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    2,000 Mules director apologizes to man falsely accused of voter fraud in film

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    Conservative film-maker Dinesh D’Souza has issued a rare apology for his controversial documentary 2,000 Mules, a cornerstone of post-2020 election fraud conspiracy theories, but a prominent organization in the election denialism ecosystem is standing behind the film’s false claims.The film alleged a massive voter fraud scheme involving individuals supposedly stuffing ballot drop boxes with illegal votes. Central to these claims was cellphone geolocation data provided by True the Vote, a Texas-based non-profit that has become a prominent actor in the election denial ecosystem.True the Vote on Monday maintained that the film’s central premise “remains accurate”. The group insists its geolocation data proves suspicious voting patterns, despite repeated debunking by election experts, including the former attorney general William Barr.In a statement from last week, D’Souza acknowledges the video was mischaracterized.“I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team,” D’Souza’s said in the statement. “If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently.”D’Souza’s public admission focuses on Mark Andrews, a Georgia voter featured in the film at a ballot drop box. Despite blurring Andrews’ face, the documentary suggested he was part of a coordinated voter fraud operation.D’Souza said he was apologizing to Andrews “because it is the right thing to do”, and “not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress”. Andrews sued D’Souza, True the Vote and the film’s distributor, Salem Media Group, for defamation in 2022 over the film. Salem settled the lawsuit earlier this year, agreed to stop distributing the film and apologized to Andrews. The lawsuit against D’Souza and True the Vote in federal court in Georgia is ongoing. Motions for summary judgment, which could make public details of how the film was made, are due to be filed on 12 December.The cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, a Department of Homeland Security agency which has dominion over elections in the United States, declined a request for comment.The concession from D’Souza marks the latest example of a prominent vector of misinformation about the 2020 election acknowledging their claims were false. Amid a separate defamation lawsuit, the Gateway Pundit, the influential far-right news outlet, acknowledged earlier this year that it had falsely accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta election workers, of fraud.OAN, another network that spread false claims about the election, also apologized to the two election workers. Freeman and Moss won a $148m judgment in a libel suit against Rudy Giuliani last year and are moving to seize his assets.Founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, True the Vote has transformed from a fringe organization into a key player in challenging election results. The group claims to protect elections through technological surveillance, but has repeatedly failed to substantiate its expansive fraud allegations.It’s not the first time the organization’s credibility has been undermined in recent memory. An app developed by True the Vote contained a security flaw that exposed user email addresses ahead of the US election, and the group is facing an IRS complaint for potentially illegal political coordination with the Georgia Republican party in 2020.The documentary’s impact extended far beyond the fringes of the internet. Months after the film premiered at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, armed individuals were documented stalking voters at drop boxes in Arizona, an illustration of how such conspiracy theories can translate into real-world intimidation.Salem Media Group – which originally distributed the film – has already ceased its circulation and issued its own apology to Andrews. Lawyers for Andrews declined to comment.Another incident that inspired the film was a video recording made of a woman, Guillermina Fuentes, collecting her ballot from her neighbor in San Luis, Arizona, a largely Hispanic town on the US-Mexico border. Fuentes was prosecuted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and her neighbor was sentenced to a year of probation. Luis Marquez, a community activist, said he was glad to hear of an apology, but the damage may have already been done. “It really made people not vote,” he said. “It made people afraid.” More

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      Rudy Giuliani tells judge he can’t pay his bills in courtroom outburst

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      The former New York mayor and lawyer to Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, erupted in court on Tuesday, telling a judge: “I can’t pay my bills!”Sketches by courtroom artists, who create pictures for the media to use when cameras are not allowed in court, such as federal courts, showed a furious Giuliani, 80, pointing at the judge in his case, Lewis Liman.The hearing in federal court in Manhattan concerned a near-$150m judgment won by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia elections workers whom Giuliani defamed while advancing Trump’s lie that electoral fraud in 2020 cost him victory over Joe Biden.Liman said Giuliani had not been complying with orders to surrender assets.Giuliani said on Tuesday: “The implications you are making against me are wrong. I have no car, no credit card, no cash, everything I have is tied up, they have put stop orders on my business accounts, and I can’t pay my bills!”Giuliani’s fall has been spectacular. After making his name as a hard-charging prosecutor who took on organized crime, he was mayor for two terms, in office on 11 September 2001 and widely praised for his leadership after the terrorist attacks on the US. His 2008 presidential run flopped but Giuliani enjoyed a successful consulting and speaking career before allying himself with Trump when the property magnate entered Republican politics in 2015.Giuliani missed out on a cabinet appointment but became Trump’s personal attorney – work that fueled Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019 for blackmailing Ukraine for political dirt. Giuliani then became a prime driver of Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election – work which produced criminal charges, to which he pleaded not guilty, the huge defamation judgment, and disbarments in Washington and New York.In New York on Tuesday, Giuliani’s lawyer told the judge his client had turned over assets including a Mercedes Benz sports car once owned by the film star Lauren Bacall. An attorney for Freeman and Moss said Giuliani had turned over the car but not the title to it. Attorneys for the two women have also said they have gained access to Giuliani’s $5m Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, but have not secured “the keys, stock, or proprietary lease”.In court, the judge told Giuliani’s lawyer: “A car without a title is meaningless … your client is a competent person. He was the US attorney in the district. The notion that he can’t apply for a title certificate – ”Giuliani cut him off, saying: “I did apply for it! What am I supposed to do, make it up myself? Your implication that I have not been diligent about it is totally incorrect.”He then launched his outburst about financial problems.Giuliani’s lawyer asked Liman to extend deadlines, given he had only just started on the case after previous attorneys withdrew. Liman denied the request, saying: “You can’t restart the clock by firing one counsel and hiring another. He has already received multiple extensions, and missed multiple deadlines.”Trial is set for 16 January regarding whether Giuliani must also give Moss and Freeman his Florida home and four New York Yankees World Series commemoration rings. On Tuesday, Giuliani’s lawyer asked if the trial could be pushed back, so his client could attend inaugural events for Trump, who will be sworn in as president in Washington DC on 20 January. Liman said no.Outside court, Giuliani told reporters Liman was “going to rule against me. If you were sitting in the courtroom and couldn’t figure it out, you’re stupid.” He also said the judge’s “background is serious leftwing Democrat … about as leftwing as you get” – even while acknowledging Liman was nominated by Trump.Giuliani said he did not regret defaming Freeman and Moss.“I regret the persecution I have been put through,” he said. More

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      Democrats decry ‘sham for justice’ after prosecutors drop Trump charges

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      Responding to news that the special counsel Jack Smith had dropped all charges against Donald Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and retention of classified information, Dan Goldman, a prosecutor turned New York Democrat and member of the House oversight committee, lamented “a shame for justice in this country”.“It establishes that Donald Trump is above the law,” Goldman told CNN. “The supreme court put him above the law [by ruling that he had ‘absolute immunity’ for official acts] but now he appears to escape full accountability for what were crimes charged by a grand jury.”Goldman rejected the argument that by re-electing Trump, the American people had acquitted him of all charges.“I think what was very clear is that people voted for Donald Trump because they thought that he was going to improve the lives of the middle class, and perhaps in addition that he would secure the border,” Goldman said. “They did not vote for him to dismantle our democracy, to attack the constitution, to politicize all of our agencies, and certainly not as a referendum on his criminal cases.“Those cases should have been played out in a court of law … and Donald Trump should not have been able to run out the clock.”Elsewhere, Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol police sergeant who testified memorably about his experiences and injuries on 6 January 2021, when Trump sent a mob to attack Congress, lamented a simple “miscarriage of justice”.“‘No one is above the law’ is a great slogan,” added Gonell, who suffered injuries to his hands, shoulder, calf and foot, as well as psychological trauma, in the Capitol attack.To many Americans on Monday, “no one is above the law”, however, no longer seemed like a legal reality. Three weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Smith dropped 44 charges against him: four for election subversion and 40 for retention of classified records.Smith said he was following Department of Justice policy, which says a sitting president cannot be charged. He also said he was acting “without prejudice”, which meant the cases could be refiled after Trump leaves power.That was an echo of the situation in New York, where sentencing on Trump’s 34 felony convictions related to hush money payments to a porn star has been postponed. In Georgia, eight election subversion charges remain on the docket.Nonetheless, among Trump’s opponents, the mood was one of despond. The writer Tom Nichols, a conservative Trump critic, summed up: “Mission accomplished. He ran for [president] to stay out of jail, and here we are.”Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, celebrated “a major victory for the rule of law”, adding: “The American people and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country.”Democrats, however, expect Trump to seek revenge, not unity – and immediate comments from both the president-elect and JD Vance, the Ohio senator and incoming vice-president, did little to calm such fears.Vance said: “If Donald J Trump had lost an election, he may very well have spent the rest of his life in prison. These prosecutions were always political. Now it’s time to ensure what happened to President Trump never happens in this country again.”In a post to his own social media platform, Trump said all cases against him, including civil suits in New York resulting in multimillion-dollar penalties, were “empty and lawless”, orchestrated by his Democratic foes.“It was a political hijacking,” Trump said, “and a low point in the history of our country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON.” More

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      Trump’s cabinet picks are agents of his contempt, rage and vengeance | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “Shock” suddenly became the most commonly uttered word in habitually nonplussed Washington DC. After Donald Trump had attempted to subvert the certification of a presidential election, incited a mob, absconded with national security secrets, was convicted as a felon, and waged his Nazi-esque “poison in the blood” campaign, his brazen cabinet appointments are so mind-boggling that even hard-bitten cynics gasp.Sheer hypocrisy would have drawn a yawn. But Trump’s cabinet selections would have startled even the character of Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca, who feigned surprise at discovering gambling in the backroom of Rick’s Café before pocketing his winnings: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”If Russia occupied the United States, it would not impose a collaborationist regime of such hare-brained incompetents. Kleptocrats would be expected as commissars, but not patent lunatics. Hitler, for his part, murdered the Nazi radicals in the Night of the Long Knives to solidify his rule over the conservative establishment.Trump declared he would be a dictator on “day one”. But before day one, he has decided to empower some of the most fringe characters floating around his Maga movement. The outrageousness of his nominees is intended above all to force the subjugation of those remaining Republicans who insist on their independence. He has posed a battle royale with the Republican Senate to determine whether it will buckle under his mafia test to recess-appoint his madcap cabinet. He wants to break the Senate and crush it under his heel as his first act. Humiliation is the essence of his idea of power.Trump’s cabinet appointments are agents of his contempt, rage and vengeance. The motive for naming his quack nominees is located in his resentments from his sordid first term for which he pledged retribution. He sees the US government in its totality as a bastion of his “enemies within”. He intends to shatter every department and agency, root out expertise that might contradict his whims, demolish the balancing power of the Congress that could inhibit him, and trample the law that might stand in his way.Wrecking the government is not only Trump’s technique for gaining submission and compliance, but is his ultimate purpose. He will achieve vindication by tearing down anything he feels was used to restrain his destructive impulses or tried to hold him accountable for his past crimes, whether it is the military, the justice system or science itself.Before the election, Trump developed two elaborate plans, one if he lost and the other if he won. In either case, he would attack the federal government. He had learned lessons from the failure of his January 6 coup. His preparation throughout 2024 to declare the election stolen and force a constitutional crisis was the underside of his campaign.In advance, he organized an extensive network of lawyers and political operatives to deny he lost, refuse to certify the election in districts and states to the point of preventing an electoral college majority, and throw the election to the House of Representatives, where the Republicans held the margin from control of state legislatures to cast 26 states for him.In March, Trump ousted the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, because she would not divert the committee’s resources into an election-denial operation and fund his legal expenses. He inserted his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as the new head. She fired 60 staffers, but named Christina Bobb, a former far-right One America Network TV presenter, who was a key cheerleader of the fake elector scheme in 2020, as senior counsel of its election integrity unit. In April, she was indicted along with 17 other Arizona Republicans for fraud, forgery and conspiracy. Trump was named “Unindicted Co-Conspirator No 1”. Bobb’s indictment only elevated her standing as a Trump loyalist.A week after Trump’s election, he appointed the outside counsel for Bobb’s effort, William McGinley, Trump’s cabinet secretary in his first term, as his new White House counsel. In Trump’s first term, his White House legal counsel, Don McGahn, had resisted his pressure to provide him with cause to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, and his successor, Pat Cipollone, objected to Trump’s schemes to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump at last has an in-house lawyer to tell him how to do what he wants.Joe Biden welcomed Trump to the Oval Office on 13 November in a show that the transfer of power was peaceful. Biden’s message was to re-establish a constitutional standard, contrasting with Trump’s graceless refusal to meet with him after January 6. But the atmosphere of normalization was illusory. Biden acted as though by his example regular order could have a chance of restoration. His gesture was nostalgic.Minutes after Trump left Biden’s presence, he announced his nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Ding, dong. The clock struck 13, again and again.But Trump had given fair warning.Trump rolled out his team of travesties in the spirit he had promised. “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in June on Dr Phil’s Fox News show. When Fox News host Sean Hannity followed up, trying to prod Trump into softening his threats, Trump rejected the opportunity. “When this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” he said.Trump’s plan upon winning, now unfolding, is to launch a full-scale assault on the federal government from the top down. He has no need to smash into the Capitol with the Proud Boys, whom he has promised to pardon as “hostages”.Certain common characteristics run through his cabinet of curiosities and horrors to mark them collectively unique among any cabinet of any president – alleged sexual misconduct and abuse, drug addiction, megalomania, authoritarianism, cultism, paranoia, white supremacy, antisemitism and grifting. Some nominees meet all these qualifications, others only two, three or four. For a few, it’s just plain and simple self-aggrandizing corruption.Each of Trump’s appointees is there to savage a target on Trump’s hitlist. When he came to Washington he was a relative blank slate, despite hauling a baggage train of scandal from New York. Back then, Trump blithely spoke of getting away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Now, it’s Pennsylvania Avenue, where six people died as a result of January 6. Trump has been in the business of making enemies of anyone trying to enforce the law. The federal cases against him will be dropped to follow the ruling of the US supreme court that he has absolute immunity for “official actions”. Liberated from accountability, Trump is building his government on revenge.Quite apart from his appointees’ dearth of managerial experience and competence, they represent the antithesis of the core mission of the departments and agencies they have been named to oversee. They are not being appointed to run them efficiently, but to rule and ruin.The greatest influence in public life exercised by Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and former national guard officer before Trump named him as secretary of defense, was in 2019 when he privately lobbied Trump and publicly advocated on Fox for pardons for three military officers convicted of war crimes, which Trump granted.Hegseth has denounced women in the military; they make up 17.5% of active duty personnel and more than 20% of reserves. He has called for the firing of the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Charles Q Brown Jr, who is Black, saying that any general “involved in any of the DEI, woke shit has got to go”.Hegseth was one of 12 national guard members who were removed from Biden’s guard detail at his 2021 inauguration after he was deemed “an inside threat”. Hegseth’s body is covered with tattoos – a Jerusalem cross, a symbol of the First Crusade, inked across his chest, and the crusader slogan “Deus Vult” (“God wills it”) on his arm among other crusader markings. This iconography has become popular with far-right Christian nationalists and white supremacists. The Deus Vult cross flag was carried by insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6. When the tattoos were spotted by his national guard master sergeant, who wrote of the “disturbing” symbols to the commanding general of Washington, Hegseth was kept far from Biden.The Associated Press first reported the story of Hegseth’s exclusion from proximity near the president. JD Vance attacked the news organization, tweeting: “disgusting anti-Christian bigotry from the AP”.In 2017, Hegseth was the subject of a police investigation for rape in Monterey, California. His second wife had divorced him in September for his affair with a Fox News producer whom he had impregnated. She would give birth to a daughter in August. In October, Hegseth attended a meeting of the California Federation of Republican Women, drank at the hotel bar in the evening, and, visibly intoxicated, was assisted to his room by a female member of the group, who attended the event with her two young children and husband. Something happened. She was bruised. Hegseth claimed they had consensual sex. The police did not press charges.According to a memo given to the Washington Post by a friend of the accuser, also present at the meeting as a participant, the alleged victim and her husband hired a lawyer “to ensure Hegseth didn’t get off without punishment”. Hegseth wound up paying her an unspecified sum of money in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.Revelations of Hegseth’s alleged behavior have not elicited censure from Trump, but expressions of sympathetic support for the would-be #MeToo victim. “Mr Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed,” stated the Trump transition response. Hegseth’s lawyer attacked the woman: “She was the aggressor. She was sober, he was drunk. She took advantage of him.”Hegseth appears to Trump as the ideal man to purge the military. Trump’s transition team has drafted an executive order for a “warrior board” to remove any general or admiral “lacking in requisite leadership qualities”. Trump complained to his chief of staff Gen John Kelly that he wanted “my generals” to be more like “Hitler’s generals”.Hegseth would be his enforcer of politicizing the military so that it never questioned any illegal behavior, like violating the War Crimes Act, or refusing an order to open fire on American protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump said to Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs, in the presence of the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, about demonstrators after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Hegseth would not be the defense secretary to advise Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act to impose martial law as Mike Flynn, his disgraced former national security adviser, suggested to him shortly before January 6.Tulsi Gabbard, the former congresswoman nominated to be the director of national intelligence, who flipped seamlessly from far left to far right, has been steady as a rote pro-Russian propagandist, hailed on Russian state media as “our girlfriend”, and has been identified with a secretive Hare Krishna-affiliated sect called the Science of Identity Foundation that mixes vegetarianism, homophobia and Islamophobia.Gabbard is there to wreak havoc on Trump’s phantom nemesis, the “deep state”. His first director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, closely observed Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, which he told Bob Woodward was “so strange”, “so subservient”. “Is this blackmail?” Coats wondered.Trump recalls that his first impeachment was the result of a whistleblower complaint from an analyst from the office of the director of national intelligence, who filed a memo about a phone call Trump had with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he sought to coerce him into manufacturing political dirt about Biden in exchange for defensive Javelin missiles already approved by the Congress. “I would like you to do us a favor,” said Trump in what he insisted was a “perfect phone call”.Trump was furious at the exposure of his blackmail. “I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” he said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right?” Now he will send Gabbard to terminate the “spies” of the “deep state”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRobert F Kennedy Jr, nominated as secretary of health and human services, is an opponent of the scientific method for which he reflexively substitutes a priori conspiracy theories. He has grifted millions on bogus claims that vaccines cause autism. “There is no vaccine that is safe and effective,” he said. A decades-long heroin addict and self-confessed sex addict, he has a family who has tried to lift him out of his turmoil, staging interventions for years to have him professionally treated for his psychological troubles, but have been reduced to despair. He claims that his family members have succumbed to “hypnosis”.During the campaign, a family babysitter emerged to accuse Kennedy of numerous sexual assaults. He claimed he had “no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely”. He said in an interview: “I’m not a church boy.” Meanwhile, he was reportedly involved in an affair with Olivia Nuzzi, a writer for New York Magazine, which cost her her fiance and job. Three other women stepped forward to claim they had sexual affairs with him after meeting him through his anti-vaccine group, the Children’s Health Defense, and at the same time he was involved with Nuzzi, which he denied.But RFK Jr, is promoted by Tucker Carlson and his trailing entourage of lost boys, Don Jr and JD Vance. Carlson and Don Jr persuaded Bobby to drop his third-party candidacy and to endorse Trump. On 31 October, at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, Carlson interviewed Trump and asked him pointedly whether he would appoint Bobby. On 1 November, RFK Jr appeared on the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, where he told a rapturous crowd that in answer to his prayers for the fulfillment of his personal destiny: “God sent me Donald Trump.”Before the election, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page confidently informed its readers that Trump’s bizarre statements and inclinations were not to be taken seriously, and that in any event would be blocked by “checks and balances”. After Trump was elected, the Journal has been stunned by the nominations of Gaetz and RFK Jr. “Good luck making sense of this nomination,” it editorialized about Bobby. “Matt Gaetz is a bad choice for attorney general,” ran another thundering piece. Murdoch is out in the cold. The TV host he fired, Tucker Carlson, is the kingmaker.In naming RFK Jr, Trump is reacting to his conflicts during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he wished to ignore it, dismissed mask-wearing and suggested injecting Clorox. He despised the scientists who told him his ideas would not work. He hated his chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, and coronavirus response coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx – “all these idiots”, said Trump.Trump also fired Dr Rick Bright, the director of the Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in charge of vaccine development, for refusing to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19, which Bright protested was one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections”. Bright testified in May 2020 before Congress that the Trump administration had “no master plan”, that the country faced “the darkest winter in our history” and that in the absence of national leadership, “our window of opportunity is closing.”Trump has not appointed RFK Jr for his famous name, though he must receive gratification from possessing for himself this piece of the Kennedy legacy, however tarnished. Bobby Kennedy Jr is there because he says that he will fire 600 experts at the National Institutes of Health, the foremost medical research center in the world – “all these idiots”. And Tucker Carlson vouches for him.The tangled resentments of Trump’s appointees are cardinal virtues, especially when they overlap with his own grievances. Trump, the adjudicated rapist, credibly accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, whom the sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein called his “closest friend for 10 years”, identifies with Matt Gaetz fending off investigations of his alleged sex crimes. After Trump confided in Reince Priebus, his first chief of staff, that he would pick Gaetz, Priebus concluded: “So, he [Trump] feels like he has gone to hell and back 10 times. So, this is also a big middle finger to the DoJ and the FBI.”At the end of the first Trump administration, Gaetz desperately sought to secure an all-purpose pardon to cover him from the then ongoing federal inquiry into alleged sex trafficking of minors to his alleged participation as a co-conspirator in Trump’s coup. He approached, among others, the deputy White House legal counsel, Eric Herschmann, who testified before the January 6 committee. “The pardon that he was discussing, requesting was as broad as you could describe,” he stated. “From beginning – I remember he said, from the beginning of time up until today for any and all things. He had mentioned Nixon, and I said Nixon’s pardon was never nearly that broad.”In October 2023, Congressman Gaetz provoked the removal of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. “I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker,” McCarthy said. “It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”On 13 November, Trump named Gaetz attorney general. The next day, Gaetz resigned from Congress. The day following that, the House ethics committee report on Gaetz’s alleged sex crimes was scheduled to be released. But because Gaetz is no longer a member of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, serving as Trump’s handyman, “strongly requested” that it would violate House rules to make the report public despite precedents to the contrary. He warned it would “open a Pandora’s box”, presumably of other dark secrets about Gaetz and perhaps other nominees.Democratic and Republican senators on the judiciary committee that will hold confirmation hearings have asked for the report. It remains bottled up.Trump does not attempt to hide his intention to “dismantle government bureaucracy” and “send shockwaves through the system”, as he tweeted in his appointment of “the Great Elon Musk” and Vivek Ramaswamy (no “Great” preceding his name), assigned to rampage through the entire government as a “Department of Government Efficiency”. Musk has a long history of conflicts with government regulatory agencies and outstanding unresolved investigations, including a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into inside stock trading. Musk’s commission is transparently a case of self-interest.“Doge”, as it is called, after “dogecoin”, a cryptocurrency that Musk has been hawking, is not at all a department, which would require FBI background checks. Musk orbits on a cocktail of LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, “often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter”, according to people who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. He speaks privately to Vladimir Putin. During the campaign, he turned Twitter/X into a cesspool of disinformation, a good deal of his own fabrication and streams of it from Russian troll farms. Inexplicably, he continues to hold a security clearance as a government contractor that has not been suspended under review during the Biden administration.Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist and libertarian ideologue who ran for the Republican nomination for president on a platform of abolishing numerous federal agencies from the IRS to the FBI, is completely inexperienced in government affairs, which he has been tasked to reform. He has made confusing, possibly conspiratorial claims about 9/11 and suggested that January 6 was “an inside job”. During his campaign, he stated that his goal was to fire 75% of the federal workforce in short order. Merely a charlatan and a demagogue, Ramaswamy does not stand out as especially peculiar among the wholly unqualified Trump nominees.Trump’s appointment of Doug Burgum, the billionaire governor of North Dakota, as secretary of the interior and “energy czar”, fits the profile of old-fashioned plunder. In April, Burgum gathered oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump flagrantly asked for $1bn in campaign contributions in exchange for tax breaks and favorable policies.Harold G Hamm, chair of Continental Resources, an independent oil company, who is an investor in a proposed $5.2bn pipeline in North Dakota, helped Burgum organize the meeting. Burgum’s family holds land that profits from Hamm’s business. “Obviously it’s no secret that I helped gather the industry up, oil and gas producers and the entire industry,” Hamm said. He handed Trump a list of more than 100 policies he wanted implemented. “I couldn’t be more thrilled by president-elect Donald Trump’s victory,” Hamm remarked. Then, Trump named as secretary of energy a fracking equipment company executive, Chris Wright, who has declared: “There is no climate crisis.”The volatile elements of petroleum, public lands and leasing deals evoke a scenario from a century ago, of a cabinet appointed by a president who promised to restore the country to its greatness in a “return to normalcy”. During the Warren G Harding presidency, the secretary of the interior, Albert B Fall, accepted kickbacks from oil companies in granting oil leases and became the first cabinet member to be sentenced to prison. It was the worst cabinet scandal in history. Make Teapot Dome Again.Trump seeks to install his cabinet by circumventing the Senate. He insists that the Republican leadership forgo its constitutional duty to advise and consent and instead allow his picks to assume their positions as recess appointments. Trump is also blocking the FBI from conducting background checks. His cabinet nominations have become his instrument for intimidation. He intends to sweep aside checks and balances for one-man rule.The appointment of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as secretary of state illustrates the kind of behavior Trump wishes to encourage among Republican senators. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Rubio derided Trump for his “small hands”, a signifier for his genitals. “You know what they say about men with small hands?” Rubio jibed.But after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York for paying hush money to an adult film actorto influence the 2016 election, Rubio leaped to blame Biden falsely for Trump’s prosecution. Rubio tweeted: “Our current President is a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power.” He added, with flaming emojis: “It’s time to fight [fire] with [fire].”Subservience has now received its reward. Rubio, “Little Marco”, the most conventional of Trump’s cabinet choices, is an example to them all.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      in Elections

      Rudy Giuliani turns over property to former election workers he defamed

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      Rudy Giuliani has relinquished dozens of watches and a Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148m defamation judgment against him, his lawyer said.Joseph Cammarata said in a letter filed late on Friday in Manhattan federal court that the trove of watches and a ring were delivered by FedEx to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, in the morning.The 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 was turned over at an address in Hialeah, Florida, and an undisclosed amount of funds from Giuliani’s Citibank accounts were also surrendered to the two women who won the judgment, according to the letter.Cammarata called Giuliani “a victim of political persecution” in an email and said this month’s election demonstrated Americans were tired of “witch-hunts, indictments, impeachments, prosecutions, convictions, civil cases and judgments”.On 22 October, Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets. But after Giuliani missed that deadline, he appeared in court on 7 November and Liman threatened to hold him in contempt.A jury previously ruled that Giuliani owes Freeman and Moss around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.“The road to justice for Ruby and Shaye has been long, but they have never wavered,” Aaron Nathan, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss, said in October. “Last December, a jury delivered a powerful verdict in their favor, and we’re proud that today’s ruling makes that verdict a reality.”“We are proud that our clients will finally begin to receive some of the compensation to which they are entitled for Giuliani’s actions,” said Nathan. “This outcome should send a powerful message that there is a price to pay for those who choose to intentionally spread disinformation.”Giuliani was also ordered to turn over his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York and several items of Yankees memorabilia. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.But in his letter, Cammarata argued that some of Giuliani’s other possessions should also be exempt from the judgment under New York and Florida law.That includes all apparel – even a shirt signed by New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio that is part of the judgment – and all household furniture, as well as a refrigerator, radio receiver, television set, computer, cellphone, tableware and cooking utensils, the letter stated.Representatives for Freeman and Moss said last week that they visited Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment only to discover it was cleared out well before the October deadline. Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.After losing the defamation case last fall, Giuliani declared bankruptcy to try to avoid paying Freeman and Moss the money they were owed. A judge dismissed that bankruptcy case earlier this year.After the 2020 election, Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused Freeman and Moss of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night in 2020. He continued to do so even after Georgia election officials said the video showed both women doing their jobs with no issue. They have also been formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing.The video and lie about the two women became central to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. The ex-president mentioned Freeman by name on a phone call in 2021 with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asking him to overturn the vote.Both women have rarely been seen in public since the incident, but have spoken about how it has upended their lives. They received constant death threats, were chased from their homes and lost their jobs. During the defamation trial in Washington DC, they spoke about the depression they faced after the election.Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York and Washington DC, has shown little regret for his false statements. During the trial, he gave a press conference on the courthouse steps in which he insisted everything he said about Freeman and Moss was true.Cammarata, in his Friday letter, also asked to delay Giuliani’s January trial over the disposition of some of his assets so that he can attend president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.Giuliani has claimed he was the victim of a “political vendetta” and expects to win on appeal and get back all his possessions. More

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      Trump fake-elector scheme: where do five state investigations stand?

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      After the 2020 election, a group of 84 people in seven states signed false documents claiming to be electors for Donald Trump. This year, despite the fact that four states have brought criminal charges against the fake electors, 14 of them will now serve as real electors for the president-elect.The 14 once-fake-and-now-real electors were selected by state Republican parties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada. They will meet in their state capitols on 17 December to cast their ballots for Trump.Prosecutors in many of the states where fake electors signed false documents are moving forward with charges, as the federal charges against Trump for election subversion and other alleged crimes are up in the air after his re-election.Five of the seven states pursued charges related to the issue. Authorities in New Mexico and Pennsylvania did not pursue charges because the documents the false electors there used hedged language that attorneys said would likely spare them from criminal charges.The fake electors in some instances are high-profile Republicans: people in elected office, in official party roles, prominent members of external conservative groups.Here’s where the state cases stand.ArizonaKris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general for Arizona, said on Sunday that her office will not be dropping any charges related to the fake electors.A grand jury in Arizona charged 18 people involved in the fake electors scheme, including the 11 people who served as fake electors and Trump allies Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb and Mike Roman. Some of the fake electors are high profile: two state senators (Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern), a former state Republican party chair (Kelli Ward) and a Turning Point USA executive (Tyler Bowyer).“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Mayes told MSNBC. “A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”Arizona charged people in April 2024, so the case is still in its early stages.GeorgiaGeorgia’s case will be the most watched, especially if all federal charges against Trump are dropped. It is the only state case where Trump himself is charged, though he will seek to have the charges dropped because of the supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling, or at least paused until he’s no longer in office. Several of the 19 people charged pleaded guilty and received probation and fines.Fake electors David Shafer, Cathleen Latham and Shawn Still were charged in the criminal racketeering case, but not all of the fake electors in Georgia were charged – many were granted immunity to cooperate with the case.The US supreme court rejected an attempt by Meadows on Tuesday to move the case to federal court.The next step is set for December: the Georgia court of appeals will hear arguments on whether prosecutor Fani Willis can continue on the case herself despite a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor on the case. A lower court previous ruled that she could continue.MichiganSixteen fake electors were charged in Michigan in mid-2023. One of them agreed to cooperate with the prosecution and had his charges dropped in return.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe case is working its way through the court process, with the last of the defendants sitting for examinations in October as the judge decides whether the case should go to trial.Six of those charged will serve as Trump’s actual electors this year. Attorneys for those fake and now real electors have said their role this year shouldn’t have any bearing on their legal cases.NevadaSix Trump electors in Nevada were charged at the end of 2023 with state forgery crimes for their roles in the scheme.In June, Clark county district court judge Mary Kay Holthu dismissed the case, saying it was in the wrong venue and should not have been filed in Las Vegas. Democratic attorney general Aaron Ford vowed to appeal the ruling, but defense attorneys have said the charges are now outside the statute of limitations.“My office’s goal remains unchanged – we will hold these fake electors accountable for their actions which contributed to the ongoing and completely unfounded current of distrust in our electoral system,” Ford said. “Our drive to seek justice does not change with election results. We are committed to see this matter through, either through winning our appeal or filing anew before the new year. This is not going away.”Two of the fake electors will again serve as Trump electors this year: Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican party, and Jesse Law, chair of the Republican party of Clark county.WisconsinThe fake elector scheme allegedly began in Wisconsin, where pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro is from.Those who served as fake electors did not get criminally charged in Wisconsin, though three people involved in the scheme – Chesebro, Roman, and James Troupis – were charged in June by the state attorney general for their role in orchestrating the scheme.The state’s fake electors settled a civil lawsuit in 2023 that required them to agree not to serve as electors when elections involve Trump and to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. Some of the electors have publicly claimed they were misled about the purpose of the alternate slates. More

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      Any line of separation between Fox News and the US government is about to vanish | Margaret Sullivan

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      When Donald Trump tapped a Fox News host this week to run the mighty US defense department, even Pete Hegseth’s colleagues at the rightwing media outlet were taken aback.“What the heck – can you believe it?” wondered Jesse Watters on his primetime show on Tuesday.“Taken right from this very couch!” exclaimed Hegseth’s fellow Fox & Friends talker Brian Kilmeade on Wednesday.This bemused enthusiasm was for public, on-air consumption.But in private, some had a dimmer view, according to Brian Stelter, author of two books about the Murdoch-controlled network.“You’re telling me Pete is going to oversee 2 million employees?” clucked one Fox host to Stelter; as the CNN media analyst noted, it’s actually almost three.In Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Stelter reported that Hegseth – a decorated veteran who served with the Minnesota national guard in Iraq and Afghanistan – consistently played to a singularly important viewer, checking his phone during commercial breaks in case Trump had commented on the show.And while Hegseth has directed a non-profit veterans’ advocacy group, nothing suggests he’s ready to run the world’s largest military. More alarmingly, he has encouraged Trump to pardon military personnel accused of war crimes, argued against women serving in the armed forces, and expressed the merit in a “preemptive strike” against North Korea.Although extreme, this development isn’t exactly breaking new ground.The Fox-to-Trump revolving door has been spinning for years. During his first term, Trump hired at least 20 officials who had previously worked at or contributed to Fox, making some of them cabinet secretaries and high-ranking White House aides.Remember, for instance, Richard Grenell, who joined Fox in 2009 and was still working there when he was nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to Germany in 2017? A few years later, Grenell was named Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. Or Ben Carson, a Fox contributor for years before becoming Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development?One particularly memorable case was Bill Shine, a high-ranking Fox executive, who left the network after allegedly helping to cover up the company’s culture of sexual harassment that brought down his buddy, co-founder Roger Ailes.No problem, though. Shine got a soft landing at the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff for communications, and later moved to Trump’s re-election campaign.It’s hard to jump from Fox to a job at a serious news organization. But, if you want to work at the Trump White House, there are few better résumé-builders.“The president’s worldview is shaped by the hours of Fox programming he watches each day, leading him to treat Fox employment as an important credential in hiring,” Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, wrote in 2019.In the past few days, he also tapped the Fox News contributor Tom Honan as his “border czar”. Honan joined Fox shortly after his retirement as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director in 2018, during Trump’s first term.The door spins and spins again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGoing for the trifecta, Trump named Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and former host of a weekly Fox show, as his preferred ambassador to Israel.Can a glorified perch for Sean Hannity – long the Trump whisperer – be far behind? And what about Tucker Carlson, despite being fired by the network last year?The Trump/Fox fit is a natural; one thing they share is a truth problem. Trump, of course, lies with fluid impunity.And Fox – though it insists on calling itself a news organization – has helped to spread lies and disinformation, including about the supposedly “rigged” 2020 election that Trump still insists he won. No matter that Fox had to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800m in a court settlement after they sued for defamation.“Instead of promoting lies and conspiracy theories from outlets like Fox News and the online fever swamps,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, “these media personalities will now be doing so with the US government’s resources and backing.”There could be no Trump as president without Fox. And Fox’s market capitalization is now approaching $20bn.Whatever they’re doing is working for mutual benefit, if not for US democracy.With this week’s developments, any line of separation – if it ever existed – is being erased. The two are nearly a single organism.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Arizona attorney general says she won’t drop Trump fake electors case

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      Allies of Donald Trump who were charged in Arizona for illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election can still expect to face justice despite his return to the White House, the state’s attorney general has said.Kris Mayes told MSNBC on Sunday that she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against defendants including the former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Christina Bobb, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior officials of the Arizona Republican party such as the former chair Kelli Ward and state senators Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman.A grand jury in April indicted 18 people in a “fake electors” scheme that sought to falsely declare Trump the winner in the crucial swing state instead of Joe Biden. Most pleaded not guilty in May to felony charges of fraud, forgery and conspiracy.The fates of various criminal cases pending against Trump and his allies were left uncertain after his defeat of Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.For instance, the US justice department is winding down its criminal cases in federal court against Trump.And, in New York, state court judge Juan Merchan is preparing to rule on whether Trump’s conviction on charges of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels should be tossed out.But Mayes has said she intends to stay the course with her office’s case.“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Mayes, a Democrat, told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.“A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”In August, Loraine Pellegrino, the former president of a Republican women’s group, became the first of the defendants convicted when she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document.Another of those accused, Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, including sitting for interviews and handing over documents, in exchange for having her charges dismissed.At the time, Mayes said Ellis’s insights were “invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso in August, the Arizona superior court judge Bruce Cohen denied a request by the remaining defendants to have the charges dismissed as “politically motivated” and set a provisional trial date for January 2026.As a state case, anybody who is convicted in Arizona cannot be pardoned by Trump, who was referred to throughout the charging documents as an unindicted co-conspirator and as the “former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election”.The Arizona fake electors scheme was replicated in a number of swing states that ultimately all certified Biden’s victory. The most prominent took place in Georgia, where Trump is one of the defendants, although two charges against him were thrown out in September – and some of the 17 others originally charged have accepted plea deals in return for giving evidence to prosecutors.Fani Willis, the Fulton county prosecutor who brought the Georgia case, was re-elected on 5 November. But no trial date has been set, and there is doubt over its timing given that Trump will be back in the White House in January.The other defendants in the Arizona case include Kelli Ward’s husband, Michael; Robert Montgomery, former head of the Cochise county Republican party; Tyler Bowyer, the Republican national committee’s Arizona representative; Greg Safsten, former executive director of the state Republican party; and activists Samuel Moorhead and Nancy Cottle, who allegedly agreed to act as fake electors. More

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      What is voter certification – the process that Trump targeted in 2020?

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      With voting completed in the US presidential election, election officials across the country will now turn to certifying the results before the electoral college meets in December and Congress certifies the vote in January.Until the 2020 election, few paid attention to certification, which was seen as a bureaucratic way of officializing the results of the election. But after 2020, Donald Trump and allies, who questioned the election results, targeted the certification process as a way of causing confusion. In advance of the presidential election, there were deep concerns that the former president and allies would try and block certification of the election results, starting at the local level.Trump’s victory in the election means that there likely won’t be an effort to block certification of the presidential results. But there still are some close US Senate and House races that could prompt battles over certification. Experts say it is clear that certification is not discretionary and those who refuse to certify could face criminal penalties.What is certification?Certification refers generally to the process of making the election results official. The process works differently in each state. Election results are unofficial until they are certified.It takes place after a canvass, the process that takes place after every election to aggregate all of the ballot totals, resolving outstanding disputes over challenged or provisional ballots and reconciling any discrepancies or inconsistencies. Officials investigate any discrepancies, if they exist, in vote totals. The process varies by jurisdiction, but there is usually a board of people which then votes to certify the election. Various state laws make it clear that this is a ministerial responsibility and that officials cannot refuse to do so.For a statewide election, results are certified at both the local and state level.Is certification when disputes over election results are resolved?No. The canvass and certification process is aimed at reconciling vote totals and getting an official count. The process may identify abnormalities that could become the basis for an election contest or challenge later. State laws allow for separate legal processes outside of the certification process to challenge election results. These typically take place in the courts.What happens if an official or a board refuses to certify?Most boards certify the vote on a majority vote, so a single member refusing to certify wouldn’t block certification.But if a majority of the board refuses to certify, a secretary of state or election watchdog group would likely sue them to get a court to force them to certify. Watchdog groups have already warned that those who refuse to certify will face criminal charges.Could an effort to block certification actually work?No. If there were substantial irregularities in an election that could affect the outcome, it would be resolved in court. Experts are confident that the winners of elections will be the ones seated.Despite that confidence, there’s still concern that refusals to certify will allow people to continue to question the election results and seed further doubt about the election.What happens after certification?In a presidential election, there are additional steps after states certify the vote.In nearly every state, the winner of the statewide vote gets all of the state’s electors to the electoral college. A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, requires the governor of each state to certify the list of their state’s electors no later than six days before the electoral college meets. This year, that means the electors will be finalized by 11 December and the electors will meet in state capitols across the country on 17 December.Once the electors meet and cast their votes, they transmit them to the National Archives in Washington. Congress will oversee the counting of the vote on 6 January 2025 to make the results official. The constitution says that the president of the Senate – the vice-president – will oversee counting of the votes. That means that Kamala Harris will oversee the counting of the vote this year. Harris, who conceded the election to Trump on Wednesday, said in her concession speech that she “will engage in a peaceful transfer of power”. More