms. Freeman in particular — calling her a “professional voter scammer” — when he spoke by phone in early 2021 with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and asked him to help find sufficient votes for him to win the election in the state.Last year, she testified at a public hearing held by the House select committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Ms. Freeman, who is Black, described the torrent of racist abuse that she and her daughter suffered after Mr. Trump began repeating Mr. Giuliani’s lies.“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation,” she said. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”Mr. Giuliani is scheduled to testify in his own defense for about an hour, court papers say, and is expected to discuss “the circumstances” surrounding the remarks he made about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss. Presumably, his time on the stand will be spent attempting to persuade the jury that his statements about the women were only minimally damaging.A representative for Mr. Giuliani said the trial was an example of the “weaponization of our justice system,” adding that Mr. Giuliani had had a long career of “public service and accomplishments.”“The Rudy Giuliani you see today is the same man who took down the mafia, cleaned up New York City and comforted the nation following Sept. 11,” the representative, Ted Goodman, said.Lawyers for Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have said they intend to ask for between $15.5 million and $43 million in compensatory damages related to Mr. Giuliani’s defamatory statements. And that request does not include any punitive damages the jury might decide to award, or damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress.Presiding over the trial will be Judge Beryl A. Howell, who oversaw the grand jury investigations resulting in the federal indictments Mr. Trump now faces. One of those indictments, filed in Washington, accuses Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election and identifies Mr. Giuliani, albeit not by name, as a co-conspirator.Judge Howell, who has also overseen scores of criminal cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, has shown little patience for defendants who took part in the pro-Trump riot. She has taken a similar stance toward Mr. Giuliani, repeatedly pointing out the ways in which his efforts to defend himself in the defamation case have been lacking.In August, for example, after Mr. Giuliani ignored some of her orders, Judge Howell sanctioned him by skipping past the fact-finding phase of the trial and summarily finding him liable of the charges. She appeared annoyed when Mr. Giuliani conceded he had lied about the women, but still maintained that his attacks against them were protected by the First Amendment, telling him his reasoning had “more holes than Swiss cheese.”Last week, she rebuked Mr. Giuliani for suddenly asking her, not a jury, to hear the trial. The arguments he offered to justify the 11th-hour switch were “simply nonsense,” she wrote.To cap it off, Mr. Giuliani skipped one of the final court hearings in the case despite Judge Howell’s explicit orders that he be there. When she saw he was not in court, she gave an ominous warning to his lawyer.“It sets the tone, doesn’t it, for the whole case,” she said. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans

      by

      Over the last few months, the incredulous question — How can Donald Trump possibly be leading the polls; there must be some mistake — has given way to the clear reality: Something in American life would need to change for Joe Biden to be favored for re-election in November 2024.The good news for Biden is that it’s easy to imagine developments that would help his re-election bid. Notwithstanding a fashionable liberal despair about how bad vibes are deceiving Americans about the state of the economy, there’s plenty of room for improvements — in inflation-adjusted wages, interest rates, the stock market — that could sweeten the country’s economic mood. (Just sustaining the economic trajectory of the last few months through next summer would almost certainly boost Biden’s approval ratings.)The looming Trump trials, meanwhile, promise to refocus the country’s persuadable voters on what they dislike about the former president; that, too, has to be worth something in the swing states where Biden is currently struggling.In both those cases, though, the president doesn’t have much control over events. No major economic package is likely to pass Congress, and whatever influence you think his White House did or didn’t exert over Trump’s indictments, Biden staffers won’t be supervising jury selection.There is an issue that’s hurting Biden, however, where the Republican Party is (officially, at least) quite open to working with the president, provided that he’s willing to break with his own party’s interest groups: the security of the southern border, where Border Patrol apprehensions remain stubbornly high even as the president’s approval ratings on immigration sit about 30 points underwater.There is a commonplace interpretation of the immigration debate that treats the unpopularity of an uncontrolled border primarily as an optics problem: People are happy enough to have immigrants in their own communities, but they see border disorder on their television screens and it makes them fearful about government incompetence. Sometimes this interpretation comes packaged with the suggestion that the people who worry most about immigration are rural voters who rarely see a migrant in real life, as opposed to liberal urbanites who both experience and appreciate diversity.The last year or so of blue-city immigration anxiety has revealed the limits of this interpretation: Place enough stress on New York or Chicago, and you will get demands for immigration control in even the most liberal parts of the country.But really, there’s never been good reason to think that immigration anxiety only manifests itself telescopically, among people whose main exposure to the trend is alarmist Fox News chyrons.Consider a new paper from Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena, respectively a Tufts University economics Ph.D and a Defense Department analyst, which uses Mexican-government ID data to track the flow of Mexican migrants into counties in the United States, and finds that exposure to immigrants increases conservatism among natives. As the migrant flow goes up, so does the vote for Republicans in House elections: “A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican Party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points.” And the inflow also shifts local policy rightward, reducing public spending and shifting money toward law enforcement as opposed to education.This suggests that a pro-immigration liberalism inevitably faces a balancing act: High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative, so a policy that’s too radically open is a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed.You can see this pattern in U.S. politics writ large. The foreign-born population in the United States climbed through the Obama presidency, to 44 million from 38 million, and as a share of the overall population it was nearing the highs of the late 19th and early 20th century — a fact that almost certainly helped Donald Trump ride anti-immigration sentiment to the Republican nomination and the presidency.Then under Trump there was some stabilization — the foreign-born population was about the same just before Covid-19 hit as it had been in 2016 — which probably help defuse the issue for Democrats, increase American sympathy for migrants, and make Biden’s victory possible. But since 2020 the numbers are rising sharply once again, and the estimated foreign-born share of the American population now exceeds the highs of the last great age of immigration. Which, again unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump.Border control in an age of easy global movement is not a simple policy problem, even for conservative governments. But policy does matter, and while the measures that the White House is reportedly floating as potential concessions to Republicans — raising the standard for asylum claims, fast-tracking deportation procedures — aren’t quite a pledge to finish the border wall (maybe that’s next summer’s pivot), they should have some effect on the flow of migrants north.Which makes them a distinctive sort of policy concession: A “sacrifice” that this White House has every political reason to offer, because Biden’s re-election becomes more likely if Republicans accept.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