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      CPAC: Noem and Stefanik lead charge of the wannabe Trump VPs

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      On Saturday, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, will end with a straw poll. But given Donald Trump’s lock on the Republican nomination, attendees will not be asked who they want for president. They will be asked to choose between 17 possible vice-presidential picks.On Friday, four such names were on the speakers’ roster.“There are two kinds of people in this country right now,” the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, told an audience in general uninterested in non-binary choices.“There are people who love America, and there are those who hate America.”As an applause line, it worked well enough. Noem hit out at “agendas of socialism and control”, boasted of taxes cut and railroads built, and decried conditions at the southern border, claiming other countries were using it “to infiltrate us, and destroy us”.But she earned perhaps her loudest response with more simple red meat: “I’m just going to say it: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suck.”Perhaps tellingly for her straw poll chances, Noem’s statement that “I’ve always supported the fact that our next president needs to be President Trump” also earned cheers. Bland at face value, the line was a dig at other possible vice-presidential picks such as Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator who challenged Trump then fawningly expressed his love.“I was one of the first people to endorse Donald Trump to be president,” Noem said. “Last year, when everyone was asking me if I was going to consider running, I said no. Why would you run for president when you know you can’t win?”That was a question for another VP contender, Vivek Ramaswamy. Having made a brief splash in the primary – clashing with Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Trump’s last remaining rival – the biotech entrepreneur landed the speaker slot at Friday night’s Ronald Reagan dinner.Before that came two more contenders from outside the primary, Elise Stefanik of New York, the House Republican conference chair, and JD Vance of Ohio, the US Marine Corps reporter turned venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author and populist firebrand senator.The author Michael Wolff once reported that Trump preferred women to wear “high boots, short skirts and shoulder-length hair”. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, once a moderate, strode out as if in mid-Maga metamorphosis, long hair feathered and highlighted.Her speech was full of Trump-esque lines. The media were the “loyal stenographers of the left”; she hectored the Ivy League college presidents she grilled in a hearing on campus antisemitism, earning Trump’s approval; the “Biden crime family” was to blame for “Bidenflation”.View image in fullscreenNo mention, obviously, that the chief source of unverified allegations about the “Biden crime family” was this week charged with lying to investigators and said, by prosecutors, to have ties to Russian intelligence.Stefanik attempted a Trumpian move: changing the historical record. Finessing her experience of the January 6 Capitol attack, she said she “stood up for the election and constitutional integrity” – which could only be true under Trump’s definiton of those terms. With 146 other Republicans, Stefanik objected to key results.It was a stark departure from her statement at the time, when Stefanik lamented a “truly a tragic day for America”, condemned “dangerous violence and destruction”, and called for Trump supporters who attacked Congress to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.That statement disappeared from Stefanik’s website. But such scrubbing may be unnecessary. Trump has little interest in truth. Perhaps Stefanik’s zealous speech, if a little flat compared with the sharp rabble-rousing of the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz shortly before, will prove persuasive. She was enthusiastically received.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance came next, making light of appearing for an interview, by the Newsmax host Rob Schmitt, rather than a speech of his own.Relentlessly, the senator communicated anger, mostly at elites and politicians of both parties he said were dedicated to their own profit at the people’s expense.“It’s a disgrace that every person here should be pissed off about,” he thundered.Vance was angry about the need to stop funding Ukraine in its war with Russia, angry about the need to boost US manufacturing, angry about the lack of border and immigration reform.Presenting himself as a proud “conservative knuckle-dragger” but also a foreign policy voice – a sort of global isolationist, just back from the Munich security conference – Vance was unrepentant over Senate Republicans’ decision to sink a bipartisan border deal and accused Democrats of using undocumented migrants for electoral ends. He said Google should be broken up, to combat leftwing bias, but also uttered a couple of lines he might hope Trump does not search up.Singing Trump’s praises as a Washington outsider, Vance appeared to suggest he thought Trump was older than Biden, the Methuselah of the executive mansion, saying: “He was born I believe in 1940.” That would make Trump 83 or 84, not a supposedly sprightly 77.Vance also said Americans were “too strong or too woken up” to be fooled by Biden again. Woken, not woke. But given Vance’s play-in video, in which Schmitt bemoaned the spread of “woke” ideas on the left, it seemed a half-bum note.Finally, late on, came Ramaswamy. He posed his own binaries: “Either you believe in American exceptionalism or you believe in American apologism … Either you believe in free speech or you believe in censorship.” Then he reeled off positions – end affirmative action, frack and drill, crack down on illegal immigration – now in service of Trump.It sounded more like a pitch for a cabinet job, say health secretary, than for vice-president. Maybe not commerce, overseeing the patent office. Hymning the founders, Ramaswamy said Thomas Jefferson “invented the polygraph test”. The third president used a polygraph, a machine for copying letters. He did not invent a test to see if a person is lying.On Saturday, Kari Lake, an election-denying Senate candidate from Arizona, will speak before Trump, Ramaswamy after. Then the CPAC attendees, dedicated conservatives pausing in their perusal of Maga hammocks and Woke Tears water, for sale at the CPAC market, will say who they want for VP. More

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      Trump now owes more than $500m. How will he pay?

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      You’re reading the Guardian US’s free Trump on Trial newsletter. To get the latest court developments delivered to your inbox, sign up here.On the docket: Trump’s cash crunchDonald Trump has a lot of major financial decisions to make following Judge Arthur Engoron’s Friday order that he owes more than $350m in penalties in his New York state business fraud case – and the clock is ticking for him to make them.He essentially has two options: pay now, or potentially pay a lot more later.The court gave the former US president 30 days from the verdict, or 17 March, to figure out what to do. But the $350m verdict is only the beginning: Engoron’s decision also ordered Trump to pay additional pre-judgment interest going back as far as when New York attorney general Letitia James began her investigation in March 2019.The attorney general’s office has calculated the interest due so far brings the current total he owes to more than $450m; the statutory 9% annual interest rate will keep accruing at more than $600,000 per week unless Trump puts up the entire amount.Since Trump plans to appeal the verdict, the only ways to pause the interest collection are either to park the full amount in a New York state-controlled escrow account or find a company prepared to help him post a bond that will assure the state he can pay the penalties if his appeals fail – for a hefty fee, of course.It’s unclear if Trump has the cash to post the full amount. Trump said under oath last year that he had roughly $400m in liquid assets, not quite enough to cover what he’d need to put into escrow.As the Guardian US’s Hugo Lowell reported on Monday: “Trump’s preference is to avoid using his own money while he appeals.” But to obtain a bond, Trump would have to find a company willing to do business with him and “would then have to pay a premium to the bond company and offer collateral, probably in the form of his most prized assets”, like his real estate holdings.Trump is also hemmed in by the verdict’s restriction barring his company from applying for a loan from any firm that does business in New York for the next three years, potentially limiting his options to secure the money for that bond.View image in fullscreenAnd don’t forget that this isn’t all he owes in recent court judgments. Trump already put $5.5m into a state-controlled escrow account to cover the first defamation judgment that he owes E Jean Carroll. He owes another $83m to Carroll following a late January federal court ruling that he had defamed her again.Trump has so far declined to say what his plan is. When asked during a Fox News town hall on Wednesday how he plans to pay his legal fines, he instead pivoted to comparing his loss in court to Vladimir Putin’s apparent murder of Alexei Navalny, the Russian strongman’s chief political foe. “It is a form of Navalny,” he remarked, dodging the question.Attorney general James told ABC News on Tuesday that she is prepared to “​​ask the judge to seize his assets” if Trump can’t or won’t pay the amount – including some of his most iconic properties. “Yes, I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day,” she said.It’s unlikely things would get to that point. But while winning the presidency this year could give him power to shut down the federal criminal cases he’s facing, it won’t help him shrug off civil liability in the New York state court.“This is going to stick with him if he does not prevail on an appeal,” Columbia University law professor Eric Talley said.Calendar crunchView image in fullscreenNew York judge Juan Merchan officially set a 25 March start date for Trump’s Stormy Daniels hush money trial last Thursday, positioning it to become Trump’s first criminal case – just weeks after his team expects him to lock up the GOP nomination for president. The trial is expected to last around six weeks, meaning the verdict could arrive sometime in mid-May.The timing of Trump’s three other pending criminal trials are all uncertain, but major developments are expected soon that will give us a much better sense of which, if any, will come to fruition before the election.In Georgia, the election interference criminal trial is in limbo until Judge Scott McAfee rules on whether a potential conflict of interest exists that justifies removing Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from the case because of her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she hired for the case. Willis, Wade and others testified in court late last week. McAfee may hold one more hearing on this before making a decision, which could come as early as next week.In Washington DC, the criminal trial relating to Trump’s conduct on and before January 6 hinges on the US supreme court’s pending decision on whether to take up his claim of presidential criminal immunity.If they decide to simply allow a lower court ruling against him to stand, the trial could get back on track for late spring. If they decide to consider the issue, the big question is how fast they decide to do so – an expedited schedule could allow enough time for the trial to take place, but if they take their time it would all but kill the trial’s chances.And in Florida, where Trump is facing criminal charges for mishandling national security documents, Judge Aileen Cannon has scheduled a conference on 1 March to determine whether Trump’s defense motions will push back her originally scheduled 20 May trial start date. (It seems likely it will.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWill this matter?View image in fullscreenGuardian US opinion columnist Sidney Blumenthal points out that Trump has run his business empire aground in spite of a huge head start: “The hundreds of millions that Fred Trump bestowed on his son could not prevent him from steering the family legacy on to the rocks.”Meanwhile, Guardian US reporter Sam Levine wonders whether Willis can regain control of the Georgia election interference case after the intense scrutiny of her personal life – even if she’s allowed to stay on. “In the court of public opinion, Trump’s defense lawyers may have already won,” he writes. “Like it or not, Willis has moved to the center of the case. It’s unclear whether she’ll be able to successfully leave the witness box and return to the prosecutor’s table.”And Guardian US reporter George Chidi dives into Willis’ court appearances, arguing that the audience she most cares about (besides the judge deciding the case’s fate) are the Atlanta voters who will decide whether to re-elect her this November. “By showing her grief and rage, she humanizes herself before this audience,” he writes, “which is likely to be sympathetic to the horrors of a Black professional’s love life aired like a reality television show before the American public as a Trump defendant’s legal ploy.”Cronies & casualtiesView image in fullscreenA federal judge threatened to hold former Trump aide Peter Navarro in contempt for refusing to obey her order to return presidential records in his possession to the national archives, and gave him until 21 March to supply them. Navarro is having a rough month: he was already sentenced to four months in prison in a separate case for refusing a subpoena to appear in front of the House January 6 committee, and is expected to begin serving that time in the coming weeks after a judge denied his appeal.View image in fullscreenThe US supreme court rejected appeals from seven Trump 2020 campaign attorneys, including Sidney Powell, to pay legal fees and face other sanctions for filing a lawsuit filled with false claims about that election.What’s next?Thursday The deadline for Trump’s team to file pretrial motions in his Florida classified documents case. Trump’s team has telegraphed that it will file a number of suppressive motions that seek to delay the case.Any day now The US supreme court could decide at any time whether or not they’ll take up the lower court ruling that denied Trump’s claim of presidential immunity in his Washington DC criminal trial.As early as next week The supreme court is expected to rule soon on whether the 14th amendment’s insurrection clause allows Colorado to remove Trump from its presidential ballot. During the court’s oral arguments two weeks ago, the justices indicated they’re highly unlikely to allow this to happen.1 March Scheduling conference in the Florida documents case to determine whether the 20 May trial date that Cannon previously scheduled will stick.17 March Deadline for Trump to appeal the civil fraud verdict.25 March New York hush money trial set to start.Have any questions about Trump’s trials? Please send them our way trumpontrial@theguardian.com More

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      Top Maricopa county official quits as election looms: ‘All I do is play defense’

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      For Clint Hickman, an official who helped lead Arizona’s largest country through some of the most difficult moments of the pandemic and the 2020 election, the current moment in American life feels like the right one to quit.Amid yet more tumult and tense division in American public life, the Maricopa county supervisor announced this week that he’s not running again, choosing instead to prioritize his family – and get rid of the endless harassment that’s been a feature of his job the last few years and put him more than once in the national spotlight.“After the election in 2020, it’s gotten worse and worse,” he said. “I started to feel like all I get to do is play defense in this job any more … I thought I was looking way too much in the rearview mirror.”Hickman, a Republican, voted to certify Maricopa’s elections in 2020 despite an aggressive campaign from former president Donald Trump and his allies to reject the results and throw the state toward the Republican candidate over Joe Biden, the Democrat who narrowly won there.The threats arrived at Hickman’s door at one point, with people protesting outside his home while his wife and three kids, now teenagers, were there. “This is poor behavior brought to my doorstep, and I would like to think it hasn’t impacted my kids,” he said.Hickman, just shy of 60 years old, said his upcoming milestone birthday made him reflect on what he wants out of life now, and that’s more time with his family. But the threats he faced at work and the punishing environment in his role as a supervisor played a role in his decision to exit.He faced credible death threats, one of which resulted in a two and a half year prison sentence for an Iowa man. The threats amped up both in response to elections and in response to the county’s decision to institute a mask mandate during the pandemic, a fault line for conservatives in the purpling county.“Those [threats] didn’t just arrive to myself. It arrived to county workers, county elections workers, people in the county clerk’s office. During the pandemic, people were making threats to anybody wearing Maricopa county badge when it came to the mask mandate.”He’s still receptive to the idea of running for office someday again, but for now, he wants to get his kids away from the vitriol he’s faced. Hickman’s family is one of the Phoenix area’s biggest business families, running a giant egg farming operation. For now, it’s back to the eggs for Hickman.Maricopa county became a national flashpoint in 2020, then again in 2022. Errors like printing problems or the use of certain pens became the subject of endless speculation and conspiracies that still linger today. And 2024 will undoubtedly bring more, as the county is a critical piece of a swing state, one that both Trump and Biden will want to win to complete their electoral map.Part of his effort to move forward is getting out of the race to remain in office. He doesn’t want his name on the ballot this year, that way “no one can say that I have my thumb on an election that I’m going to rig for either myself or my friends”.The seat could, theoretically, go to someone who wouldn’t uphold the county’s elections – that’s up to the district’s voters, he said. He doesn’t think they’d go for it, but the seat belongs to the citizens there, not him.He joins a too-long line of public servants who have left their roles in the face of ongoing harassment over elections. A study of 11 states in the US west, including Arizona, by Issue One showed that more than 160 chief local election officials had left their roles since the 2020 election, leaving half of the 76 million Americans living in those states with a new top election official.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHickman called it “shocking” to see elections officials run out of their jobs, often whipped up by misunderstandings and distortions. “It is saddening to see so much of a brain drain in this space leaving due to harassment techniques by people that want to do people harm,” he said.He’s one of few officials who have seen the person who threatened them prosecuted. Mark Rissi, of Iowa, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison over threats he made to Hickman and to the state’s attorney general. In the voicemail Rissi left for Hickman in September 2021, he said he was going to “lynch” the supervisor. “You’re gonna die, you piece of [expletive]. We’re going to hang you. We’re going to hang you.”At the sentencing hearing, Hickman testified – and Rissi didn’t even recognize him, Hickman said. Rissi was supposed to enter prison on 8 January, but has so far delayed his sentence because of health issues.“I’m looking forward to the day I can stop looking over my shoulder for this guy,” Hickman said.Hickman said he isn’t sure what to do to address this kind of threatening behavior and how to stop it. Catching the people making threats and holding them accountable is part of it, but there seems to be a lot more going on – maybe the pandemic, maybe the people running for office – driving more people to conflict and chaos, he said.“I can certainly play the blame game all day long,” he said. “But we need some solutions. And I don’t know what those solutions are at this short moment. How about this? Maybe everybody needs to start watching Mr Rogers again and start treating people nicer.” More

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      in US Politics

      Want to come up with a winning election ad campaign? Just be honest | Torsten Bell

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      There are so many elections this year but how to go about winning them? Labour has a sub-optimal, but impressively consistent strategy: waiting (usually a decade and a half in opposition).It’s paying off again with huge swings to them in last week’s two byelections. But this approach requires patience and most parties around the world are less keen on waiting that long. So they spend a lot of time and money trying to win, which means election adverts. In the US, TV ads are centre stage. In the UK, those are largely banned (even GB News is meant to be providing news when Tory MPs interview each other) but online ads are big business.Those involved in politics have very strong views about the kind of ads that work. They absolutely have to be positive about your offer. Or negative about your ghastly opponent. It’s imperative they’re about issues, not personalities. Or the opposite. The only problem with those election gurus’ certainties? Different kinds of ads work at different times and places. So found research with access to an intriguing data source: experiments conducted by campaign teams during 2018 and 2020 US elections to test ad options before choosing which to air; 617 ads were tested in 146 survey experiments.Researchers showed that quality matters – it’s not unusual for an advert to be 50% more or less persuasive than average. But one kind is not generally more persuasive and the type of ads that worked in 2018 didn’t have the same effect in 2020.So, if you’re trying to get yourself elected, my advice is to base your campaign on the evidence, not just your hunch. See it as good practice. After all, we’d ideally run the country that way. More

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      Find Me the Votes review: Fani Willis of Georgia, the woman who could still take down Trump

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      If this week’s hearing about Fani Willis’s affair with her assistant Nathan Wade has piqued America’s interest in the character of the Fulton county district attorney, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have written the perfect book for this moment.Isikoff has been a dogged investigator for the Washington Post, NBC and Yahoo, while his longtime friend and collaborator Klaidman is a former managing editor of Newsweek now a newly minted investigative reporter for CBS. Together they have produced the most readable and authoritative account to date of all of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.At its center is a nuanced portrait of Willis, who at least until a couple of days ago appeared to be Trump’s most effective nemesis, having indicted him, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as 16 other co-conspirators.Whether Willis’s affair with one of her principal assistants is a valid reason to force the presiding judge to dismiss her from the case remains to be seen. But the revelation seems to have been as much of a bombshell for her biographers as it was for everyone else.Contacted by the Guardian, both authors declined to predict the outcome of the current proceeding. But Isikoff sounded optimistic that Willis would survive this latest assault.“How did the relationship between Willis and Wade prejudice any of the other defendants?” Isikoff asked. “There is simply no evidence that it did.”Willis is a daughter of the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, her father, John C Floyd III, migrated from the politics of John F Kennedy and the non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr to the much tougher ideology of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles, which he co-founded in 1967. After that he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer.Isikoff and Klaidman say Floyd’s odyssey gives us “a glimpse into his daughter’s pugnacious personality and her deep-seated loathing of bullies” – both of which were on prominent display when she defended herself in the hearing room.While it was her personal passion that brought Willis into an unwelcome spotlight, it was her own focus on allegations of sexual harassment against her previous boss and mentor that made her election as the first woman district attorney of Fulton county possible. Paul Howard became the first Black person to hold the job of Fulton county DA in 1996, and made Willis a star by giving her some of his Atlanta office’s most famous cases. She became famous as the lead prosecutor in an indictment of 35 public school officials for alleged violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act. The Atlanta schools superintendent, six principals, two assistant principals and 14 teachers were accused of faking students’ test scores, in response to the requirements of No Child Left Behind.That law, championed by George W Bush, put schools at risk of losing federal aid if students didn’t meet minimum standards for success on standardized tests. All but one of the defendants was Black, which made the prosecution even more controversial. By the time Howard gave Willis the case she was chief of the office’s trial division. Isikoff and Klaidman say she proved a “hands-on micromanager” who “plunged into every detail of the case”. Its complexity turned out to be the perfect training for Willis to use the same Rico statute to go after Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.One of this book’s most important contributions is to remind us of the breadth and viciousness of the president’s efforts to undermine democracy – and the horrendous effects they had on the lives of decent, honest election officials in every swing state Trump lost.After multiple lawsuits alleging voter fraud were thrown out by nearly every judge who heard them, Trump famously turned his attention to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, one of several Republicans whose resistance proved heroic. When Trump got Raffensperger and his assistants on the phone, they were shocked by how many QAnon conspiracy theories Trump seemed to have accepted as fact – just because so many of his supporters had retweeted them. A particular favorite of the president’s was the notion there had been 200,000 forged signatures on absentee ballots in Fulton county – even though the total number of absentee votes had been 148,319.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the same call, Trump repeated the big lie that the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss had run between 18,000 and 56,000 bogus ballots through election scanners. Trump said Freeman was “known all over the internet”. This was the same lie promoted by Giuliani, which ultimately cost him a richly deserved verdict of $148m for libeling the two innocent women.In one of the many telling details of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, the authors remind us that the other hero from that phone call was the Georgia deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs.“Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors believe. To protect her boss, she decided to tape the phone call – without telling Raffensperger. After the tape leaked to the Washington Post, it quickly became the single most powerful piece of evidence against the ex-president in any of the four prosecutions he is still facing.When you see all of Trump’s alleged crimes piled together in a single narrative, it is beyond belief that he remains the favorite of a majority of Republican primary voters. But these same facts should surely be enough to guarantee his defeat if he actually gets the chance to face the larger electorate in November.
      Find Me the Votes is published in the US by Twelve More

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      in Elections

      ‘That’s lies’: Fani Willis defends herself over relationship with Trump prosecutor – video

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, vehemently denied wrongdoing while testifying at a court hearing on Thursday as she rebutted accusations that her romantic relationship with a deputy prosecutor on the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump meant she should be disqualified from the case. The district attorney testified that her relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade started months after he was retained to work on the case, charging Trump over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state, and ended in summer 2023 More

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      in US Politics

      Arizona Republican who resisted pro-Trump pressure in 2020 to stand down

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      A Republican elected official in Arizona who protected the vote and withstood a barrage of pressure and threats in 2020 from within his own party to sway the election toward Trump announced on Thursday that he will not seek re-election.Clint Hickman, a supervisor in Maricopa county, the state’s largest county that includes Phoenix, faced death threats for doing his job to confirm the county’s vote totals in 2020, when the state narrowly chose Joe Biden. State Republicans then initiated a sham “audit” of the county’s results, a costly hand count that took months only to conclude that Biden did indeed win.In a statement on Thursday, Hickman cited his family and the desire to spend more time with them as a reason for not running again, the Washington Post first reported.“My family has been gracious and unselfish in supporting me as I’ve campaigned, served, held town halls and breakfasts with constituents, been part of early morning and late-night meetings about county business, made decisions that brought significant attention and had profound impact – all things that come with public service,” he wrote. “I’m proud of this period of my life, but I want more time with my family.”Hickman, who first took office in 2013, will still be in office when the county canvasses the 2024 vote, with his term ending in early 2025. The Maricopa board is dominated by Republicans, with four of the five members affiliated with the GOP.One of the people who threatened Hickman, an Iowa man named Mark Rissi, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison over a threat he made to Hickman and to the state’s attorney general.Rissi had left a voicemail for Hickman in September 2021, telling the supervisor: “When we come to lynch your stupid lying Commie [expletive], you’ll remember that you lied on the [expletive] Bible, you piece of [expletive]. You’re gonna die, you piece of [expletive]. We’re going to hang you. We’re going to hang you.”During a sentencing hearing for Rissi, Hickman shared how protesters came to his house in 2020, while his wife and children were home, Votebeat reported.Elections officials across the country have seen ongoing threats and harassment since the 2020 election. Many of them have left their jobs or been run out by those who believe the election was stolen.In Maricopa county, the threats have not subsided since 2020. In the 2022 midterms, election workers received daily messages that called them names and alluded to their demise. Other county officials have seen their families threatened, with the lead election attorney arming himself and getting body armor for his family after a threat against his children. Bill Gates, another Republican supervisor who said the endless threats gave him post-traumatic stress, is also not running for re-election. More

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      Judge to consider whether to disqualify Fani Willis from Georgia election case

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      An Atlanta judge on Thursday will examine whether Fulton county prosecutors charging Donald Trump and his allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia had improper romantic relations that merit being disqualified from bringing the case.The eventual outcome of the hearing – expected to take over two days before the presiding Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee – could have far-reaching implications for one of the most perilous criminal cases against the former president.Trump’s co-defendant in the Georgia 2020 election interference case, Michael Roman, is seeking to have the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and her top deputy, Nathan Wade, disqualified as a result of their romantic relationship because it constituted a conflict of interest.If Roman is successful in having Willis relieved from bringing the case, it would result in the disqualification of the entire district attorney’s office, throwing into disarray a prosecution that has already been roiled politically since the allegations were made last month.The district attorney’s office has vehemently rejected the claim that the romantic relationship gave rise to a conflict, arguing in court filings that there was no impropriety under the law and there was no financial benefit to either Willis or Wade, as has been alleged.McAfee allowed the hearing to go forward after he decided on Monday that there was the possibility of conflict that he wanted to resolve. “It’s clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said at a hearing.The judge is not expected to immediately rule on the matter. The anticipated two-day proceeding is what is known as an evidentiary hearing, where both sides are expected to call witnesses to testify in open court under oath.During the potentially fraught hearing, McAfee is expected to delve into three principal issues to tackle the conflict of interest question: whether Willis financially benefited from hiring Wade, when the romantic relationship started, and whether the romantic relationship was ongoing.The main focus of the hearing is likely the testimony of Terrence Bradley, a former partner at Wade’s law firm, and those of Willis and Wade. McAfee rejected a request from the district attorney’s office to quash their subpoenas but ruled out getting into Wade’s legal qualifications.The allegations first surfaced in an 8 January motion filed by Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, who complained about a potential conflict of interest arising from what she described as “self-dealing” between Willis and Wade as a result of their then-unconfirmed romantic relationship.Roman’s filing, in essence, accused Willis of engaging in a quasi-kickback scheme, where Wade paid for joint vacations to Florida and California using earnings of more than $650,000 from working on the Trump case. The filing also alleged the relationship had started before he was hired.The filing itself, however, provided no concrete evidence that showed alleged self-dealing. At the time, Merchant said her information was based on confidential sources and information in Wade’s divorce case. Yet when the divorce records were unsealed, there was similarly no concrete evidence.After declining to address the allegations for a month, the district attorney’s office acknowledged on 2 February that Willis and Wade had been romantically involved but only after he had been hired as a special prosecutor, and insisted there was no financial benefit because travel costs had been split.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe lawyer for Roman told the judge on Monday that she could undercut that characterization with testimony from Bradley. Indeed, the central thrust of the allegations appear to be buttressed by Bradley; the judge referred at one point to Bradley as the defense’s “star witness”.But special prosecutor Anna Cross, another top deputy on the Trump case who is also representing the district attorney’s office in the matter, told the judge Bradley’s recollections were either fabricated or misrepresented, and was restricted in what he could say because of attorney-client privilege.Whether Willis will be disqualified remains uncertain. Legal experts have generally suggested the evidence to date – there has been almost none, bar Wade’s bank statements showing he paid for a couple of trips – did not show an actual conflict of interest.The potential problem for Willis is that she was previously disqualified from investigating the Georgia lt governor Burt Jones over a lower legal standard of “appearance of impropriety”, after she publicly endorsed Jones’s political rival in that re-election race.The allegations have also threatened to turn the case into political theatre. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has derided the prosecution as scandal-plagued in addition to his usual refrain that the criminal charges against him are a political witch-hunt. More