Presidential Election of 2020

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      Trump Makes Another Pitch to Appeals Court on Immunity in Election Case

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      The filing was the last step before an appeals court in Washington will hold a hearing on the crucial issue next week.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday made their final written request to a federal appeals court to grant Mr. Trump immunity to charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing the indictment should be tossed out because it arose from actions he took while in the White House.The 41-page filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was the final step before the defense and prosecution debate the issue in front of a three-judge panel next Tuesday.The dispute over immunity is the single most important aspect of the election interference case, touching not only on new questions of law but also on consequential issues of timing. The case is scheduled to go to trial in Federal District Court in Washington in early March, but has been put on hold until Mr. Trump’s efforts to have the charges tossed on immunity grounds are resolved.In their filing to the appeals court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers repeated some of the arguments they had made in earlier submissions. They claimed, for instance, that a long history of presidents not being charged with crimes suggested that they all enjoyed immunity. They also said that prosecuting Mr. Trump now could unleash a chain reaction of other presidents being indicted.“The 234-year unbroken tradition of not prosecuting presidents for official acts, despite vociferous calls to do so from across the political spectrum, provides powerful evidence of it,” D. John Sauer, a lawyer who has handled Mr. Trump’s appeals, wrote of the idea of executive immunity.Mr. Sauer added: “The likelihood of mushrooming politically motivated prosecutions, and future cycles of recrimination, are far more menacing and crippling to the presidency than the threat of civil liability.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers raised another, even more audacious argument: that because he had been acquitted by the Senate during his second impeachment of inciting insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he could not be tried in a criminal court in the election interference case.But both legal experts and some of the senators who acquitted Mr. Trump have disagreed with that position — not least because the federal charges he is facing are not analogous to those he faced during his impeachment.The issue of Mr. Trump’s immunity claims is legally significant because the question of whether former presidents can be criminally liable for things they did in office has not been tested in court. Mr. Trump is the first former president to have been charged with crimes.But the appeal of the immunity issue has revolved around more than the question of whether Mr. Trump should eventually stand trial on the election charges. It has also touched on the separate, but equally critical, question of when the trial should occur.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have been trying for weeks to keep the trial on schedule, arguing that the public has an enormous interest in a speedy prosecution of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party’s leading candidate for the presidency.Mr. Trump’s lawyers, pulling in the opposite direction, have used every lever at their disposal to slow the case down, hoping to delay a trial until after the 2024 election is decided. If that happened and Mr. Trump won, he would have the power to simply order the charges against him dropped.The immunity challenge is being considered by Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and by Judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs, who were put on the bench by President Biden.On Tuesday, before Mr. Trump’s court papers were filed, the judges informed both sides in the case that they should be prepared at the hearing next week to discuss issues raised in several friend-of-the-court briefs that have been submitted.One of the briefs argued that the issue of immunity should never have been subject to an immediate appeal, but rather should have been raised only if Mr. Trump were convicted. Another maintained that Mr. Smith had been improperly appointed to the role of special counsel and lacked the “authority to conduct the underlying prosecution.”Last month, fearing that a prolonged appeal could delay the case from going in front of a jury, Mr. Smith made an unusual request to the Supreme Court: He asked the justices to step in front of the appeals court and consider the case first.Although the justices rejected his petition, they are likely to get the case again after the appeals court makes its decision. More

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      Tracking State Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 Ballot

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      States with challenges to Trump’s candidacy Trump disqualified, decision appealed Decision pending Challenge dismissed or rejected Alaska Ariz. Calif. Colo. Conn. Del. Fla. Idaho Kan. La. Maine Mass. Mich. Minn. Mont. Nev. N.H. N.J. N.M. N.Y. N.C. Okla. Ore. Pa. R.I. S.C. Texas Utah Vt. Va. W.Va. Wis. Wyo. Formal challenges to Donald J. Trump’s […] More

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      Trump’s Most Ambitious Argument in His Bid for ‘Absolute Immunity’

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      The former president says his acquittal by the Senate in his second impeachment trial, for inciting insurrection, bars any prosecution on similar grounds.There is almost nothing in the words of the Constitution that even begins to support former President Donald J. Trump’s boldest defense against charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election: that he is absolutely immune from prosecution for actions he took while in office.A federal appeals court will hear arguments on the question next week, and the panel will consider factors including history, precedent and the separation of powers. But, as the Supreme Court has acknowledged, the Constitution itself does not explicitly address the existence or scope of presidential immunity.In his appellate brief, Mr. Trump said there was one constitutional provision that figured in the analysis, though his argument is a legal long shot. The provision, the impeachment judgment clause, says that officials impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate are still subject to criminal prosecution.The provision says: “Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: But the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”All the clause says in so many words, then, is that “the party convicted” in the Senate can still face criminal prosecution. But Mr. Trump said the clause implied something more.The clause “presupposes that a president who is not convicted may not be subject to criminal prosecution,” Mr. Trump’s brief said.A friend-of the-court brief from former government officials said Mr. Trump’s position had “sweeping and absurd consequences,” noting that a great many officials are subject to impeachment.“Under defendant’s interpretation,” the brief said, “the executive would lack power to prosecute all current and former civil officers for acts taken in office unless Congress first impeached and convicted them. That would permit countless officials to evade criminal liability.”Mr. Trump also made a slightly narrower but still audacious argument: “A president who is acquitted by the Senate cannot be prosecuted for the acquitted conduct.”Mr. Trump was, of course, acquitted at his second impeachment trial, on charges that he incited insurrection, when 57 senators voted against him, 10 shy of the two-thirds majority needed to convict.The idea that the impeachment acquittal conferred immunity from prosecution may come as a surprise to some of those who did the acquitting.Take Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, who voted for acquittal. Shortly afterward, in a fiery speech on the Senate floor, he said the legal system could still hold Mr. Trump to account.“We have a criminal justice system in this country,” Mr. McConnell said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”That suggests that Mr. Trump’s reading of the clause is far from obvious, but the Justice Department has said that it is not wholly implausible. In 2000, its Office of Legal Counsel issued a 46-page memorandum devoted to just this question. It was called “Whether a Former President May Be Indicted and Tried for the Same Offenses for Which He was Impeached by the House and Acquitted by the Senate.”The argument that such prosecutions run afoul of the Constitution “has some force,” according to the memo, which was prepared by Randolph D. Moss, now a federal judge. But, it went on, “despite its initial plausibility, we find this interpretation of the impeachment judgment clause ultimately unconvincing.”It added: “We are unaware of any evidence suggesting that the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution chose the phrase ‘the party convicted’ with a negative implication in mind.”More fundamentally, the memo said, “impeachment and criminal prosecution serve entirely distinct goals.” Impeachment trials involve political judgments. Criminal trials involve legal ones.In a brief filed on Saturday, Jack Smith, the special counsel, wrote that “acquittal in a Senate impeachment trial may reflect a technical or procedural determination rather than a factual conclusion.” The brief noted that at least 31 of the 43 senators who voted to acquit Mr. Trump at the impeachment trial said they did so at least in part because he was no longer in office and thus not subject to the Senate’s jurisdiction.Mr. Trump’s reading of the provision “would produce implausibly perverse results,” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing his trial in Federal District Court in Washington, wrote in a decision last month rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of absolute immunity.She noted that the Constitution permits impeachment for a narrow array of offenses — “treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors.”Under Mr. Trump’s reading, Judge Chutkan wrote, “if a president commits a crime that does not fall within that limited category, and so could not be impeached and convicted, the president could never be prosecuted for that crime.”“Alternatively,” she went on, “if Congress does not have the opportunity to impeach or convict a sitting president — perhaps because the crime occurred near the end of their term, or is covered up until after the president has left office — the former president similarly could not be prosecuted.”She added that President Gerald R. Ford’s pardon of former President Richard M. Nixon, who resigned as calls to impeach him for his role in the Watergate scandal grew, would have been unnecessary under Mr. Trump’s reading. More

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      Maine Law ‘Required That I Act’ to Disqualify Trump, Secretary of State Says

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      Barring former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot was a hard but necessary call, Shenna Bellows said in an interview.Before she decided to bar former President Donald J. Trump from Maine’s primary ballot, Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state, was not known for courting controversy.She began her career in public office as a state senator in 2016, winning in a politically mixed district. She prided herself on finding common ground with Republicans, an approach she said was shaped by growing up in a politically diverse family.As the former head of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union, Ms. Bellows did not shy away from divisive issues. But her ballot decision on Thursday was perhaps the weightiest and most politically fraught that she had faced — and it sparked loud rebukes from Republicans in Maine and beyond.In an interview on Friday, Ms. Bellows defended her decision, arguing that Mr. Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol made it necessary to exclude him from the ballot next year.“This is not a decision I made lightly,” Ms. Bellows, 48, said. “The United States Constitution does not tolerate an assault on the foundations of our government, and Maine election law required that I act in response.”Ms. Bellows, a Democrat, is among many election officials around the country who have considered legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s latest bid for the White House based on an obscure clause of the 14th Amendment that bars government officials who have engaged in “insurrection” from serving in the U.S. government.After holding a hearing this month in which she considered arguments from both Mr. Trump’s lawyers and his critics, Ms. Bellows explained her decision in a 34-page order issued on Thursday night.The ban, which is being appealed in the courts, made Maine the second state to disqualify Mr. Trump from the primary ballot next year. Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled last week that his efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election were disqualifying. Opponents of Mr. Trump are pursuing similar challenges in several other states.Lawyers on both sides of the dispute are calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to promptly issue a ruling on how election officials should interpret the insurrectionist clause of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted to bar Confederate officials from serving in the U.S. government after the Civil War.Mr. Trump’s campaign and Maine Republicans have called Ms. Bellows’s decision an overreach. The Maine Republican Party issued a fund-raising appeal that called Ms. Bellows “a biased Democrat Party hack unworthy of the high office she holds.”Maine’s two senators, Susan Collins, a Republican, and Angus King, an independent who generally votes with Democrats, also took issue with the ban, with Mr. King saying that “the decision as to whether or not Mr. Trump should again be considered for the presidency should rest with the people as expressed in free and fair elections.”Ms. Bellows said it was not uncommon for secretaries of state to bar candidates from the ballot if they did not meet eligibility requirements, and noted that she refused to allow Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot after he failed to get enough signatures.Ms. Bellows, who became a powerful figure in a politically divided state, said she had managed to work collaboratively with Republicans. Though in interviews, longtime colleagues of Ms. Bellows said they were not surprised by her willingness to take a politically risky stance.“Secretary Bellows has a well-earned reputation for being an extremely hard worker who is willing to follow her conscience,” said Zach Heiden, the chief counsel at the A.C.L.U. in Maine who reported to Ms. Bellows when she led the organization from 2005 to 2013.At the A.C.L.U., Ms. Bellows championed same-sex marriage and expanding voting rights, and fought provisions of the Patriot Act and certain government surveillance programs after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2014, after leaving the organization, Ms. Bellows launched an unsuccessful bid to unseat Ms. Collins, who has been in the Senate since 1997.“At first the Democratic establishment did not take her seriously,” said John Brautigam, a former Maine lawmaker. “But Shenna won the nomination and conducted a credible and issue-focused campaign.”In 2016, Ms. Bellows won a State Senate seat that included her hometown, Manchester. The district is politically mixed: It favored Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Mr. Trump in 2016.While her politics have been decidedly liberal, Ms. Bellows said she had never seen herself as an extreme partisan. Shortly after becoming a state senator, Ms. Bellows said she found common ground with Republicans on several initiatives, including a bill making it easier to license medical professionals in the state.That approach to politics, she said, was shaped by growing up in a family that was politically split.“The key to my success in working across the aisle has always been the willingness to listen and hear both sides and to be open to what people have to say,” she said.In 2020, Ms. Bellows put herself forward as a candidate for secretary of state, a role that is chosen by the Legislature in Maine. Ms. Bellows said she sought the position because she saw it as an opportunity to safeguard democratic principles, key among them the right to vote.“As a kid, I had a copy of the Bill of Rights on my bedroom wall,” she said. These days, she said, she often carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution in her purse.The aftermath of the 2020 election deeply disturbed Ms. Bellows, who condemned Mr. Trump in posts on social media after an effort to impeach him failed.“He should have been impeached,” she wrote in February 2021. “But history will not treat him or those who voted against impeachment lightly.”Republicans have said that those remarks call into question her objectivity. But Ms. Bellows said her decision to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot was based solely on the facts and the law. She said a motto from her time at the A.C.L.U. had long guided her actions.“We had a saying: There are no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent principles,” she said. “That is a philosophy that I try to live my life by.” More

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      Prosecutors Ask Judge to Keep Trump From Making ‘Baseless Political Claims’ in Trial

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      The special counsel, Jack Smith, is seeking to shape the evidence the jury in the federal election interference case will hear.Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Wednesday to keep former President Donald J. Trump and his lawyers from claiming to the jury in his upcoming election interference trial that the case had been brought against him as a partisan attack by the Biden administration.The move by the prosecutors was designed to keep Mr. Trump from overtly politicizing his trial and from distracting the jury with unfounded political arguments that he has often made on both the campaign trail and in court papers related to the case.Ever since Mr. Trump was charged this summer with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, he and his lawyers have sought to frame the indictment as a retaliatory strike against him by President Biden. Mr. Trump has also placed such claims at the heart of his presidential campaign even though the charges were initially returned by a federal grand jury and are being overseen by an independent special counsel, Jack Smith.Molly Gaston, one of Mr. Smith’s senior assistants, asked Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is handling the election case in Federal District Court in Washington, to keep Mr. Trump’s political attacks as far away from the jury as possible.“The court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation,” Ms. Gaston wrote, “and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding.”The 20-page motion was filed two weeks after Judge Chutkan effectively froze the case in place as an appeals court considers Mr. Trump’s broad claims that he is immune from prosecution. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear the question of the immunity immediately, although the justices are likely to take up the issue after the appeals court completes its highly accelerated review.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Michigan Supreme Court Decides Trump Can Stay on Ballot

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

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      Michigan Republican Regrets Participation as Fake Trump Elector

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

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      The Unsettling Truth at the Heart of the Giuliani Case

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      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