Trump, Donald J

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      Fani Willis to Appeal Judge’s Decision to Quash Charges in Trump Georgia Case

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      Thursday’s legal filing by Fani Willis creates a second substantive set of issues that must now be considered by the Georgia Court of Appeals before the election case can go to trial.Fani T. Willis, the lead prosecutor in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and 14 of his allies, said on Thursday that her office would appeal a judge’s decision earlier this year to throw out six of the dozens of counts in the sprawling indictment.Thursday’s legal filing by Ms. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, creates a second substantive set of issues that must now be considered by the Georgia Court of Appeals before the election case can go to trial. This month, the court agreed to hear the appeal of another ruling by the judge, Scott McAfee, that allowed Ms. Willis to remain on the case despite defense lawyers arguing that she should be disqualified.Ms. Willis’s decision to file the appeal was yet another indication that the closely watched election interference case was unlikely to go to trial before the upcoming presidential election. “In some ways it’s an implicit concession that it’s not going to happen before November,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been following the case closely.A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment on the filing on Thursday.The original indictment, which was handed up by a grand jury in August, included 41 counts against Mr. Trump and 18 co-defendants. Four of those co-defendants have since pleaded guilty.In March, Judge McAfee, of Fulton County Superior Court, quashed six of the charges for lacking sufficient detail. Those charges asserted that Mr. Trump and other defendants had solicited public officials to break the law by violating their oaths of office.For example, one count against Mr. Trump said that he “unlawfully solicited, requested and importuned” the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to violate his oath of office by decertifying the election. Judge McAfee ruled at the time that the six charges “do not give the defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently.”Though the quashing of the six charges was a setback for prosecutors, it left intact the most important element of the indictment: the state racketeering charge that was brought against all of the defendants.It is unclear how much more time it will take for the appellate court to handle Ms. Willis’s appeal, but legal experts have said that the appeal of the disqualification matter alone could take months.Defense lawyers in the case had argued that Ms. Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting it on the grounds that she had created an untenable conflict of interest when she engaged in a romantic relationship with Nathan J. Wade, a lawyer she had hired to manage the prosecution team.Judge McAfee ruled in March that Ms. Willis could keep the case if Mr. Wade stepped away from it. Mr. Wade resigned hours after the judge issued his ruling. More

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      Trump Plays Up His Putin Ties in Claiming He Could Get Gershkovich Released

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      Former President Donald J. Trump claimed that, if re-elected, he could draw on his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin to press Russia into releasing Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in a Moscow jail for more than a year.Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that Mr. Gershkovich would be “released almost immediately after the election, but definitely before I assume office,” suggesting that his securing Mr. Gershkovich’s release was contingent on his defeating President Biden in November.“Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, added. Mr. Trump has frequently bragged about his positive relationship with Mr. Putin, whose strongman tendencies he has praised in interviews and on the campaign trail.Asked about Mr. Trump’s post, a spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters that “Putin has no contact with Donald Trump, of course.”Mr. Gershkovich, who was arrested in March last year in Russia and charged with espionage shortly after, has been designated by the White House as “wrongfully detained,” a label signifying that the United States views him as the equivalent of a political hostage and believes the charges against him are fabricated.Russia has not presented any evidence to support the spying charge, which Mr. Gershkovich and The Journal have vociferously rejected. The Biden administration has said it is working to secure his release.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ohio Elections Official Threatens to Exclude Biden From the Ballot

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      The Ohio General Assembly adjourned on Wednesday without addressing an issue that the state’s top elections official said would prevent President Biden from being placed on the ballot there, escalating a partisan clash that could result in the president not being on the ballot in all 50 states in November.Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, has said that he plans to exclude Mr. Biden from the ballot because he will be officially nominated after a deadline for certifying presidential nominees on the ballot. This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered a quick solution to ensure that major presidential candidates remain on the ballot.The Biden campaign is considering suing the state in order to ensure Mr. Biden is on the ballot, while also searching for some other way to resolve the issue without moving the date of the nominating convention, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations.A legal fight could be expensive and arduous. The Supreme Court recently ruled that states could not bar Mr. Trump from running for another term under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that prohibits insurrectionists from holding office. But it took six months of legal wrangling before the court put that issue to bed.Ohio is not considered a swing state — Mr. Trump won there with an eight-point edge in 2020 — but the Biden campaign could be drawn into a monthslong legal battle to ensure that the president is on the ballot in all 50 states.A legislative fix, which would have pushed back the certification deadline to accommodate the late date of the Democratic National Convention, stalled out this month as Republicans in the Ohio Senate tacked on a partisan measure that would ban foreign donations to state ballot initiatives. Mr. LaRose has previously said that passing the ban is the price that Democrats must pay to ensure that Mr. Biden is on the ballot, and that he would otherwise enforce the law as written.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Trump Official Meets With Arab and Muslim American Leaders

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      As President Biden’s support among Arab and Muslim Americans withers over his backing of Israel in the war in Gaza, former President Donald J. Trump is making a long-shot push to take advantage.On Tuesday, Richard Grenell, a former high-ranking official in the Trump administration, met for more than two hours with a group of about 40 Arab and Muslim American leaders at an Italian restaurant outside Detroit. Mr. Grenell was joined by the former president’s son-in-law Michael Boulos, who is married to Tiffany Trump and is Lebanese American, though the Trump campaign said it had not organized the meeting.Many Arab and Muslim American voters have said they are so angry with Mr. Biden over his Israel policy that they will sit out the election, despite supporting him in large numbers in 2020. But Mr. Grenell told the group that it had the chance to exercise extraordinary political power by backing Mr. Trump instead, according to six people who attended the meeting.Mr. Grenell argued that if Muslim and Arab Americans publicly swung their support to the former president — and helped him win Michigan, a key battleground state — they would demonstrate to both Republicans and Democrats that they could not be ignored.“The door is open to start to explore,” said Yahya Basha, a Syrian American radiologist from Royal Oak, Mich., who helped organize the meeting. “Let’s go approach and see what Trump has to offer.”Dr. Basha and others present described the meeting as light on policy details and said they needed to hear more before committing to support Mr. Trump. Several others who attended were already Trump supporters, but some had cast their ballots for Mr. Biden in 2020.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Doug Emhoff Calls Trump a ‘Known Antisemite’ as Biden Team Steps Up Attacks

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      Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, called former President Donald J. Trump “a known antisemite” in a video released on Tuesday, a notable escalation of attacks by President Biden’s campaign against Mr. Trump over his language about Jews.Mr. Emhoff’s remarks came in an afternoon social media post by the Biden campaign with the anodyne title “Second Gentleman @DouglasEmhoff responds to Trump attacking Jewish Americans.”“The last person I’m going to take advice from as a Jewish person is a known antisemite who’s had dinner with antisemites, who said there was ‘good people on both sides’ after Charlottesville,” Mr. Emhoff says in the video, after he apparently watches a weeks-old video of Mr. Trump proclaiming that Jews who vote for Mr. Biden “have to have their head examined.”Mr. Emhoff adds for emphasis, “He’s the last person I’m going to take advice from.”The Biden campaign has been seeking to extend a news cycle that began this week when Mr. Trump posted, then later took down, a video on social media that included old-time newspaper headlines saying a victory by him in November would bring about a “unified Reich.” Mr. Biden, in a video released by his campaign, accused Mr. Trump of using “Hitler’s language.”The Biden campaign and its surrogates have previously condemned Mr. Trump for using antisemitic language. Two weeks ago, a Biden campaign spokesman, Charles Lutvak, blasted Mr. Trump for employing “patronizing antisemitic shtick” after the former president said Jews who voted for Mr. Biden “should be ashamed of themselves.”Mr. Trump has long flirted with antisemitic language and imagery, and shown support for far-right backers who are openly antisemitic.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      House G.O.P. Moves to Crack Down on Noncitizen Voting, Sowing False Narrative

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      The bills under consideration have virtually no chance of becoming law, but Republicans are using them to amplify Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens.Republicans are pushing legislation to crack down on voting by noncitizens, which happens rarely and is already illegal in federal elections, in a move that reinforces former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the 2024 results if he loses.This week, House Republicans plan to vote on a bill that would roll back a District of Columbia law allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, which they contend is needed to prevent Democrats from expanding the practice to other jurisdictions. And they are advancing another measure that would require states to obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering a person to vote.The legislation has virtually no chance of becoming law, but it serves to amplify one of Mr. Trump’s favorite pre-emptive claims of election fraud. It also underscores Republicans’ embrace of a groundless narrative — one that echoes the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — that Democrats are intentionally allowing migrants to stream into the United States illegally in order to dilute the voting power of American citizens and lock in electoral victories for themselves.Speaker Mike Johnson recently appeared alongside Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida resort and residence, to announce a pledge to get tough on migrants flowing across the border, suggesting with no evidence that they were coming in unchecked as part of a plot to vote for President Biden.“There is currently an unprecedented and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system — and that is the threat of noncitizens and illegal aliens voting in our elections,” Mr. Johnson warned during a news conference on the steps of the Capitol this month.But he conceded that he had no evidence to support that assertion.“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Mr. Johnson said. “We don’t have that number.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s First Campaign Manager, Is Brought Back for G.O.P. Convention

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      Corey Lewandowski, former President Donald J. Trump’s first campaign manager, who was ousted from that campaign in 2016 and then from a pro-Trump super PAC in 2021, has been hired as an adviser for the Republican Party’s nominating convention in July, a person familiar with the decision said.Mr. Lewandowski, a longtime political adviser to Mr. Trump, was pushed out of a pro-Trump super PAC that he had helped lead — Make America Great Again Action — in 2021 after the wife of a donor accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. A spokesman for Mr. Trump said at the time that Mr. Lewandowski would “no longer be associated with Trump World.” His hiring for the Republican National Convention, which will be held in mid-July in Milwaukee, represents his return to Mr. Trump’s circle of political advisers.The hiring was first reported by National Review, and Chris LaCivita, a top official in the Trump campaign, told the conservative outlet that Mr. Lewandowski was “very helpful to me, and he’s helpful to the R.N.C., and he’s helpful to the president.”This month, Paul Manafort, who replaced Mr. Lewandowski as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, stepped down from a similar role advising the nominating convention, saying that “the media wants to use me as a distraction to try and harm President Trump and his campaign.” Mr. Manafort was convicted of a range of financial crimes and conspiracy to obstruct justice and spent nearly two years in prison before Mr. Trump pardoned him in December 2020.Mr. Lewandowski was the campaign manager for Mr. Trump when he first jumped into the presidential race in June 2015. Mr. Trump fired him in June 2016 at the urging of allies and his adult children as Mr. Lewandowski faced negative headlines that had overshadowed his boss, including being arrested and charged with misdemeanor battery — a charge later dropped — after he was accused of grabbing a reporter as she approached Mr. Trump. The next year, a pop singer accused Mr. Lewandowski of slapping her twice on the buttocks at a party in Washington.A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee highlighted the allegations against Mr. Lewandowski and said the Trump campaign was “scraping the bottom of the MAGA barrel” by hiring him.Mr. Lewandowski had considered running for a Senate seat in 2020 in New Hampshire, but ultimately backed out of the race. More