Presidential Election of 2020

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      Georgia Judge Orders 2 Separate Trials for Defendants in Trump Election Case

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      Two defendants will get a speedy trial starting in October, but the others, including Donald J. Trump, can have more time to prepare, the judge ruled.A judge on Thursday granted former President Donald J. Trump and 16 others a separate trial from two of their co-defendants who will go to trial next month in the Georgia election interference case.The judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, has laid out an expedited trial schedule for Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, two lawyers who helped Mr. Trump try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. The two had invoked their right under Georgia law to seek a speedy trial, in part to avoid the high cost of a more protracted legal fight.Their trial is set to begin with jury selection on Oct. 23. Judge McAfee, in a seven-page order on Thursday, said that he hoped to have a jury seated by Nov. 3 to comply with the speedy trial law.A trial date for Mr. Trump and the other 16 co-defendants has not been set. In his order, Judge McAfee described what was to come as a “mega-trial.” But he also raised the possibility that those 17 might not all be tried together in the end, if some make successful arguments to break off their cases.“Additional divisions of these 17 defendants may well be required,” the judge wrote. “That is a decision for another day once the many anticipated pretrial motions have been resolved and a realistic trial date approaches.”All 19 defendants were charged in August in a wide-ranging state racketeering indictment after an investigation into election interference in Georgia, which Mr. Trump lost in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes. In the weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump made baseless claims that he was the victim of significant electoral fraud. The indictment says that he and the other 18 defendants were part of a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn his loss in Georgia in various ways.Questions about the size, shape and timing of trials for a case of such magnitude have yet to be fully resolved. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office, which is leading the prosecution, had wanted all 19 defendants to be tried together, arguing in a filing on Tuesday that “breaking this case up into multiple lengthy trials would create an enormous strain on the judicial resources.”But in his order on Thursday, Judge McAfee noted that some lawyers would need more time to prepare. He also noted that the Fulton County courthouse “simply contains no courtroom adequately large enough to hold all 19 defendants.”Further complicating matters is the fact that several defendants are seeking to move their cases to federal court. If just one of them succeeds, there is a possibility that the whole group could be forced into the federal system, although experts say the law on this issue is not clear.Regardless, the prospect of a federal judge presiding over a state trial dimmed somewhat last week, when Judge Steve C. Jones, a U.S. district court judge, rejected a removal request from Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff and a defendant.Mr. Meadows has appealed. Judge Jones is scheduled to hold hearings next week on similar requests from Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who sought to intervene after the Georgia election, and three other co-defendants who served as bogus electors on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s lawyer in Georgia, Steven H. Sadow, has indicated in court documents that the former president may also soon ask to have his case moved to federal court.On Thursday morning, as Judge McAfee held a hearing on a number of pretrial motions, tensions between the prosecution and defense were palpable. Brian T. Rafferty, a lawyer for Ms. Powell, accused the district attorney’s office of failing to respond to his request for certain documents as part of the discovery process.At another point, Scott Grubman, a lawyer for Mr. Chesebro, angrily accused Daysha D. Young, a Fulton County assistant district attorney, of engaging in a “personal attack” on Mr. Grubman’s co-counsel, Manny Arora, after Ms. Young mentioned a 2010 incident in which a judge barred Mr. Arora from contacting grand jurors in a separate case.Mr. Chesebro was indicted based on his role as an architect of the bogus electors scheme. His lawyers have called for his case to be dismissed, arguing that he was merely “researching and finding precedents in order to form a legal opinion, which was then supplied to his client, the Trump campaign.”Ms. Powell was indicted on charges relating to the copying of sensitive voter system data in rural Coffee County, Ga., by Trump allies seeking evidence of fraud. On Wednesday, her lawyer filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that county elections officials had allowed access to the elections system there in January 2021.“This means that no data was stolen, there was no fraud, and nothing was done without authorization,” the motion said. More

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      He Was a Hillary Clinton Cheerleader. Now He Calls Democrats a Threat.

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      Peter Daou, a former Democratic activist, is running Cornel West’s third-party campaign. He talked to The New York Times about how he came to view the two-party system as a bigger problem than Donald J. Trump.On Monday, Cornel West, a left-wing scholar and third-party presidential candidate, announced that he had hired Peter Daou as his campaign manager. The choice adds a new twist to one of the most unusual career trajectories in political consulting.A Lebanese American jazz keyboardist and dance music producer — one of his early club remixes was declared “smokin’” by Billboard in 1991 — Mr. Daou, 58, found his way into politics in the mid-2000s. He started as a liberal blogger and then became a digital adviser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.In 2016, he achieved prominence as the chief executive of Shareblue, a pro-Clinton megaphone that cultivated online outrage against Donald J. Trump, the political media and Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton’s primary rival. (Mr. Daou was not affiliated with the 2016 Clinton campaign, but he did get a shout out in Mrs. Clinton’s subsequent book, “What Happened.”) At the time, a Sanders strategist called Mr. Daou the “pond scum of American politics” — so it was a surprise when, four years later, Mr. Daou transformed from Clinton superfan to an equally loud supporter of Mr. Sanders, the Vermont socialist.It was the first of a series of record-scratch shifts in Mr. Daou’s politics. He has since quit the Democratic Party, called on President Biden to resign over campaign-trail allegations of groping, and worked briefly for Marianne Williamson’s campaign before signing onto Dr. West’s Green Party candidacy.In 2017, Mr. Daou started a short-lived online platform, endorsed by Mrs. Clinton, that aimed to fight “a proliferation of confusing, chaotic misinformation” with verified, Clinton-affirming facts. He denounced “Russia’s successful hacking of our election using cyberespionage, online intimidation, and disinformation.” He now mocks the “liberal speak” of Democrats: “January 6, January 6, January 6, January 6, January 6, January 6, January 6, January 6, Orange man bad, Orange man bad, Orange man bad, Orange man bad, Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin,” he posted this month on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.“My evolution, philosophically and politically, I’ve been exceptionally transparent about it,” Mr. Daou said in a phone conversation with The New York Times, shortly after the West campaign’s announcement. The interview has been edited and condensed.How would you define success for the Cornel West campaign? What are you trying to do here?The first definition of success, to me, is a President Cornel West. But there are many, many ways of thinking about what this campaign can achieve. One would be to finally break the grip of the duopoly, you know, the monopoly of the two parties where you really just get two choices.You’ll hear Democrats saying, “We’re saving democracy, we’re protecting democracy.” Well, you don’t protect democracy by trying to kick Greens off the ballot, and you don’t protect democracy by telling people, “You’re a spoiler.” You can’t kill democracy to save it.Cornel West is running for president as a third-party candidate.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressDuring the 2020 primary, you wrote an essay in The Nation warning that fighting among the various factions of the American left, “at a time when they need to marshal every asset to defeat Trump and his G.O.P. cronies,” would be “an epic act of self-destruction.” Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chairman, has made more or less the same argument about Dr. West’s candidacy, saying, “This is not the time to play around on the margins.”Somebody quoted William Blake, in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” on Twitter: “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” Yes, in 2020, I was buying into these spoiler arguments. I was going after the progressives and the leftists and the Green Party members who I have now come to see as my family. And it was a mistake. I was wrong. You know, it’s OK to be wrong.In 2016, you worked for Shareblue, which a lot of people would credit with stoking the my-party-right-or-wrong strain of Democratic social media posting that you now decry. Do you feel like you had a hand in creating this thing that you’re fighting?I think I played a part, yes. Because look, when you’re in that partisan war, you’re in the trenches and you’re fighting and you’re throwing punches. You get caught up in the moment, you believe your side is right, and you fight. I’m one human being, but I take responsibility for that. I apologize for that. The way I see it, what I can do right now, especially with Dr. West, is break out of it.You’ve recently made fun of what you call the “orange man bad” school of liberal discourse.My former liberal Democratic political friends say, “Oh, you just love Trump, you’re a Trump supporter.” No, I oppose Trump more than you do. The problem is painting Donald Trump as some singularly dangerous figure, because it takes attention away from all the other problems. That’s propaganda. That’s intentional. And it also raises a lot of money for the Democratic Party.You wrote a book in 2019 arguing that “nothing in American life is more of a threat to our democracy than the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right.” You’re now arguing that the Democratic Party “is itself a threat to democracy.” Are these threats comparable, to your mind?I consider myself an independent leftist. I haven’t always been in that place. For a long time, I worked within the Democratic Party, and slowly moved toward the left, to the point where I quit the party in 2020. And, having done that, I look much more objectively at these arguments that Republicans are far, far worse and far, far more dangerous than Democrats, and if Trump gets elected again, it’s the end of the world, it’s the end of the country.When we say we’re protecting democracy, there’s an assumption there that there is a democracy. You only are given two choices. And both parties are responsible for that. It’s certainly a threat to democracy to take Joe Biden, who 67 percent of Democratic voters in a recent CNN poll do not want to be the Democratic nominee.If that’s the case, why not challenge him in the primary? Why run as a third-party challenger?I think what we’ve seen this cycle, and the last couple of cycles with Bernie Sanders, is the Democratic Party will not give the opportunity for somebody like Dr. West to actually engage in a fair primary process. So I think this is the right way to go. The Green Party will get on the ballot, or we’re working to get on it, in all 50 states. We are going to make sure this is a fair process because it’s not going to be a fair process within the Democratic Party.Ron Klain, who until recently was Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, wrote a blurb for your 2019 book. When was the last time you talked to anybody in Bidenworld?I have not been in contact with any of my establishment colleagues for many years. I’m sure they don’t have very high opinions of me. But it really doesn’t matter to me, because this is not about my personal connections.You recently addressed the young Biden-supporting TikTok influencer Harry Sisson, comparing his enthusiasm for Mr. Biden to yours for Mrs. Clinton in 2016, and warning him: “Trust me, you’ll regret it later.” For a long time, even after you embraced Bernie Sanders, you seemed to stand by your years as a Clinton die-hard. Are looking back differently at that now?I thought I was doing the right thing at the time. Looking back now, I was just enabling and supporting a system that is oppressing people. So for a younger person getting involved, I say, look at the system itself. Look at the suffering created by the system and fight the system. Don’t get attached to one politician or one party. I find the idea of anarchist philosophy, along the lines of David Graeber, quite intriguing: You know, no power dynamics, no coercion, a structure in which in which we all cooperate, and there’s true equality, right?In the end, what Dr. West is doing, this is the way you do it: You go at the system directly. And that’s what we’re going to be doing to the very last day. He will be on the ballot. And this is not going to be some sort of process in which, you know, “Down the line, well, maybe not, if this is going to bring on a Republican.”We are working to get on the ballot. In the general election, there are going to be at least three choices, and he will be one of them. More

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      Biden, Trump and the 2024 Field of Nightmares

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      In the bottom of the 10th inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, with the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 5-3, Red Sox manager John McNamara sent Bill Buckner — a great hitter dealing with terrible leg problems that made him gimp his way around first base — back out to play the infield instead of putting in Dave Stapleton, Buckner’s defensive replacement. A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears.Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Meaning that if you place a player where he shouldn’t be, or try to disguise a player’s incapacity by shifting him away from the likely action, or give a player you love a chance to stay on the field too long for sentimental reasons, the risk you take will eventually catch up to you, probably at the worst possible moment.Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. Consider the dreadful-for-liberals denouement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career, where nobody could tell a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court justice who had survived cancer that it was time to step aside and Democrats were left to talk hopefully about her workout regimen as she tried to outlast Donald Trump. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.Or consider the Trump presidency itself, in which voters handed a manifestly unfit leader the powers of the presidency and for his entire term, various Republicans tried to manage him and position him and keep him out of trouble, while Dave Stapleton — I mean, Mike Pence — warmed the bench.This managerial effort met with enough success that by the start of 2020, Trump seemed potentially headed for re-election. But like a series of line drives at an amateur third baseman, the final year of his presidency left him ruthlessly exposed — by the pandemic (whether you think he was too libertarian or too Faucian, he was obviously overmastered), by a progressive cultural revolution (which he opposed but was helpless to impede), by Biden’s presidential campaign and finally by his own vices, which yielded Jan. 6.Naturally, Republicans are ready to put him on the field again.These experiences set my expectations for what’s happening with Democrats and Biden now. The increasing anxiety over Biden’s lousy poll numbers, which I discussed in last weekend’s column, has yielded a defensive response from Biden partisans. Their argument is that the president’s decline is overstated, that his administration is going well and he deserves more credit than he’s getting and that, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser suggests, the press is repeating its mistake with Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and making the age issue seem awful when it’s merely, well, “suboptimal.”I do not think Biden’s decline is overstated by the media; by some Republicans, maybe, but the mainstream press is, if anything, treading gingerly around the evident reality. But I do think Biden’s defenders are correct that the effect of his age on his presidency has been, at most, only mildly negative. It’s limited his use of the bully pulpit and hurt his poll numbers, but his administration has passed major legislation, managed a foreign policy crisis and run a tighter ship than Trump.Where I have criticisms of Bidenism, they’re mostly the normal ones a conservative would have of any liberal president, not special ones associated with chaos or incompetence created by cognitive decline.But in running Biden for re-election, Democrats are making a fateful bet that this successful management can simply continue through two sets of risks: the high stakes of the next election, in which a health crisis or just more slippage might be the thing that puts Trump back in the White House, and the different but also substantial stakes of another four-year term.“The ball will always find you” is not, of course, an invariable truth. It’s entirely possible that Biden can limp to another victory, that his second term will yield no worse consequences than, say, Ronald Reagan’s did, that having managed things thus far, his aides, spouse and cabinet can see the next five years through.But the Trump era has been one of those periods when providence or fate revenges itself more swiftly than usual on hubris — when the longstanding freedom that American parties and leaders have enjoyed, by virtue of our power and pre-eminence, to skate around our weak spots and mistakes has been substantially curtailed.Even Millhiser’s proposed analogy for the fixation on Biden’s age, the Clinton email scandal, fits this pattern. “Her emails” hurt Clinton at the last because they became briefly entangled with the Anthony Weiner sex scandal. This was substantively unfair, since nothing came of the Clinton emails found on Weiner’s laptop. But it was dramatically fitting, a near-Shakespearean twist, that after surviving all of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals the Clinton dynasty would be unmade at its hour of near triumph by a different, more pathetic predator.So whether it’s certain or not, I can’t help expecting a similarly dramatic punishment for trying to keep Biden in the White House notwithstanding his decline.That I also expect some kind of punishment from the Republicans renominating Trump notwithstanding his unfitness doesn’t make me inconsistent, because presidential politics isn’t quite the same as baseball. Unlike in a World Series, there need not be a simple victor: All can be punished; all of us can lose.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Questions About Key Players in Trump’s Plan to Overturn the 2020 Election

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      Last month, Times Opinion published a graphic mapping out many of the key players in former President Donald Trump’s plot to upend the 2020 election. In response to the project, we received more than 700 questions and comments from readers hungry to know more. Some asked why key players had not yet been charged. Others wanted to know how to prevent future subversive efforts like the fake electors scheme. So we asked Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who drew up the initial list of names and worked on how to arrange them, to weigh in. He started with the questions that, as he put it, “hit hardest for me: questions about who we left out and those who funded the whole shebang.” Reader comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.The Masterminds and FinanciersWho is financing Mr. Trump’s machine? When you follow the money, what do you find? — Nathaniel Means, Shreveport, La.Norman Eisen: Nathaniel’s question is key. An army of small donors have shouldered part of the burden, as have more substantial donors to his Save America PAC and other organizations.There were others who funded aspects of the election overthrow effort. The Rule of Law Defense Fund, an organization associated with the Republican Attorneys General Association, for instance, was involved in promoting the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse. Other donors include Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix heiress who reportedly gave about $300,000 to rally organizers. The special counsel Jack Smith is reportedly continuing to analyze as part of his prosecution fund-raising efforts related to the attempt to overturn the election, though it is unclear if that will include the Jan. 6 rally, so we may see.If you want more information, you can dig into the Jan. 6 committee’s final report. It includes an appendix entitled “The Big Rip-off,” which explains how the Trump campaign raised enormous sums off its claims that the election was stolen.And of course, there’s a whole additional piece of this puzzle: the figures who continue to fund the members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election. Public Citizen and Judd Legum’s “Popular Information” newsletter have both done good reporting on this topic. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an organization I co-founded, has also published very good analysis of the major American companies that have or continue to fund these members of Congress. I patronize many of those companies, so I suppose the ultimate answer to your question is that we’re all funding those who enabled or continue to enable Trump, if indirectly.This conspiracy to “defraud” America seems very decentralized. Who, or what group of conspirators, masterminded the effort and gave it urgency and energy? — Jeff Tarakajian, Narragansett, R.I.We put Mr. Trump at the center of our graphic with his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, directly to his right because we felt that they were really the masterminds behind this effort. But ultimately, I believe that this was an attempted coup not of soldiers, tanks and guns but of lawyers, cases and statutes. That’s why we depicted lawyers on Mr. Trump’s other side. They too were critical to the overall scheme. So were many others who still seem to be welcomed in polite society, including the R.N.C. chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.Criteria for the ‘Congressional Cowards’What, if any, consequences will the “congressional cowards” suffer? Are they all just going to get off scot-free? Run for re-election? How can that be possible? — Cheryl Voglesong, Troy, Mich.The eight congressional cowards we highlighted, and the additional 139 members of Congress who baselessly voted against certifying the 2020 election, do indeed seem to be insulated from consequences so far. These 147 members largely hail from Trump strongholds, which has shielded them from electoral consequences. Exacting legal consequences is also challenging because of the complex set of legal immunities members of Congress enjoy. That makes them tougher to prosecute or even investigate. Just last week, Scott Perry, a congressman from Pennsylvania who had one of the most significant roles in the attempted coup, was able to use this immunity argument to convince judges on the D.C. Circuit that prosecutors shouldn’t be able to access everything on his cellphone. (It was seized by the F.B.I. in August 2022, and he has been fighting back in the courts since.) The D.O.J. may still appeal that decision to the full D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court, but the whole episode highlights the challenge that prosecutors face in attempting to hold members of Congress accountable for their actions.If you’re wondering why we chose to highlight these eight members of Congress and not the other 139 who voted against certifying the election results, it’s because we felt that, based on a thorough review of the public record, they bore the most profound responsibility. We could have included a generic bubble for the remaining 139, as we did elsewhere in the graphic, but ultimately we chose a simpler approach.Serious Players Haven’t Been ChargedBased on taped comments that have been broadcast in the media, it would seem both Roger Stone and Steve Bannon were involved in the conspiracy. Why haven’t they been charged? — Kathy Rogers, Whitefish Bay, Wis.Part of the reason Mr. Stone and Mr. Bannon have yet to be charged is that the American justice system has extremely high standards for prosecution and appeal. It’s one of the strengths of our justice system. So despite their participation in aspects of the effort, including taking part in the infamous Willard war room, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Stone were not charged because prosecutors likely decided the evidence was just not strong enough.‘Mr. Trump Has Inspired Extreme Loyalty’One would expect these were all law-abiding people for whom the threat of potential criminal prosecution works as an effective deterrent. Any thoughts about why the politicians and lawyers and bureaucrats risked their own personal well-being for this long-shot effort? — Jon Lipsky, San FranciscoI have wrestled with this question for years, including as the attempted coup was unfolding in real time after the election. I suspect the answer is slightly different for every single one of these people. Mr. Trump has inspired extreme loyalty in millions of Americans, and these leaders appear to be among them. That allegiance sent them down a factual and legal slippery slope that started with baseless arguments but culminated in outright illegal ones.Pushing Back on Subversive EffortsWhat formal mechanisms can be put in place to prevent individual states from putting up slates of fake electors? — Jeff Rosen, Evanston, Ill.The efforts to overturn the election exploited weaknesses in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which defined the procedures for certifying a president-elect’s victory at the time. In August 2022, I testified before the Senate Rules Committee in support of comprehensive legislative reform to prevent such shenanigans in the future by targeting the gaps exposed on Jan. 6. I’m pleased to say that these improvements became law in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. With 135 years elapsing between the original act in 1887 and the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, this remodel was long overdue, and should restrict future misconduct (although the criminal mind is endlessly inventive).This network obviously does not care what the public thinks of them, and the progress made by the justice system has been halting at best. How can the average Joe push back on these subversive efforts? — Benjamin Larson, CincinnatiThe ultimate way that average people can push back on election subversion is by making their voices heard at the ballot box, preferably creating margins that are too large to easily overthrow. But it doesn’t stop there. With the multiple criminal cases moving across the country, there’s also a role for average folks in serving on the juries in these matters. Given Mr. Trump’s heated rhetoric, coming on top of the other sacrifices in serving as a juror in the trial of a long case, that is no easy task. But I’m confident that Americans will step up to do that job as well.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Moves to Quash Most Charges Against Him in Georgia

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      The motion essentially piggybacked off another filed by one of the former president’s co-defendants, which gave a detailed critique of the sprawling indictment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Monday to throw out most of the 13 charges against him in the wide-ranging election interference indictment handed up by a grand jury last month in Georgia.The one-page motion from Mr. Trump’s Georgia lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, refers to a more expansive motion also filed on Monday by one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, the lawyer Ray Smith III. That motion gives a detailed critique of the 98-page indictment, arguing that its “defects” are “voluminous,” and that it is legally unsound.Among other things, Mr. Smith’s motion says that the charge of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — which all 19 defendants face — seeks to “punish protected First Amendment activity” and fails to “sufficiently allege the existence” of a racketeering enterprise whose goal was to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow 2020 election loss in the state.The Smith filing argues that the racketeering conspiracy laid out by the prosecution was actually “comprised of millions of people throughout the country” who believed election fraud had taken place and were working toward the same goal as the defendants.To illustrate the point, the motion stated that there were probably thousands of bank robbers in the United States, “but the mere fact that they all rob banks and have the same goal and many of the same methods of operation, does not mean that all American bank robbers constitute one RICO enterprise, despite the fact that they are people who commit the same crime, for the same reason.”Mr. Smith’s legal team includes Donald F. Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer.The office of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who is leading the prosecution, declined to comment on Monday evening ahead of an official response to the motion in court. Mr. Sadow also declined to comment.The filing was the latest legal volley in the case, which Mr. Trump sought to quash even before his indictment in mid-August. It came as little surprise to legal analysts watching the case, who had expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive defense long before the start of a trial.The former president’s lawyers have already moved to sever his case from two co-defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who have demanded a speedy trial. Their joint trial is set to start on Oct. 23.Mr. Smith, a lawyer based in Atlanta who helped Mr. Trump’s team challenge his loss in Georgia after the election, faces a dozen charges in the case. He advanced false claims about the election at a legislative hearing, according to the indictment. And, prosecutors charge, he took part in the efforts to get fake Trump electors to cast votes and sign documents that falsely claimed that he had won the election. Mr. Smith has pleaded not guilty.“He never advocated violence; he never cried ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” his lawyers argued in the motion. “If advocacy in court or the legislature is a crime — if it merits being branded a ‘racketeer’ — there are very few people who will have the courage to risk engaging in such advocacy. ”Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in the Atlanta area, said on Monday that the motion was unlikely to succeed in court, describing the racketeering enterprise defined in the indictment as “pretty tightly drawn.” But he noted that defense lawyers sometimes filed motions directed more at the court of public opinion, with an eye toward influencing a potential jury pool.Notably, the Smith motion does not excuse all the activity that took place.“If, as the Fulton prosecutors claim, somebody threatened physical harm to an election worker, that might (or should) be prosecuted as a crime,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers write. “The same for stealing computers or information from a computer.”Some defendants in the case were charged with conspiracy to commit computer theft in a breach of a rural Georgia county’s voting system, while others were accused of threatening a poll worker.Mr. Trump may soon follow the lead of several other defendants and ask to have his case moved to federal court, where the jury pool would be somewhat more supportive of him. But on Friday, a U.S. District Court judge rejected such a request from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, dimming the prospects that others would succeed with the strategy. More

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      Judge Denies Mark Meadows’s Request to Move Georgia Case to Federal Court

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      Moving the case to federal court would have given Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, one key advantage: a jury pool that was more favorable to Donald J. Trump.Georgia prosecutors leading the criminal election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies notched a victory on Friday when a judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his case from state court to federal court.Mr. Meadows would have faced the same state felony charges had his case been heard by a federal judge and jury, including a racketeering charge for his role in what prosecutors have described as a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. But removal to federal court would have given him key advantages, including a jury pool that was more favorable to Mr. Trump.Conducting a trial in federal court would have also increased the likelihood that the United States Supreme Court, a third of whose members were nominated by Mr. Trump, would ultimately get involved in the case.The setback for Mr. Meadows came in the first of many rulings that are expected for the defendants who are seeking to have their cases moved out of state court. Mr. Trump has not filed for a removal to federal court, but he is widely expected to do so.However, the ruling, by Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia, does not bode well for any of those efforts. An early trial is already scheduled to start in state court on Oct. 23 for two defendants, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, who have invoked their right for a speedy trial under Georgia law.The question of where the trials will take place is significant in another way as well. Unlike in federal court, the proceedings in state court will be televised, setting the stage for long-running public trials focused on efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to cling to power.“There is no federal jurisdiction over the criminal case,” Judge Jones, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, wrote in his ruling. “The outcome of this case will be for a Fulton County judge and trier of fact to ultimately decide.”A lawyer for Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Read the documentJudge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his racketeering case from state court to federal court.Read Document 49 pagesThe ruling, which Mr. Meadows appealed on Friday night, came after his lawyers took the unexpected step of putting their client on the witness stand to make the case for removal in a hearing on Aug. 28 in Judge Jones’s courtroom in downtown Atlanta.“Meadows had the strongest of the removal cases,” said Norman Eisen, who was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “If Meadows has failed, then there’s little hope for Clark, or for that matter Trump,” he added, referring to Jeffrey Clark, a defendant and former Justice Department official who has also filed to move his case to federal court.In a filing this week, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, notified the presiding Fulton County Superior Court judge, Scott McAfee, that Mr. Trump might seek to move his case; he has until the end of the month to decide.A key issue for Judge Jones was whether Mr. Meadows’s actions, as described in the 98-page indictment, could be considered within the scope of his job duties as White House chief of staff, which would qualify his case for removal under federal law. Removal is a longstanding legal tradition meant to protect federal officials from state-level prosecution that could impede them from conducting federal business; it is rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.In the hearing on Mr. Meadows’s request, Fulton County prosecutors argued that he had overstepped the bounds of his chief-of-staff duties by acting as a de facto agent of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. They noted that he had arranged and participated in the now-famous Jan. 2, 2021, call between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes, enough to reverse his election loss in the state.The prosecutors said that with such actions, Mr. Meadows had violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while they are on the job. Among the examples they noted was a text message that Mr. Meadows sent on Dec. 27, 2020, to an official in Mr. Raffensperger’s office, in which he offered financial assistance from the “Trump campaign” for a ballot verification effort.Mr. Meadows’s lawyers emphasized that a chief of staff’s job often occupies a messy place where policy and politics converge — and that was among the reasons that some observers thought he had the best shot at removal to federal court.But Judge Jones decided that the actions ascribed to Mr. Meadows in the indictment were not within the scope of his federal duties.The evidence, he ruled, “establishes that the actions at the heart of the state’s charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures.”Mr. Meadows testified at the hearing before Judge Jones that he believed there were outstanding allegations of election fraud that Mr. Trump was concerned about that needed further investigation in the weeks after the election even after William P. Barr, the attorney general at the time, met with Mr. Meadows and told him that many of the allegations were “bullshit.”In a likely preview to his defense strategy, Mr. Meadows also said he wanted to help Mr. Trump look into election fraud allegations as a way to “hopefully get this off of the president’s concern list.” That way, he could “land the plane,” he said, referring to facilitating a smooth and peaceful transfer of power to an incoming President Biden.Mr. Trump’s lawyers unsuccessfully sought removal in his state criminal case in New York, in which he is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from a hush money payment made to a porn star in 2016. Mr. Trump is also facing two federal criminal cases in Florida and Washington, D.C.Besides Mr. Meadows and Mr. Clark, three other co-defendants in the Georgia case have asked for their cases to be moved to federal court. The others were Republican Party electors who submitted Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump despite his loss in Georgia: State Senator Shawn Still; Cathy Latham, a party activist from rural Georgia; and David Shafer, the former head of the Georgia Republican Party. Their claim is seen as particularly tenuous, because they did not work for the federal government.For cases that remain in the state court system, the jury will be drawn from Fulton County, which covers most of Atlanta; Mr. Trump received just over 26 percent of the vote there in 2020. Cases removed to federal court would get a jury from a 10-county area where Mr. Trump received nearly 35 percent of the vote — a not-insignificant advantage for defendants, given the fact that it takes only one not-guilty vote to hang a jury.In addition to racketeering, Mr. Meadows is charged with one count of solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer for his participation in the phone call with Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state. Prosecutors accuse Mr. Meadows of having “unlawfully solicited, requested and importuned” Mr. Raffensperger to engage in the illegal act of changing the certified vote returns in the state.Prosecutors subpoenaed Mr. Raffensperger to testify at Mr. Meadows’s removal hearing. Mr. Raffensperger recounted how he was not swayed by Mr. Trump’s arguments that there were problems with the election results, which at that point had been subject to multiple recounts.When asked to characterize the conversation with Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows, Mr. Raffensperger said, “I thought it was a campaign call.” More

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      Special Grand Jury in Georgia Recommended Charging Lindsey Graham in Trump Case

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      A special grand jury made the recommendation last year after hearing from dozens of witnesses on whether Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election.A special grand jury that investigated election interference allegations in Georgia recommended indicting a number of Trump allies who were not charged, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser.In its final report, which a judge unsealed on Friday, the panel also recommended charges against Boris Epshteyn, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s main lawyers, as well as a number of other Trump-aligned lawyers, including Cleta Mitchell and Lin Wood.Mr. Trump and 18 allies were charged in a racketeering indictment that was handed up last month by a regular grand jury in Fulton County, Ga.The special grand jury, which Fulton County prosecutors convened to help with the investigation, met at an Atlanta courthouse from June to December of last year. It spent much of that time hearing testimony from 75 witnesses on the question of whether Mr. Trump or any of his allies had sought to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.Under Georgia law, the panel could not issue indictments itself. In the Trump case, that task fell to a regular grand jury that was seated over the summer. The regular grand jury heard evidence from prosecutors for one day in early August before voting to indict all 19 defendants whom prosecutors had sought to charge.The special grand jury’s mandate was to write a report with recommendations on whether indictments were warranted in the investigation, which was led by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Ms. Willis asked to convene a special grand jury because such panels have subpoena powers, and she was concerned that some witnesses would not cooperate without being subpoenaed.Portions of the report were publicly released in February, but those excerpts did not indicate who had been recommended for indictment, or on what charges. The release of the full nine-page report this week was ordered by Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court.Read the Report by the Special Grand Jury in Georgia That Investigated President TrumpThe special grand jury investigated whether Mr. Trump interfered in the 2020 election in the state. Their report included recommendations on whether indictments were warranted, and for whom.Read DocumentMr. Epshteyn declined on Friday to comment about the report. Others whom the advisory panel recommended for indictment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.After the special grand jury recommended indictments of about 40 people, the district attorney had to weigh which prosecutions would be the most likely to succeed in court. A potential case against Mr. Graham, for example, would have been hampered by the fact that there were conflicting accounts of telephone calls he made to a top Georgia official. Mr. Graham has repeatedly said that he did nothing wrong.Fulton County prosecutors indicated in court filings last year that they were interested in those calls by Mr. Graham, a onetime critic of Mr. Trump who became a staunch supporter. They were made shortly after the November 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.Mr. Raffensperger has said that in those calls, Mr. Graham suggested the rejection of all mail-in votes from Georgia counties with high rates of questionable signatures, a step that would have excluded many more Democratic votes than Republican ones. But the phone calls are not known to have been recorded, and recollections differ about exactly what was said — factors that probably figured in the decision not to charge Mr. Graham.In a filing seeking Mr. Graham’s testimony, prosecutors said that he “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about re-examining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” and “made reference to allegations of widespread voter fraud” during those calls.A few weeks after the calls, Mr. Trump followed up with a call of his own to Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, saying that he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes, enough to reverse his loss in Georgia. Mr. Trump’s call, which was recorded, is the basis for a number of charges in the 98-page indictment.Mr. Graham has characterized as “ridiculous” the idea that he had suggested to Mr. Raffensperger that he throw out legally cast votes, and the senator’s lawyers have argued that he was carrying out a legitimate investigative function as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a bid to avoid testifying before the special grand jury last year, Mr. Graham waged a legal battle that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately, he was forced to testify.Afterward, he said that he had spent two hours giving testimony behind closed doors, where he said he “answered all questions.”Mr. Graham has been critical of prosecutors in the Georgia case and the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump, characterizing them as liberals who were “weaponizing the law” to unfairly target the former president.After the Georgia indictment, Mr. Graham told reporters in South Carolina that he was not cooperating with the Fulton County prosecutors, dismissing the idea as “crazy stuff.”“I went, had my time, and I haven’t heard from them since,” he said. More