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      ‘Everything is possible’: a worrying new book explores the danger of disinformation

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      You might not have heard of Rosanne Boyland. She made the 10-hour drive from Kennesaw, Georgia, to Washington on 5 January 2021. The next day, the 34-year-old died after losing consciousness in the crush of a mob of Donald Trump supporters as it surged against US Capitol police. She would never have been there, her sister said later, “if it weren’t for all the misinformation”.The tragedy opens Barbara McQuade’s new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. The NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst explores how the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth has been weaponised to consolidate power in the hands of the few, undermine legal structures and drive voters such as Boyland. It is both cause and symptom of the US’s corrosive polarisation.A former national security prosecutor, McQuade has seen the threat of disinformation evolve from al-Qaida to Islamic State to cyber-attacks from Russia. Teaching at the University of Michigan Law School, where she is a professor, she had her students study special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on 2016 election interference by Russia.“I was fascinated by the details of accounts that were created by Russian operatives with names like Blacktivist or Heart of Texas posing as grassroots activists on the right or the left or various groups, and then taking very divisive stands on various issues just in an effort to sow discord,” McQuade, 59, says in an interview in the lobby of a Washington hotel.It was then Trump’s bogus “stop the steal” movement in 2020, based on the big lie of widespread voter fraud rejected in more than 60 lawsuits and by his own attorney general, that inspired her to write the book. It considers lessons learned ahead of a potential repeat in 2024 as the US braces for a Joe Biden v Trump rematch.“We will definitely get interference from foreign adversaries, including Russia and probably China, North Korea, maybe Iran, but there is a domestic part of this now where we are already hearing Donald Trump talk about how voting by mail is unreliable and laying the groundwork so that, if and when he loses, and there are more Democrats who have voted by mail than Republicans, he will have credibility.View image in fullscreen“He will say: ‘See, I won the election and then it all flipped for me. It was fraud.’ The same strategy that he used in in 2020. I don’t know if he’ll have new strategies but ‘stop the steal’ was a classic disinformation influence campaign based on no evidence whatsoever.”Trump commentary falls into categories. Some stop short of drawing comparisons with Adolf Hitler, perhaps wary of Godwin’s law, which holds that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. Others dive in, arguing that some aspects of Trump’s authoritarianism, nativism and charisma do evoke the Nazi tyrant in enlightening ways.McQuade goes there with an “authoritarian playbook” charting a brief history of disinformation from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Jair Bolsonaro and Trump and noting the tactics: demonising the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts and stoking violence.She elaborates: “Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that there are two things that are essential to effective propaganda. One was a very simple repeatable message because when people hear a message repeated again and again – and start hearing it from different sources – they begin to believe it to be true.“The other is that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. All of us are guilty of white lies from time to time that we might say out of kindness. My sister might say your hair looks fine when she means anything but, or my husband might say to me, no, dear, that dress doesn’t make you look fat.“They’re saying these things out of kindness, even though they might be technically lying. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, most people would not ever imagine that anyone could have the audacity to lie about something that is so significant – he was talking about the role of Jewish people in society, for example.“But here the big lie for Trump was that the election has been stolen because people say: ‘How could you possibly pull that off? It’s so ridiculous.’ That’s part of what gives it its credibility and he knows that so I worry we’re going to begin to hear that again, and there are a significant number of Americans who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. There will always be people who are manipulated by those strategies.”Now the history of the January 6 insurrection itself is being rewritten, with the rioters recast as “patriots” and, if tried and imprisoned, as “hostages” whom Trump is promising to pardon if elected. Opinion polls show that more than a third of Americans believe that Biden’s election was illegitimate; Republicans are more sympathetic to the US Capitol rioters now than they were in 2021.McQuade says with some dismay: “They assaulted people, they brought weapons, they broke windows, they spread faeces on the walls of the temple of democracy, they carried Confederate flags in there. Now to refer to it as legitimate political discourse or ordinary tourist activity, and then to refer to people who have been arrested, charged and imprisoned for their crimes as hostages, is absolutely a brand of disinformation. I’m curious to see how many people will continue to fall for that in this election.”View image in fullscreenTrump svengali Steve Bannon, an arch election denier and vaccine conspiracy theorist, once memorably declared that the real opposition was the media and the way to deal with them was to “flood the zone with shit”. This brings to mind the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. McQuade cites the Russian author and journalist Peter Pomerantsev on “the fog of unknowability”.She explains: “Everything is possible and nothing matters, and so everything’s PR because people begin to doubt the very existence of truth. One day Putin might say the missiles were shot by Ukraine; the next day the missiles were shot by Russia; the next day the missiles were shot by Nato.“People don’t know what to think and consistency doesn’t matter. In fact, inconsistency is part of the point, because first people become angry and then they become cynical and then finally they become numb and disengaged from politics altogether and so that’s a very dangerous place for democracy.“The other thing that people think in Russia is that truth is for suckers: you should just get what you can while you can and everybody is corrupt, which is one of the things that causes Donald Trump to constantly be suggesting that the Bidens are corrupt – if everybody is corrupt, then it gives you permission to overlook Donald Trump’s corruption, right?“‘Well, they’re all corrupt. Who knows what to believe? All these investigations are themselves weaponised and corrupt so I might as well look for someone who is strong, who will advance my values despite all of his corruption.’ This normalisation of corruption is something that is part of it all as well.”How has it come to this? McQuade, who was born in Detroit and lives Ann Arbor, Michigan, identifies three central causes. First, the delivery mechanism of disinformation has changed. For centuries, the deceiver had to rely on word of mouth or leaflets or planting a false story, perhaps in a foreign newspaper, in the hope that someone would pick it up and pass it on. Now someone can spread a lie at the push of a button.“Social media is a wonderful tool and can connect us to people all over the world in wonderful ways, but can also be used as a weapon when people want to and so it has been a really efficient vehicle for delivering disinformation,” says the author. “They’re completely unaccountable and we have ceded all of our power on social media to a handful of young bro billionaires, whose interest, of course, is in their own profits, not in the social good.”Second, we are living through the worst political divisions in America since the 1861-1865 civil war. McQuade reckons it began with the combative, attention-grabbing Republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and has grown as parties concentrate on turning out their bases rather than finding common ground. With elections framed as an existential struggle between good and evil, voters demand political purity. “If my tribe says X then I say X too, even if I don’t believe X to be true.”Third, there is anxiety about a changing world: the climate crisis, refugees and border security, economic shifts with potential job losses. It is fertile soil for demagogues who promise that they alone can fix it. “We have leaders who want to use that to stoke fear because they perceive that that will be in their own political interest to attract those voters who are concerned about those changes and attract them into their own fold.“It’s a combination of those three things that Donald Trump has exploited in this country like no one we’ve ever seen. I don’t think that he’s necessarily a political genius, but I do think he’s a conman and a marketing genius who knows how to sell things. He’s a huckster and he has taken advantage of this moment for personal and political gain.”The huckster’s rise nearly a decade ago caught the media off guard. The old and laudable rules of balance, impartiality and not editorialising no longer seemed to work when one candidate was so blatantly mendacious. The New York Times newspaper broke the seal in 2016 with the headline: Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent. But as another election looms, McQuade worries that journalists have still not figured out how to cover him.“That which is novel is always newsworthy, that which is controversial is always newsworthy, and so they present those things. But in an effort to present both sides of a story and in a tradition of not calling people liars, they have allowed Donald Trump and his supporters to manipulate them and play them. They’ll just say he made a statement that is not backed up by evidence; say he’s lying! You gotta say it out loud.”View image in fullscreenBut Attack from Within is not a letter of surrender or obituary of America. McQuade offers solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalising doxxing (the act of revealing identifying information about someone online) and considering a ban on online anonymous accounts.The former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan urges politicians to get ahead of the curve of artificial intelligence. “I hope that our Congress can do something which we failed to do with social media, which is get ahead of it, because if it can put things in place before they create havoc, it’s much easier than trying to react after the fact.”Individual citizens, she says, can gain skills be critical consumers of social media. “We can educate ourselves and take responsibility by doing things like, when we read an article, don’t rely just on the headline; we should actually read the article before we forward it to someone else.“We should look for second sources of a story; if there’s an outrageous story, someone else will be reporting it. If there is data in a story, we should look at that data. How big was the sample set? Was it a sample of three or a sample of 3m? That makes a difference. Were the results of this study a causation or just coincidence with an outcome? We need to do that.”McQuade also calls for increasing media literacy in schools and a revival of teaching civics rather than focusing on test scores. “Civics education is important for all of us, because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”
      Attack from Within is out now More

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      Judge dismisses six charges against Trump and defendants in Georgia election case

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      The Georgia judge overseeing the election-interference case against Donald Trump and 14 defendants dismissed six of the charges in the wide-ranging indictment on Wednesday, saying they were not detailed enough.One of the many crimes Trump and some of the co-defendants in the case were charged with was soliciting officials in Georgia to violate their oath of office. Those charges were dismissed. The other charges in the case against Trump and other defendants remain.More details soon … More

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      Man who sent bomb threat to Arizona election officials jailed for 42 months

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      A Massachusetts man who threatened to blow up the secretary of state of Arizona in 2021 has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison, one of the most severe federal punishments yet handed down for the wave of violent threats against election officials unleashed by Donald Trump’s stolen election lie.James Clark, 38, was sentenced in federal district court in Phoenix on Tuesday to 42 months of imprisonment, to be followed by three years on probation. Judge Michael Liburdi said that his online bomb threat had inflicted “emotional and psychological trauma” on government employees and required a deterrent sentence to protect democracy.Liburdi remarked that there had been so many recent threats in Arizona against election officials that people were quitting their jobs. “If we do not have good people to fill these positions who are committed to the delivery of fair elections, we lose our ability to govern ourselves,” the judge said.The prosecution was handled under the auspices of the election threats task force, a specialist unit within the justice department. The task force was set up in 2021 in response to the plague of intimidation of election officials that has erupted since the former president made his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.Tuesday’s sentence of three and a half years in prison is on a par with the previous harshest sentence secured by the task force. In August, Francis Goetz from Texas was given a similar punishment for posting several threats against Arizona election officials on far-right social media platforms.Clark made his bomb threat a week after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. In his plea agreement he admitted to logging into the website of the then secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, who is now Arizona’s governor.He demanded that she resign within two days or an “explosive device impacted in her personal space will be detonated”. Within minutes of sending the threat, Clark searched online for Hobbs’s home address and put her name against the search term “how to kill”.Four days after the bomb threat, he searched for details of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing.After Clark’s bomb threat was discovered, two floors of the Arizona government building were evacuated and the then Republican governor Doug Ducey was forced to shelter in place. Security sweeps were conducted of Hobbs’s home and car.Before the sentence was handed down, a statement from the current Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, was read out to court. He said that the bomb threat had made employees in his office suffer fear and anxiety.“It makes each of us feel vulnerable, and that trauma does not abate over time. This type of threat is anti-American and a threat to democracy,” Fontes said.Tanya Senanayake, a trial attorney with the public integrity section of the justice department who prosecuted the case, had pressed for an even longer prison sentence of almost five years. She said that a deterrent punishment was needed to protect public officials from “a growing trend of threats to their lives and to the safety of their families”.Defense attorney Jeanette Alvarado emphasized that Clark was in the throes of alcohol and drug abuse at the time he committed the offense. He was now in recovery and has been clean and sober for three years, she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClark himself addressed the judge and said that when he made the bomb threat “I was not the person I wanted to be … I am deeply, deeply ashamed.”Since Trump became the first president in US history to refuse to cede power, election administrators and their families have come under a barrage of verbal and online attacks. A study by the Brennan Center last year found that almost one in three election officials had been threatened or abused, and almost half were concerned about the safety of their colleagues and staff.Arizona has borne the brunt of much of the wave of harassment. In two separate incidents last month, the FBI arrested individuals in Alabama and California alleged to have made violent threats against election officials in Maricopa county, the largest constituency in Arizona that covers Phoenix.On 25 March, a further federal sentencing hearing will be held in Phoenix in the case of Joshua Russell, 44, of Bucyrus, Ohio. Russell pled guilty to having left three threatening voicemails in August 2022 targeting an unnamed election official in the Arizona secretary of state’s office.The messages accused the victim of perpetrating election fraud and said: “America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life, you communist fucking traitor bitch.”The US attorney general Merrick Garland has made combating threats against election officials a priority for the justice department. In a speech in January he said: “These threats of violence are unacceptable. They threaten the fabric of our democracy.” More

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      House Republicans’ report contradicts witness account of Trump’s wheel-grab

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      US House Republicans on Monday released a report they said contradicted sensational January 6 committee testimony in which a former aide to Donald Trump described being told that as the attack on Congress unfolded, the then president was so eager to join supporters at the Capitol he tried to grab the wheel of his car.“The testimony of … four White House employees directly contradicts claims made by Cassidy Hutchinson and by the select committee in the final report,” read the report by the House administration subcommittee on oversight, which searched for alleged bias or malpractice in the January 6 investigation.“None of the White House employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report said, referring to the colloquial name for cars that carry the president.“Some witnesses did describe the president’s mood after the speech at the Ellipse. It is highly improbable that the other White House employees would have heard about the president’s mood in the SUV following his speech at the Ellipse, but not heard the sensational story that Hutchinson claims Anthony Ornato, the White House deputy chief of staff for operations, told her after returning to the White House on January 6.”Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump and his final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, testified before the January 6 committee in private and in public.In public, her testimony about Trump’s anger at his inability to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden made her a star witness, compared by some to John Dean, the White House counsel whose testimony sealed Richard Nixon’s fate in the Watergate scandal.In especially memorable testimony, Hutchinson described what she said Ornato told her about Trump’s reaction, after telling supporters to “fight like hell”, to being told he could not go with them to the Capitol, to try to block election certification.According to Hutchinson, Ornato said Trump furiously lunged for the wheel before a secret service agent grabbed his arm and said: “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.”Hutchinson said she was told “Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel [an agent] and when Mr Ornato recounted the story to me, he motioned towards his clavicles”.Questioned by Liz Cheney, an anti-Trump Republican and January 6 committee vice-chair, Hutchinson said Engel did not dispute the account. It was soon reported that Engel did dispute it, and wanted to testify under oath.Among transcripts released on Monday, the unnamed agent who drove Trump said: “The president was insistent on going to the Capitol. It was clear to me he wanted to go to the Capitol.”“He was not screaming at Mr Engel. He was not screaming at me. Certainly his voice was raised, but it did not seem to me that he was irate – [he] certainly … didn’t seem as irritated or agitated as he had on the way to the Ellipse,” the area near the White House where Trump addressed supporters.The driver added: “I did not see him reach. He never grabbed the steering wheel. I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all. You know, what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”The transcript was among those the January 6 committee did not release, citing security concerns. The transcripts were eventually released with redactions.On Monday, the New York Times said former January 6 committee aides said its final report included details of the driver’s interview and no cover-up was attempted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe final report said: “The committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a ‘furious interaction’ in the SUV. The vast majority of witnesses who have testified before the select committee about this topic, including multiple members of the secret service, a member of the Metropolitan police, and national security and military officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as ‘irate’, ‘furious’, ‘insistent’, ‘profane’ and ‘heated’.”It also said: “It is difficult to fully reconcile the accounts of several of the witnesses who provided information with what we heard from Engel and Ornato. But the principal factual point here is clear and undisputed: President Trump specifically and repeatedly requested to be taken to the Capitol. He was insistent and angry, and continued to push to travel to the Capitol even after returning to the White House.”On Monday, Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, the Republican select committee chair, said the report showed “firsthand testimony directly contradicts Cassidy Hutchinson’s story and the [January 6] committee’s narrative. Although the committee had this critical information, they still promoted Ms Hutchinson’s third-hand version of events.”Now 27, Hutcinson has released a memoir and become a prominent figure on the anti-Trump right. On Monday, her attorney re-released a letter to Loudermilk first sent in January.“Since Ms Hutchinson changed counsel,” the letter said, referring to her decision to stop using lawyers provided by Trump, “she has and will continue to tell the truth.“While other individuals … would not speak with the select committee, Ms Hutchinson and many other witnesses courageously stepped forward. Yet she now finds herself being questioned by you and your subcommittee regarding her testimony and on matters that may also be the subject of ongoing criminal proceedings against Mr Trump.”Trump, 77, is the presumptive Republican nominee to face Biden again in the fall. He still faces 91 criminal charges, 17 concerning attempted election subversion. Though Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, Senate Republicans assured his acquittal.Hutchinson, her lawyer said, would not “succumb to a pressure campaign from those who seek to silence her”. More

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      Texts reveal Trump co-defendant Chesebro’s role in ‘fake electors’ plot

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      Kenneth Chesebro was eager to help.It was five days after the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden was projected to defeat Donald Trump and win Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes. Trump’s campaign was requesting a recount. Chesebro, a little-known Harvard-educated lawyer, believed there were abnormalities in the election and emailed Jim Troupis, a friend and former Wisconsin judge, to offer to help with any of the campaign’s legal efforts.Chesebro tacked on a thought at the end of his message. If there were still questions about irregularities while Wisconsin’s members of the electoral college cast their votes for Joe Biden, Congress might not have to accept the result of the election.“If these various systemic abuses can be proven, and found to be pivotal in a court decision and/or detailed legislative findings, I don’t see why electoral votes certified by Evers (at least if court proceedings are still pending on the ‘safe harbor’ days) should be counted over an alternative slate sent in by the legislature, whose decisions should have primacy,” he wrote in an email on 8 November 2020. “At minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House.”The short email was the earliest seed of what would come to be known as the “fake elector” scheme – a national effort led by Chesebro to get Congress to reject legitimate slates of electors in favor of pro-Trump slates. It was a critical piece of Trump’s anti-democratic effort to overturn the 2020 election and now lies at the center of two criminal cases against Trump.Chesebro has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents, a felony, in Georgia, and was sentenced to five years of probation and $5,000 restitution. He is an unnamed co-conspirator in the federal election interference case against Trump. Troupis, who currently sits on a judicial ethics panel in Wisconsin, has not been criminally charged for his role in the scheme.“The resolution of this litigation provides much-needed transparency into how the fraudulent electors scheme was conceived and developed, and it exposes the key roles both Troupis and Chesebro played not only in executing the scheme in Wisconsin, but also around the nation,” Law Forward, Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and Stafford Rosenbaum, the legal groups who brought the civil case, said in a statement.Chesebro did not immediately return a request for comment.“It is the duty of lawyers to vigorously represent their clients, regardless of their popularity, within the bounds of the law. Our representation was vigorous and ethically appropriate,” Troupis said in a statement.Five days after his email, on 13 November, Troupis invited Chesebro to be part of the “legal briefing” team. Chesebro, who had been peppering Troupis with tweets he came across, replied that he was available to join “any call today on 20 mins notice”.“In the meantime, I’m still reading up on election law,” he added.Five days later, Chesebro sent what is now a well-known memo outlining the fake elector scheme. With the subject line “The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes”, the document offered a legal justification to throwing out the valid votes of Americans across the country and would become a roadmap for what was to unfold over the next few weeks.In the emails, Chesebro floated multiple avenues to challenge the election in Wisconsin – attempting to solve the puzzle of actually getting a court to side with them.“I should add a note about a more aggressive version of this strategy,” he wrote to Troupis on 19 November, arguing that the state legislature could justify choosing its own electors by casting doubt on the official process – which had changed during the pandemic to expand absentee voting. “The beauty of this is that the Republican legislators, if they adhere carefully to this theory, can emphasize that they’re simply acting in the interests of the State,” he added.Clever legal arguments would be important, but so would the perception, among Republican voters, that the 2020 election had been tainted by rampant fraud.“The whole idea is a long shot. Probably it would only be viable if by early December there was a palpable sense among conservatives that there was a concerted effort by Democrats to steal this election in multiple states,” he wrote.Chesebro pointed to numerous pandemic-era practices as potential legal challenges: “Democracy in the Park” events staffed by poll workers in Madison parks where voters could drop off their ballots ahead of election day and the use of ballot “drop boxes” were two particularly troubling practices, in Chesebro’s mind, and could form the basis for an objection.The documents also show how Chesebro sought to use conservative media to get the attention of conservatives on the Wisconsin supreme court. As they discussed various theories of wrongdoing in 18 November, Chesebro suggested “tipping off” conservative radio hosts. “Mostly to maximize the chance that [supreme court of Wisconsin] justices hear about this quickly and prejudge the case?” he wrote, adding a winking emoji to the text.In mid-December, after the Wisconsin supreme court declined to overturn the state’s election results, Chesebro sent Troupis a screenshot of a text that appears to joke about killing Brian Hagedorn, a conservative justice who cast a critical vote in the case. “We’re thinking of inviting Hagedorn on the plane and solving that problem at high altitude, over water…” the message says. It’s not clear who the message is from.Outside of the legal strategy, the documents also show how Chesebro was willing to assist with any detail, no matter how small – from brainstorming a media strategy to offering to coordinate on logistics. He drafted up a press release on the Wisconsin alternate electors meeting, only backtracking when Michael Roman, a top Trump aide, made clear in a 14 December email that the plan was not to be shared with the media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionChesebro offered an alternative idea – rather than a local media blitz, a message about their effort could come from the top – “Like a tweeted statement by Ellis, and follow up on-camera explanation by RG, and or follow up tweet by the President?” he replied, apparently in reference to Trump campaign lawyers Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani. “Much wiser heads on that sort of thing than me!”View image in fullscreenLater, as he and Roman tried to figure out how to get the fake elector documents to the Capitol on January 6, Chesebro offered different flights and routes a congressional aide can take as they fly into Washington.Those who know Chesebro have been baffled at how he got caught up in the fake elector scheme. The messages hint at a sense of excitement in being involved with Trump and his closest aides. After Troupis and Chesebro met with Trump in the Oval Office on 15 December, Chesebro texted Troupis a picture of Troupis on what appears to be a private plane.A few days after that meeting, Trump sent out a tweet inviting supporters to Washington on January 6. “Be there, will be wild,” Trump said. Chesebro sent the tweet to Troupis and wrote: “Wow. Based on 3 days ago, I think we have a unique understanding of this.”And on January 6, Troupis praised Chesebro’s work as senators began to object to the electoral college vote. “You got Arizona. Well done Ken! History is made,” he wrote in a text message. Chesebro replied with a picture of him on the mall smiling in front of the Washington monument. He later followed up with a smiling selfie of him and the far-right host Alex Jones. “Hanging with Alex Jones,” Chesebro wrote. “Lol. I told him to put you on his show.”The next morning, after the attack on the capitol, Chesebro suggested Trump surrogates should lay blame on antifa and poor security that was under the control of Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. He also suggested Trump could put the episode behind him by inviting Biden and Harris over for coffee on the morning of the inauguration. “He could lighten it up with a couple of well-placed jokes.”About an hour later, he said it was “stupid to have a rally on Jan. 6”. “Original plan was Jan. 5 right? Would have been perfect to have a Jan. 5 rally, then told people to go home, so focus would be on debate in Congress.” He also added Mike Pence was to blame for giving Trump hope of overturning the election and then not following through.On 22 February, the US supreme court dismissed a request filed by Troupis and Chesebro on behalf of the Trump campaign to revisit the Wisconsin election results.“So sorry,” Chesebro wrote.“You’re [sic] work was incredible Ken. I am honored to have been a part of it,” Troupis replied.“I am honored you invited me to help at all. Would have been worth it even if we’d gotten no votes and had never met the President – just being on a team with the guts to represent someone with an important case who other lawyers shunned was worth it,” Chesebro said. More

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      Judge hears closing arguments in ‘daytime soap opera’ Fani Willis hearing

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      A Fulton county judge began hearing closing arguments on Friday afternoon in a three-day evidentiary hearing to determine whether the district attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from handling the election interference against Donald Trump because of her romantic relationship with a deputy handling the case.The hearing has offered a dramatic deviation from the racketeering case against the former US president and 14 remaining co-defendants for trying to overturn the election in Georgia.The matter kicked off in January when Michael Roman, a Republican operative and one of the defendants in the case, filed a motion claiming Willis financially benefitted from the case because of a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a top prosecutor in the case. Trump and several other defendants later joined the request.Willis and Wade both admitted to a romantic relationship, but both said it only began after he was hired on 1 November 2021. They both testified about vacations they had taken together and revealed personal details about a romantic relationship that they say only began in 2022, after he was hired, and ended last summer.A star witness who was supposed to undercut their claims ultimately failed to produce meaningful evidence.On the surface, the question at the heart of the matter was whether Willis had a conflict of interest because of her relationship with Wade. But over several hours of testimony, lawyers for Roman, Trump and the other defendants did not produce any concrete evidence showing that she did.Willis testified that she repaid Wade in cash for any travel they had taken together – a claim that drew skepticism from defense lawyers, but no evidence to prove otherwise.“This was a disqualification hearing that quickly denigrated into a daytime soap opera,” said J Tom Morgan, a former district attorney in DeKalb county, a Fulton county neighbor. “Have they proven a conflict of interest, where this all started, absolutely not.”Lawyers may use Friday’s hearing to try and introduce additional evidence, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, including cellphone records that defense lawyers say undercut Wade’s claims that he never spent the night at Willis’s condo.It’s not exactly clear what the standard Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, will use to determine whether Willis should be disqualified. Georgia law allows for a prosecutor to be disqualified if there is an actual conflict of interest. Experts say state law has long established this high bar to clear and the defendants in the case have not done so.But McAfee has suggested that defense lawyers may not need to prove an actual conflict, but merely the appearance of one. “I think it’s clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said at a recent hearing.Robert CI McBurney, a different Fulton county judge who was overseeing the case at an earlier stage, disqualified Willis from investigating a fake elector after she appeared at a fundraiser for his political rival. That appearance, he said, would lead to questions about her motives in every step of the case, which was enough to disqualify her.A disqualification would upend the case and delay it past the 2024 election. The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a state agency, would have the sole discretion to reassign the case to another prosecutor, and there’s no timeline for how long that could take.But even if Willis and Wade aren’t disqualified, defense attorneys have used the hearings to damage the two prosecutors’ judgment and credibility in the public’s eye.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy bringing to light something they failed to disclose on their own, they’ve seeded the impression that the two were trying to conceal something.While it may not stand up legally, defense lawyers have also showed text messages from an associate of Nathan Wade’s in which he says the affair “absolutely” began before he was hired (the witness, Terrence Bradley, later testified he was only speculating). They also put a former friend of Willis on the stand that said she was certain the relationship began before Wade was hired. And they have also sought to introduce cellphone evidence that could undermine Wade’s claims he never spent the night at Willis’s condo before the relationship began.“I was standing in the grocery store and I would guess that the two women in front of me have not really paid much attention to this case or the politics,” Morgan said. “But they start talking about the text messages … it’s more interesting. People who haven’t paid any attention to this all of a sudden are paying attention to it.”Morgan also said the timing or existence of a relationship between Willis and Wade wasn’t really relevant to whether there was a conflict of interest. But during the hearing, the two prosecutors had boxed themselves in to a story that the romantic relationship only began after Wade was hired.Any evidence that comes to light questioning that undermines their credibility and could lead to accusations of perjury. Willis herself has said with certainty that the relationship definitely did not begin until after Wade was hired, but also acknowledged that it was difficult to say exactly when a romantic relationship begins.“It’s not like when you’re in grade school and you send a little letter saying, will you be my girlfriend? and you check it,” she said during one point in the hearing.More than anything, Trump’s team has succeeded in muddying the waters of the case and taking the attention off his efforts to undermine democracy. Willis underscores that when she testified during the first day of the hearing.“You’re confused. You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      Liz Cheney: supreme court delay will deny voters ‘crucial evidence’ on Trump

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      A Republican member of the January 6 committee has said the supreme court’s decision to wade into Donald Trump’s immunity case will deny Americans crucial information about the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.Liz Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman who was ousted by primary voters angry at her participation in the hearings that followed the insurrection, also demanded the justices come to a speedy decision.In a message posted to X, formerly Twitter, Cheney, a vocal Trump critic, said voters needed to have a verdict on the presumed Republican presidential nominee before they go to the polls in November.“Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear,” she wrote.“Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and seize power. Our justice system must be able to bring him to trial before the next election. SCOTUS [supreme court of the US] should decide this case promptly.”Justices on Wednesday set the week of 22 April to hear oral arguments over Trump’s assertion that he cannot be held criminally responsible for actions he took to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.Trump, who is facing a four-count indictment including conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election results, has declared the decision a victory, mostly because it puts the trial on hold, possibly until after the election.Some Democrats, meanwhile, are also upbeat about it. The California congressman Ted Lieu, who has previously accused Trump of committing multiple election crimes, said such a delay would work to his party’s advantage at the ballot box.“My view of the SCOTUS action: if the trial is delayed until after November, we will see the largest blue wave in history,” he wrote, also on X.“If November becomes a referendum on whether Trump faces justice, then Democrats will absolutely flip the House, keep the White House and expand the Senate.”Some legal experts are warning the supreme court’s action, along with delays already affecting several of the other legal cases Trump is facing, could have consequences for democracy.While many believe the court will ultimately confirm the rejection by a Washington DC appeals court of Trump’s claim, they say the delay could prove harmful.“This case really is most important in terms of democracy, and the most compelling with the evidence. That makes it very difficult in the sense there would be no verdict on this critical issue that cuts to the heart of democracy,” said Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond and a veteran supreme court analyst.“Maybe the supreme court just couldn’t resist, as the highest court in the land, weighing in on this very weighty question of presidential immunity, though most people who are clear-eyed about this don’t believe that there’s much of an argument for immunity in this context.“The court could have been perfectly satisfied with the DC circuit opinion, which was comprehensive and clear, and just seen no reason to take it up. But this is about delay. I don’t think anybody really disputes that. Trump’s theory over his entire life in litigation is that delay is his friend, and here it really is. It’s conceivable none of these cases goes to verdict before the election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, Trump claimed that “legal scholars are extremely thankful for the supreme court’s decision”, and insisted without irony that future presidents would fear “wrongful prosecution and retaliation” after they left office if he loses.Trump himself has spoken openly of seeking “retribution and revenge” over political foes if he is returned to office, and said he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.A former lawyer and legal analyst Lisa Rubin said she was “beyond terrified for our country” because the supreme court will delay the trial and potentially affect the election.“I honestly thought there would be enough votes on the court not to take this case, for no other reason than bad facts make bad law,” she told MSNBC News. “And the facts here could not be worse. If there was a context in which you wanted to decide the bounds of presidential immunity it’s not this case.”With oral arguments set for April, a ruling might not be handed down until May at the earliest.Alternatively, in the worst-case scenario for special counsel Jack Smith, the supreme court could wait until the end of its current term in July. That could mean the start of a trial expected to take up to three months might be delayed until no earlier than late September.Trump’s legal strategy has been to stall the various cases against him, ideally until after November’s election, in the hopes that a second term of office will allow him to pardon himself or install a loyal attorney general to drop charges.
      Hugo Lowell contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      Supreme court to hear Trump immunity claim in election interference case

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      The US supreme court agreed on Wednesday to take up the unprecedented claim that Donald Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution in the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, throwing into jeopardy whether it goes to trial before the 2024 election.The justices set oral arguments for the week of 22 April to consider a recent ruling by a three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, which categorically rejected Trump’s immunity claim in a decision earlier this month.Trump’s criminal case will remain on hold until the supreme court ultimately rules on the matter, inserting it into the politically charged position of potentially influencing whether Trump will go to trial before the presidential election in November.The unsigned order said the court intended to address at oral arguments “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office”.In the federal 2020 election case, Trump faces a four-count indictment in Washington DC brought by the special counsel, Jack Smith, that charges him with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election results, and violating rights.Trump sought to have the charges dismissed last year, arguing in a 52-page filing that the conduct he was charged with fell under the so-called “outer perimeter” of his official duties, which meant he could not be prosecuted because of the broad protections afforded to the presidency.The motion to dismiss contended that all of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat detailed in the indictment, from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification of Biden’s victory to organizing fake slates of electors, were in his capacity as president and therefore protected.At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that not only was Trump entitled to absolute presidential immunity, but that the immunity applied regardless of Trump’s intent in engaging in the conduct described in the indictment.The arguments were rejected by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, and subsequently by the three-judge panel at the DC circuit, which wrote in an unsigned but unanimous decision that they could not endorse such an interpretation of executive power.“At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches,” the opinion said. “We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”Trump’s lawyers settled on advancing the immunity claim last October in large part because it is what is known as an interlocutory appeal – an appeal that can be litigated pre-trial – and one that crucially put the case on hold while it was resolved.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPutting the case on hold was important because Trump’s overarching strategy has been to seek delay, ideally even beyond the election, in the hopes that winning a second presidency could enable him to pardon himself or allow him to install a loyal attorney general who would drop the charges.The involvement of the supreme court now means the case continues to remain frozen until the justices issue a ruling. And even if the court rules against Trump, the case may not be ready for trial until late into the summer or beyond.The reason that Trump will not go to trial as soon as the supreme court rules is because Trump is technically entitled to the “defense preparation time” that he had remaining when he filed his first appeal to the DC circuit on 8 December 2023, which triggered the stay.Trump has 87 days remaining from that period, calculated by finding the difference between the original 4 March trial date and 8 December. The earliest that Trump could go to trial in Washington, as a result, is by adding 87 days to the date of the supreme court’s final decision.With oral arguments set for April, a ruling might not be handed down until May. Alternatively, in the worst case scenario for the special counsel, the supreme court could wait until the end of its current term in July, which could mean the trial might be delayed until late September at the earliest. More