Presidential Election of 2020

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Michigan Supreme Court Decides Trump Can Stay on Ballot

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Michigan Republican Regrets Participation as Fake Trump Elector

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The Unsettling Truth at the Heart of the Giuliani Case

      by

      No sooner did a jury deliver a nearly $150 million defamation judgment against the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani than he went out and again started smearing the two Georgia election workers at the center of the case. Within days, he filed for bankruptcy, shielding himself in the near term from having to surrender whatever assets he has to his creditors.His brazen thumbing of his nose at the jury and the legal system laid bare some unsettling truths about justice. Defamation law is one of the few tools that lawyers have to hold people accountable for using lies to destroy reputations and to deter wrongdoing. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, county clerks, election officials and other public servants targeted by politically motivated conspiracy theories like the Big Lie have used defamation lawsuits to try to clear their names and correct the public record.But in a hyperpartisan era when the incentives to tell lies about your political opponents can seemingly outweigh the risks, is defamation law still up to the task? And if admitted liars like Mr. Giuliani can avoid having to pay up, what does accountability even look like now?Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers who sued Mr. Giuliani for falsely claiming that they stole the 2020 election in Georgia for Joe Biden, will probably only ever see pennies on the dollar of the full amount that a Washington, D.C., jury awarded them.There are a few procedural hurdles to clear: The bankruptcy proceedings will hinge on whether a judge decides that Mr. Giuliani’s actions were “willful and malicious.” (If they were, he’ll still have to pay, even in bankruptcy.) Then there’s the question of whether he has the money to pay his debts. According to his bankruptcy petition, he has $1 million to $10 million in assets — nowhere close to what he’d need to clear the roughly $153 million he says he owes in total. (That number doesn’t include ongoing lawsuits against him that could also lead to financial settlements.) Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss could negotiate a settlement with him or choose to pursue a percentage of his assets and earnings for the rest of his working life.Recouping any money in a defamation judgment can take time. After juries in Connecticut and Texas found Infowars founder Alex Jones liable for more than $1.4 billion for spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school shooting, the families of victims who sued him and his businesses have spent the past year fighting him in bankruptcy. Only after a judge ruled that Mr. Jones’s conduct had met the “willful and malicious” standard did he finally propose a greatly reduced settlement of $5.5 million per year for five years and then a percentage of his business income for the next five. (The Sandy Hook families, who filed their suits nearly six years ago, have offered their own plan to liquidate all of Mr. Jones’s existing assets and to pursue his future earnings to collect on their jury verdict.)But victory for plaintiffs in cases like these is not limited to money. A trial gives victims of viral disinformation a chance to confront their tormentor in a court of law, where facts and procedures still matter, offering them a real sense of catharsis and vindication. Especially in cases that involve major news events, defamation suits can also help correct the public record. The trial in Freeman v. Giuliani not only proved that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had not done any of the criminal acts Mr. Giuliani alleged; it exhaustively debunked one of the biggest conspiracy theories to emerge from the 2020 presidential election.Tens of thousands of articles and TV segments amplified the trial’s findings to a massive audience. “This case was never about making Ruby and Shaye rich,” said Michael J. Gottlieb, the lead lawyer for the two women. “Of course, we wanted them to be compensated. But it was about accountability and establishing a public record of the truth about what happened at State Farm Arena in November 2020.”On a societal level, the real hope for these defamation cases is that over time, as more liars are brought low by their actions and held accountable in court, politicians and political operatives will pause before spreading disinformation and, slowly, this country will move toward a better, safer political discourse. For now, that seems overly optimistic. The twisted incentives created by extreme polarization and a fragmented media landscape might lead a young up-and-comer in conservative (or liberal, for that matter) politics to traffic in disinformation and conspiracy theories if that is the quickest way to fame, fortune and influence — consequences be damned.Our society counts on defamation judgments to draw a line between truth and falsity, and “we don’t imagine that there will routinely be recalcitrant defendants who will feel the incentive to lie to audiences that are eager to accept those lies is greater than the incentive to abide by the rule of law,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor and media expert. “Our libel system doesn’t really envision those dynamics.” Libel law itself may be outdated — too slow or too weak to reckon with the realities of modern politics.But there is reason to hope. As the Giuliani case shows, deterrence can take many forms. When Mr. Giuliani uttered more lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss shortly after the verdict, they filed a new lawsuit in the same court, seeking an injunction to prevent him from continuing to defame them. If successful, that case could be the strongest protection they have from getting drawn into the spotlight once more.Even without an injunction, now that a court has ruled that Mr. Giuliani defamed the two women with actual malice — meaning he knowingly or recklessly made the false statements in question — media outlets large and small may be hesitant to give him a platform. Even if the judgment doesn’t chasten Mr. Giuliani, it will almost surely make networks like Fox News and One America News think twice before they put him on the air.More than updating defamation law or passing new legislation, the way to send a signal to future Rudy Giulianis and Alex Joneses is by defending victims of widespread lies — and the larger truth — at scale. One of the legal organizations that represented Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, Protect Democracy, is attempting to do just that. The group is also representing them in a separate lawsuit against the right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit and is representing a Pennsylvania postal worker smeared by Project Veritas, a county recorder in Arizona attacked by the Republican candidate Kari Lake and a voter in Georgia accused of being a “ballot mule” by Dinesh D’Souza.These cases will test whether our legal system can evolve to meet the challenges posed by our viral era. But at the least, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have shown that you don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve justice.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Makes Focused Appeal to Black Voters in South Carolina

      by

      The president’s campaign is putting money and staff into South Carolina ahead of its primary in an effort to energize Black voters, who are critical to his re-election effort.President Biden’s campaign and affiliated groups are amping up their efforts in South Carolina, pouring in money and staff ahead of the first Democratic primary in February in an effort to generate excitement for his campaign in the state.It seems, at first glance, to be a curious political strategy. Few incumbent presidents have invested so much in an early primary state — particularly one like South Carolina, where Mr. Biden faces no serious primary challenger, and where no Democratic presidential candidate has won in a general election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.But the Biden campaign sees the effort as more than just notching a big win in the state that helped revive his struggling campaign in 2020, putting him on the path to winning the nomination. It hopes to energize Black voters, who are crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election bid nationally, at a moment when his standing with Black Americans is particularly fraught.“One of the things that we have not done a good job of doing is showing the successes of this administration,” said Marvin Pendarvis, a state representative from North Charleston. He added that the campaign will need to curate a message “so that Black voters understand that this administration has done some of the most transformational things as it relates to Black communities, to minority communities.”Four years after Mr. Biden vowed to have the backs of the voters he said helped deliver him the White House, Black Americans in polls and focus groups are expressing frustration with Democrats for what they perceive as a failure to deliver on campaign promises. They also say that they have seen few improvements to their well-being under Mr. Biden’s presidency. Some are unsure whether they will vote at all.To counter that pessimism and boost Black turnout, Democrats are hitting the Palmetto State with a six-figure cash infusion from the Democratic National Committee, a slew of campaign events and an army of staffers and surrogates.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

    • 188 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Principles at Stake in Push to Disqualify Trump: Will of Voters and Rule of Law

      by

      If the Colorado Supreme Court is right that the former president is constitutionally ineligible to run for president, fundamental values are in severe tension.The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald J. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again pits one fundamental value against another: giving voters in a democracy the right to pick their leaders versus ensuring that no one is above the law.Mr. Trump’s status as the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, despite his role in the events that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has created severe tensions between those two principles. If the court’s legal reasoning is correct, obeying the rule of law produces an antidemocratic result.That constitutional and political dilemma is likely to land before the U.S. Supreme Court. And while Mr. Trump’s name would stay on the primary ballot as the justices weighed the matter, their decision would have consequences far beyond his opportunity to win Colorado’s 10 Electoral College votes.For one, similar legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility are pending in at least 16 additional states. Moreover, the precedent the case will set could open or shut the door to the risk that partisans will routinely turn to state courts to try to keep major federal candidates off the ballot.Supreme Court justices have life tenure in the hope that their work will be independent of political influence, and, under the principle of the rule of law, it would be illegitimate for them to torque their interpretation of the Constitution with an eye toward political consequences. Under the rule of law, the Constitution and federal statutes apply equally to everybody, and no one’s power, wealth, political influence or other special status puts him or her above the law.But under the principle of democracy, the government’s legitimacy stems from the fact that voters decided whom to put in charge. The prospect of unelected judges denying voters the opportunity to make their own decision about Mr. Trump’s political future has given pause even to some of his critics who fervently hope Americans will reject him at the ballot box.Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that even if one thinks that Mr. Trump’s actions rendered him unfit for office in line with the 14th Amendment, there are other — and less alarmingly novel — systems that could have addressed that problem before it reached the courts. These would have freed the Republican Party to have a starkly different primary contest, he said.“The problem is that we’re just not set up for this — we’ve run through the safety nets,” Mr. Vladeck said. “We’ve been spared from this problem in the few prior episodes where it could have arisen by different sets of constraints. And so now we’re in this position because those backstops have failed.”Had nine more Republican senators voted to convict Mr. Trump at his Jan. 6 impeachment trial, he would be ineligible to hold future office anyway, said Mr. Vladeck, who wrote a column about the complications of the Colorado court’s ruling titled “The Law and High Politics of Disqualifying President Trump.” And if more Republican voters were repelled by Mr. Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term, his political career would be over as a practical matter.The legal dispute turns on a clause of the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. Its third section says that people who betrayed their government oaths by engaging in an insurrection are ineligible to hold office. Citing Mr. Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6. riot, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that he was an oath-breaking insurrectionist whose name could not lawfully appear on the ballot.Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the former president was disqualified from holding office again.Stephen Speranza for The New York Times“If the language is clear and unambiguous, then we enforce it as written,” a four-justice majority wrote.But even if a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court privately agree that the disqualification clause, by its plain text, seems clearly to bar Mr. Trump from returning to government power, it will not be surprising if they hesitate at the prospect of issuing a ruling affirming the Colorado court’s decision.If the justices want to overturn the Colorado ruling, they will have numerous potential offramps. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have technical arguments, like whether the clause in question has legal force by itself or whether Congress would first need to enact a statute for it take effect. His lawyers will also have substantive arguments, like denying that the mob violence of Jan. 6 rose to the level of an “insurrection” in the constitutional sense.The dilemma invites comparisons to the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election, which overruled Florida’s Supreme Court and ensured that George W. Bush would maintain his narrow lead over Al Gore in that state to win its Electoral College votes and become the next president.A similarity is the risk of the appearance of partisanship. In the Bush v. Gore case, the five most conservative justices ensured that the Republican candidate would prevail. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is controlled by a supermajority of six Republican appointees, so a decision to overturn the Colorado ruling and help Mr. Trump could also carry partisan overtones.A difference is the implications for democracy. The Florida Supreme Court in 2000 was not itself deciding the fate of the candidates but trying to allow the completion of a recount that would have clarified the will of voters. If the Supreme Court now overturns the Colorado ruling, it will be leaning in the direction of letting voters decide about Mr. Trump; upholding the state court’s ruling would be the opposite.There has always been inherent tension in the American governing system because the Constitution sets certain limits on democracy. For one, most decisions are made by elected representatives, not directly by plebiscites and referendums.The current dilemma invites comparisons to the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election.Mark Wilson/Newsmakers, via Getty ImagesThe structures of the Senate and the Electoral College system undercut the democratic principle that everyone has an equal say by giving disproportionate power to voters in sparsely populated states — including sometimes enabling the loser of the national popular vote, like Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016, to nevertheless become president.Not everyone who lives in the United States is allowed to vote for government leaders. Noncitizen permanent residents, people under 18 and convicted felons in some states may not participate in elections — all of which conflicts with the principle that the legitimacy of the government stems from the consent of the governed about who will be in charge.Other requirements restrict who is eligible to hold office. The 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being elected president a third time, even if voters want to keep that person in place. It was added after President Franklin D. Roosevelt violated the constitutional norm of retiring after two terms, which President George Washington had established.The Constitution sets age limits: One must be at least 25 years old to be a member of the House, 30 to be a senator and 35 to be president, even if voters would prefer someone who happens to be younger. And the Constitution dictates that to be eligible to be president, a person must be a natural-born citizen. The antidemocratic nature of that rule drew some attention when the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a naturalized citizen who was born in Austria, was elected governor of California. He could never run for president, no matter how popular he was with voters.The issue of citizenship at birth has also been the subject of political attention. When Senator John McCain ran as the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, there were questions at the fringes about whether he was eligible because he had been born in the Panama Canal Zone, although to American parents.Mr. Trump’s rise to national political prominence was fueled by his lie that President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, might have been born in Kenya. And in the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Trump attacked a rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, over his birth in Canada, similarly seeking to raise doubts about his eligibility for the presidency.But, despite Mr. Trump’s own history of questioning the eligibility of his political adversaries for president, his legal disqualification would risk undermining democratic legitimacy in a society where extreme polarization and partisanship are already raw.The moment calls to mind an ambiguous legal phrase that is often invoked as a rallying cry for courageously following the law but, as Mr. Vladeck pointed out, also carries a grim warning: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      A Christmas Gift From the Bond Market

      by

      It’s been a strange few days on the Donald Trump front: He said something about himself that I actually believe and something about the economy that’s mostly true.On the personal side, Trump has been sounding a lot like Adolf Hitler lately — I don’t mean his general tone, I mean his specific statement last week at a New Hampshire rally that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing what Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” almost word for word. (And if you think it was just a one-off, he said the same thing in a September interview.) But Trump claims never to have read “Mein Kampf,” and I believe him, just as I believe that he’s barely skimmed the Bible or any of the great books or, I would guess, “The Art of the Deal.” Pretty clearly, reading isn’t his thing.What’s happening, presumably, is that Trump talks to people who have read Hitler, approvingly, and that’s how Nazi language gets into his speeches. Are you reassured?On the economic side, the stock market has recently been close to record highs, but Trump has dismissed these gains as just making “rich people richer.”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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      How Could the Supreme Court Respond to Colorado?

      by

      David Firestone and Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and that disqualifies him from appearing on the 2024 ballot in Colorado, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.In this audio conversation with the Opinion editor David Firestone, the editorial board writer Jesse Wegman says he believes that the United States Supreme Court will eventually take this case. But Wegman is less certain than he once was that “the court is just going to strike this down.”Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Scott Morgan/ReutersThe 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, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin with help from Phoebe Lett. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Marge Mary Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Judge Orders Giuliani to Pay $148 Million Damage Award Immediately

      by

      A federal judge found that Rudolph Giuliani had a history of hiding assets and that he must swiftly pay two Georgia election workers he was found to have defamed.A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to immediately pay the $148 million he owes to two former Georgia election workers for falsely accusing them of manipulating ballots after the 2020 election, citing concerns that he might “conceal his assets” if he were allowed to wait.The decision by the judge, Beryl A. Howell, was the latest legal defeat for Mr. Giuliani, who is facing an array of woes for his efforts three years ago to keep former President Donald J. Trump in office after his election defeat. But even though Judge Howell ordered speedy payment, there is no indication that Mr. Giuliani, whose long-running financial problems have only been intensifying, has anywhere near the amount he owes.On Monday, a few days after a jury in Washington imposed the damages on Mr. Giuliani, the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, asked Judge Howell to waive the standard 30-day waiting period and force him to pay them as soon as possible.In their request to Judge Howell, the women, who are mother and daughter, said that Mr. Giuliani had already failed to obey other court orders in the case related to money that he owed them. They also noted that Mr. Giuliani, a onetime U.S. attorney and mayor of New York, was being hounded by his creditors, including his former lawyer, and was saddled by “significant debts threatening his personal solvency.”“There is especially good reason,” lawyers for the women wrote, “to believe that defendant Giuliani intends to evade payment of the judgment by any means he can devise.”In a 13-page order, Judge Howell agreed with virtually everything Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss said about Mr. Giuliani, who admitted that he lied about the women in advance of his trial this month to determine damages in Federal District Court in Washington. Before the trial began, Judge Howell found that Mr. Giuliani was liable for defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.At the trial, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss described how they were subjected to a torrent of threats and racist abuse after Mr. Giuliani, then the personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, directed his millions of social media followers to watch a video of them in a Georgia vote counting center, asserting without any basis that they were cheating Mr. Trump as they counted votes on Election Day.“Giuliani just messed me up, you know,” Ms. Freeman told the jury.The decision on Wednesday to speed up the payments was warranted, Judge Howell wrote, given Mr. Giuliani’s history as an “uncooperative litigant.” The judge said he had a record of disregarding her orders to pay the women’s legal fees and costs related to requests for discovery material.“Giuliani feebly counters concerns about him hiding assets, stating that there is no evidence in the record of any attempt by him to dissipate assets,” she wrote. “This statement simply ignores the ample record in this case of Giuliani’s efforts to conceal or hide his assets.”While Mr. Giuliani could still appeal the damages awarded by the jury, Judge Howell pointed out that the sum the jurors came up with was actually “conservative.” As part of his appeal, he could ask for a stay of immediate payment — though, as Judge Howell noted, he would still have to post a surety bond to show that he was good for at least some portion of the money if he lost. More