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      Trump asks US supreme court to keep election interference case frozen

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the US supreme court on Monday to keep on hold the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results while he prepares to challenge a recent appeals court ruling that found he was not immune from prosecution.The former US president also asked the nation’s highest court to stay the US court of appeals for the DC circuit order that prevented him from seeking what is known as an “en banc” rehearing of the case by the full bench of appeals judges.“President Trump’s application easily satisfies this Court’s traditional factors for granting a stay of the mandate pending en banc review and review on certiorari by this Court,” Trump’s lawyers John Sauer, John Lauro and Greg Singer wrote in the 110-page petition.The petition argued that Trump had met the key tests for the supreme court to grant a stay because there was a strong likelihood it would hear the case and because without a stay, Trump would suffer “irreparable injury” if the case proceeded to trial in the interim.“It is axiomatic that President Trump’s claim of immunity is an entitlement not to stand trial at all, and to avoid the burdens of litigation pending review of his claim,” the petition said.The filing broadly expounded earlier arguments Trump had made about presidential immunity, which his legal team has viewed as the best vehicle to delay the impending trial because it was a vehicle through which Trump could pursue an appeal before trial that also triggered an automatic stay.Trump has made it no secret that his strategy for all his impending cases is to seek delay – ideally beyond the 2024 election in November, in the hopes that winning a second presidency could enable him to pardon himself or direct his attorney general to drop the charges.For months, Trump has attempted to advance a sweeping view of executive power – that he enjoyed absolute immunity from prosecution because the conduct charged by the special counsel Jack Smith fell within the “outer perimeter” of his duties as president.The contention received short shrift from the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing his case in Washington and rejected his argument. It received similar treatment from a three-judge panel at the DC circuit, which categorically rejected his position.“We cannot accept former president Trump’s claim that a president has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power,” the unsigned but unanimous opinion from the three-judge panel said.“At bottom, former president Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three [government] branches,” the opinion said. “We cannot accept that the office of the presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”But Trump’s lawyers have long viewed the immunity issue as more of a vehicle to stall the case from going to trial than an argument they would win on its merits. It was perhaps the only motion they could make that triggered an appeal before trial and came with an automatic stay.Trump was forced to appeal directly to the supreme court, instead of making an intermediary challenge that would cause further delay, after the DC circuit panel issued parameters on how Trump could use further appeals if he wanted the case to remain frozen.The panel ruled that Trump needed to petition the supreme court by Monday to keep the stay in place. The stay would remain until the supreme court either declined to hear the case or until it issued a judgment in the event it did agree to take up the matter.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat effectively foreclosed Trump from pursuing an “en banc” rehearing – which is where the full bench of judges at the DC circuit would reconsider the decision of the three-judge panel – since pre-trial proceedings under Chutkan would resume while he waited for the DC circuit to weigh in.Over the weekend, Trump’s chief appellate lawyer John Sauer prepared the application for a stay, a person familiar with the matter said.The concern in recent days among the Trump legal team has been whether the supreme court would agree to keep the case frozen while Trump made his final appeal, the person said. And even if they granted the stay, it remains unclear whether the supreme court would ultimately agree to take up the case.How the court moves next could decide whether Trump will go to trial on the federal election interference case before the 2024 presidential election. Recent public polls have shown that voters would be more inclined to vote for the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020, if Trump was convicted in this case.If the supreme court declines to hear the case, it would return jurisdiction to Chutkan in the federal district court in Washington. Chutkan scrapped the 4 March trial date she initially scheduled, but has otherwise shown a determination to proceed to trial with unusual haste.If the supreme court does accept the case, the question will be how quickly it schedules deadlines and arguments – and how quickly it issues a decision. The closer to the end of its term that the court issues a decision, the more unlikely a trial would take place before the election.The speed with which the supreme court moves has become important because Chutkan has promised Trump that he would get the full seven months to prepare his trial defense that she envisioned in her original scheduling order that set the 4 March trial date. More

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      How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

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      Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,” Lessig says. “There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.”The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the “dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”Having repeated the wargaming exercise for the new book, Lessig is far less confident that another assault on democracy would end so positively. With the former president almost certain to secure the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa and New Hampshire, Lessig has no doubt about how far Trump is prepared to go.“We’ve seen that he’s willing to do much, more more than we expected back in 2020,” he says.Another reason for people to be “very anxious” is that Trump and his inner circle have had four years to conduct their own wargames and are likely to be far more sophisticated: “Trump didn’t understand how to undo the structures of government. Now he’s well-trained, he knows exactly what he needs to do.”For their 2024 wargame, Lessig and Seligman assume the November election will be nail-bitingly close, both nationally and in at least one battleground state. That is not an outlandish precondition – you only have to think about the 537 votes that gifted Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in 2000.Given a close election, there are factors that could help stave off disaster. With the vice-presidency in the hands of Kamala Harris, there is no chance of Trump or his supporters unleashing the kind of pressure to which they subjected Mike Pence in 2020, trying to get him to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.In the wake of January 6, Congress also moved to close several loopholes by clarifying some of the most ambiguous wording of the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act makes it harder for Congress to object to the counting of votes under the electoral college, and gives the courts a greater role in adjudicating the proper slate of electors to be returned from individual states should disputes arise.But in the Lessig-Seligman analysis, inevitable congressional compromises have left some loopholes in place, opening up opportunities for an unscrupulous, now battle-hardened candidate.Three scenarios stand out. The first relates to so-called “faithless electors”: delegates chosen by parties to represent the winning candidate in each state under the arcane terms of the electoral college who decide to go against their pledge and back the loser.During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, 10 electors switched their votes. The ruse was a creative, albeit vain attempt to stave off a Trump presidency.Lessig argued on behalf of the 2016 faithless electors before the US supreme court, in a case known as Chiafolo v Washington. The court ruled against the faithless electors, ordering that states have the right to compel them to back the winners of the popular vote.The authors’ concern is that the supreme court left it up to each state to decide whether or not to take up that power. Several states have yet to spell out in law that electors must abide by their pledge to vote for the victor. That leaves the door open to electors coming under massive, even violent pressure from Trump’s army of Make America Great Again warriors.“Imagine an elector had Maga Republicans surrounding their house carrying torches and demanding they vote for Donald Trump. Who knows what the electors would do in those circumstances,” Lessig says.The second scenario involves what Lessig and Seligman call a “rogue governor”: the governor of a state who decides to flip the results of the presidential election. This route poses the greatest long-term threat of US democracy imploding, Lessig believes.Paradoxically, post-January 6 reforms in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act heightened the danger by increasing the powers of governors to certify slates of electors sent to Congress. Both houses of Congress can vote to overrule a rogue governor, and count the correct slate representing the winner of the popular vote, but only if the House and Senate agree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGiven a divided Congress, a rogue governor and rogue House working together could steal the state’s electoral votes, and with it potentially the presidency.The risk of this scenario in this election cycle is minimal, Lessig concedes. Many of the highly sensitive battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – have Democratic governors.That leaves Georgia, which Biden won by just 11,779 votes. It has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result in 2020 and so is arguably less likely to go rogue this year.View image in fullscreenThe third wargaming scenario is the one that really keeps Lessig up at night: what if an entire state legislature decided to go rogue?Again, the idea is not fanciful. Several legislatures in the most hotly contested states have Republican majorities firmly under Trump’s sway – Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, to name just three – and conspiracy theories about rampant electoral fraud continue to circulate within them.Lessig worries that the supreme court ruling in Chiafolo, by giving state legislatures the power to tell electors how to cast their electoral votes, heightens the risk of a Maga-dominated legislature going rogue. He envisages state lawmakers claiming massive fraud in a close race and using that to justify switching its result to Trump.“That’s a kind of opened hole that is going to be very hard to close in time,” he says.The Harvard professor has emerged from this journey into the dark arts of election subversion in a bleak mood. The book finishes with a raft of proposed changes to federal and state laws that the authors argue would close the loopholes they uncovered in their travels. Will those changes happen in time to prevent a second Trump blitzkrieg?“I’m not optimistic,” Lessig says. “I’m not optimistic that Congress will be able to do anything in time, so the most we can hope for is that the infrastructure resists as it did last time.”When he was researching the book, Lessig says he had the voice of his 13-year-old daughter ringing in his head: “Just chill,” as she would say. But in the event of an extremely close result, he feels he can’t just chill.He stresses that none of this is partisan. He began life as a Republican and had the distinction in 1980, aged 19, of being the youngest delegate from Pennsylvania to Ronald Reagan’s nominating convention.“Neither of us have anything against the conservative movement in the United States, as expressed in the traditional Republican party,” he says.But he looks at how the party has become “disengaged from the basic premise of democratic politics – if you win, you win, if you lose, you go home”. And he sees that the number of Americans who still believe the 2020 election was stolen, against all evidence, remains steady. That scares him.“Many Trump supporters have the sense that anything is justified, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “Trump is denying every single core democratic norm, and yet his support continues to grow. That too is astonishing and terrifying.”
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Trump is not immune from prosecution in 2020 election interference case, court rules

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      A federal appeals court panel has decided to reject Donald Trump’s arguments that he cannot be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results because it involved actions he took while president.While hearing oral arguments in Washington DC on 9 January, the three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit had expressed skepticism with Trump’s claim to immunity, while the former US president looked on in the court room. On Tuesday they rejected the claim.Last year, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, which charged the former president over his efforts to reverse the 2020 election, including by advancing fake slates of electors and obstructing Congress on 6 January 2021.The motion was rejected by the trial judge, prompting Trump to appeal to the DC circuit. The special counsel sought to bypass the potentially lengthy appeals process by asking the US supreme court to intervene directly, but the nation’s highest court returned the case to the appeals court.The ruling has been issued by the panel, which includes one judge appointed under George HW Bush’s presidency and two chosen by Joe Biden.The very legal process itself is acting as a hindrance to the prosecution in the federal criminal case and playing into Trump’s hands.Observers before the decision came down viewed a long-shot ruling in Trump’s favor as an obvious, significant blow to Smith – while a ruling that Trump is not immune would mean him appealing to the full DC circuit and then potentially the US supreme court, causing huge delay in the case amid the primaries and thrusting the conservative-leaning highest court into the middle of the presidential election.The appeal the panel just ruled on arose after the DC federal judge Tanya Chutkan in early December rejected Trump’s claim, based on his sweeping and unprecedented interpretation of executive power, that she should dismiss the case. She ruled that he enjoyed no immunity from prosecution simply because when the actions in question took place when he was still president.A grand jury indicted Trump last August, accusing him of conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights, in the case brought by the Department of Justice-appointed Smith.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe charges relate to Trump’s wide-ranging efforts after losing the 2020 election to Biden to overturn the results, campaigning in vain in court, in the media and by pressuring election officials in swing states, culminating in his encouragement of supporters on 6 January 2021, to stop the certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which led to the deadly invasion of the US Capitol.Trump faces 91 charges in four separate criminal cases, two federal, one in New York and one in Georgia. More

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      Far-right group Project Veritas admits it had ‘no evidence’ of voter fraud in Pennsylvania

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      The far-right political agitator James O’Keefe and the Project Veritas organization he once led have admitted that they had “no evidence” backing up widely spread claims of voter fraud at a Pennsylvania post office during the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.O’Keefe and Project Veritas made that admission Monday after settling a lawsuit filed against them by Robert Weisenbach, the postmaster of Erie, Pennsylvania, in state court, concluding one of the more prominent legal battles spurred by Republican lies that Donald Trump was defrauded out of another term in the White House.“Neither Mr Weisenbach nor any other [postal] employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots,” O’Keefe said in a statement published Monday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie post office during the 2020 presidential election.”Claims by an Erie mail carrier and Trump supporter named Richard Hopkins thrust his local post office into the center of rightwing conspiracy theories seeking to delegitimize Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Hopkins maintained in a signed affidavit that he had overheard Weisenbach discuss illicitly backdating mail-in ballots, which overwhelmingly favored Biden after Trump urged his supporters to vote in person instead despite vaccines meant to limit the spread of Covid-19 still not being widely available at the time.But Hopkins recanted his sworn allegations after Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who was then leader of the chamber’s judiciary committee, cited them to support his calls for a federal investigation into ballot tampering.Hopkins sought to cast doubt on his retraction soon after, saying in a YouTube video: “I did not recant my statements.” But Monday, Hopkins confirmed he was wrong to have besmirched Weisenbach.“I only heard a fragment of the conversation [involving] Weisenbach and reached the conclusion that the conversation was related to nefarious behavior,” Hopkins said in a statement released along with O’Keefe’s. “As I have now learned, I was wrong. Mr Weisenbach was not involved in any inappropriate behavior concerning the 2020 presidential election.”Hopkins’s statement alluded to the results of a US post office inspector general’s investigation which cleared Weisenbach and his colleagues of wrongdoing. The statement also apologized to Weisenbach, his family and his post office employees, along with anyone who was “negatively” affected by Hopkins’s falsehoods. “I implore everyone … to leave the Weisenbach family alone and allow them to return to their normal, peaceful lives,” Hopkins’s statement added.Neither Project Veritas nor Weisenbach’s attorney, David Houck, could immediately be reached for comment. But Houck confirmed to NBC News that Monday’s statements from O’Keefe and Hopkins came after they had agreed to settle Weisenbach’s lawsuit.Houck did not elaborate on any other terms of the settlement.“The only comment I’m allowed to make about it is that the case was filed, litigated, and settled to the satisfaction of the parties,” Houck said to NBC.O’Keefe’s and Hopkins’s statements Monday inspired heaps of schadenfreude in some quarters. A comment on X from Bill Grueskin, who spent six years as academic dean of the prestigious Columbia Journalism school, summarized the general reaction.“Sorry to take down a couple of your heroes, but it appears that James O’Keefe and Project Veritas got something wrong,” Grueskin wrote while sharing screencaptures of Monday’s mea culpas.Despite Trump supporters’ claims to the contrary, election integrity experts consider the 2020 race to be the most secure ever. In a rare instance of an improperly reported voting result from the 2020 election, a Virginia county confirmed in January that Trump had been awarded 2,237 ballots more than he should have, and Biden was short changed nearly 1,650.O’Keefe and Project Veritas earned notoriety for video stings – often involving hidden cameras – which targeted progressives. One of his more prominent stings took down the community activism group Acorn, whom O’Keefe duped by posing as a pimp aspiring to establish a brothel.Another aimed at US senator Mary Landrieu during her final term in office saw O’Keefe and three associates plead guilty in 2010 to entering federal property under false pretenses. O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a fine of $1,500.O’Keefe resigned from Project Veritas in February 2023 after the group’s governing board found that he had “spent an excessive amount of donor funds in the [previous] three years on personal luxuries” and filed a civil complaint against him.In September, Project Veritas suspended its operations and laid off most of its employees. Then, Hannah Giles resigned as chief executive of Project Veritas in December, alleging that “illegality” and “financial improprieties” in the past had left the nonprofit “an unsalvageable mess”. More

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      Nearly half of US wants Trump election subversion verdict before November, poll says

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      Nearly half of those in the US want to see Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case resolved before the former president runs for the White House again in November, according to a poll published on Monday.Meanwhile, a quarter of Americans do not think Trump will ever concede if he loses a second time to Joe Biden, said the survey, commissioned by CNN.The survey in question found that 48% of those polled believed it was “essential” for there to be a verdict before November’s election. Another 16% said that they would at least prefer to see one.CNN’s poll also showed that expectations Trump would concede if he loses have dropped from 37% to 25% since October – and more than three-quarters (78%) think the former president would try to pardon himself of federal charges stemming from his presidency if he wins another stint in the Oval Office.Trump has been performing strongly in polls as compared with Biden. A survey by NBC News released on Sunday found that Biden is beset by a deficit of 20 percentage points against Trump in his handling of the economy, despite signs that the US may have achieved an almost unique “soft-landing” after a government and consumer spending boom during the Covid-19 pandemic.The poll also found that fewer than three in 10 voters approve of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war. And Biden lags Trump by 16 points on the perception of competence and effectiveness, a reversal from 2020.But the question of Trump’s legal quagmire hangs over Biden’s unfavorable polling. The former president is facing more than 90 criminal charges accusing him of trying to illegally nullify his defeat by Biden, illicitly retaining government secrets after leaving the White House and making illegal hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has claimed an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump.If Trump is convicted of a felony, the poll found, a five-point lead for Trump flips to a two-point lead for Biden.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.On Friday, the US district judge Tanya Chutkan formally postponed the federal election interference case against Trump over which she is presiding. It was scheduled to begin in March, but that date has been pushed back while a Washington DC appeals court weighs arguments from the Trump legal team that he is immune from prosecution for actions taken while he was president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the DC appeals court rejects Trump’s appeal, it will probably advance to the US supreme court, meaning further trial delays.Public desire for a resolution to that case before the November election comes as recent polling by Bloomberg found majorities of voters in seven key swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime (53%) or sentenced to prison (55%) in one of the four cases against him overall.But, according to CNN, views of Trump’s efforts to stay in office despite his 2020 defeat in effect remain unchanged from the summer of 2022, with 45% of US adults saying he acted illegally, 32% unethically, and 23% that he did nothing wrong at all. More

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      US judge delays Trump’s federal 2020 election subversion trial

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      A US judge has formally postponed Donald Trump’s trial on federal charges that the former president sought to overturn the 2020 election results.The trial was due to start on 4 March in Washington before the delay ordered from the federal judge Tanya Chutkan.Trial delays in general are not unusual in court cases. The delay in Trump’s trial in particular stems from an appeal by the ex-president that claims he is immune to prosecution for actions taken while he was in the Oval Office.Chutkan had indicated in January that Trump’s original trial date – chosen last summer – would not hold because the case had been frozen by the former president’s appeal.The judge has prohibited prosecutors from filing motions while the appeal is pending and made clear that Trump’s legal team would get a full seven-month period to prepare for the trial. Any time between December and the end of the appeals process would not count against that preparation period, Chutkan has also said.Trump has been grappling with more than 90 criminal charges in various jurisdictions for subversion of the 2020 election, illegal retention of government secrets after he left the Oval Office, and hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged extramarital sex with him.Separately, he has also been ordered to pay about $88m in damages to the former Elle columnist E Jean Carroll after having been found liable of sexually abusing her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s as well as defaming her.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReuters contributed reporting More

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      Fani Willis confirms relationship with prosecutor on 2020 Trump election case

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      The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor working on the case against Donald Trump and 14 other defendants, confirmed for the first time on Friday they had a romantic relationship. But they denied any wrongdoing and Willis said she should not be disqualified from the case.“In 2022, District Attorney Willis and I developed a personal relationship in addition to our professional association and friendship,” Wade wrote in an affidavit attached to a 176-page motion Willis filed in court on Friday. Notably, Wade said the relationship developed after he was hired to work on the Trump case in 2021.Willis wrote in the filing she had no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification”. She urged Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, to dismiss a request to disqualify her without a hearing, currently set for 15 February.“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” she wrote.Michael Roman, a seasoned Republican operative and one of the defendants in the wide-ranging racketeering case against Trump and associates for trying to overturn the election, is seeking Willis’s disqualification. He alleges that Wade used money he earned from his work in Willis’s office on the case to pay for vacations for the two of them. Trump and Robert Cheeley, another defendant, have also joined Roman’s request to dismiss the case.Legal experts are largely dubious of Roman’s request to disqualify Willis.“The filing effectively ended any question I had about what Judge McAfee should and will do. The motion to dismiss and disqualify will be roundly and easily rejected. My only question now is whether other defendants will slowly back away from the Roman motion given how effectively the DA dispatched with the allegations of serious wrongdoing,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.But the confirmation of a relationship with Wade could still do serious harm to Willis in terms of the politics of the case, undermining the credibility of her judgment in the public’s view. The fact that Willis did not disclose the relationship publicly before Roman’s filing, and did not respond to the allegation for weeks, could also leave the impression she was trying to conceal it from public view. Trump, who has already taunted Willis over the relationship, is also likely to dig in.Meanwhile, even though he may not have done anything wrong legally, some experts have called for Wade to step aside in order to protect the public perception of the case.There is no evidence that the relationship resulted in any financial gain for Willis, the district attorney wrote in her filing. She noted they had no joint bank accounts or shared expenses and were not financially dependent on each other. While Wade has purchased travel for Willis with his personal funds, she also noted that she had done the same for him.“Financial responsibility for personal travel taken is divided roughly evenly between the two, with neither being primarily responsible for expenses of the other, and all expenses paid for with individual personal funds,” Willis wrote in the filing.A personal relationship between two lawyers also is not enough to disqualify a prosecutor, Willis wrote. She noted that some of the lawyers for various defendants in the case were either married or in a personal relationship. She noted Roman had offered no evidence their relationship affected prosecuting the case in any way.“The existence of a relationship between members of a prosecution team, in and of itself, is simply not a status that entitles a criminal defendant any remedy,” she wrote.Willis also rebuffed an additional argument by Trump’s attorneys that she should be disqualified because of comments she made at a Black church saying attacks on her were racist. Trump had used those comments to suggest the prosecution against him was racially motivated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The motion makes no serious legal argument, establishes no violation of any ethical rule, and makes no real effort to link the public statements to the legal standard for disqualification,” she wrote. “Instead, much like the motion advanced by … Defendant Roman, Defendant Trump’s motion appears designed to generate media attention rather than accomplish some form of legitimate legal practice. It should be dismissed out of hand.”Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in Fulton county, dismissed Willis’s filing.“While the DA admits to an intimate relationship with her employee Special Asst DA Wade, she fails to provide full transparency and necessary financial details. Indeed, she says absolutely nothing about the so-called ‘coincidence’ of Wade filing for divorce the day after the DA hired him!” he said in a statement.“Most significantly, and disingenuously, the DA attempts to explain and downplay her ‘church speech’, by preposterously claiming that her racially charged extra-judicial comments were somehow not about the case or the defendants, and that her intentional injection of racial animus in violation of her ethical responsibilities as a prosecutor should simply be ignored,” he added.“Apparently, the DA believes she can make public out-of-court statements about race, this case, and the defendants whenever she wants, and the court is powerless to punish her by disqualification.”Shortly after the filing, Trump distorted what Willis had said into falsehoods and used it to attack her. In a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, he said: “By going after the most high level person, and the Republican Nominee, she was able to get her ‘lover’ much more money, almost a Million Dollars, than she would be able to get for the prosecution of any other person or individual. THAT MEANS THAT THIS SCAM IS TOTALLY DISCREDITED & OVER!”Willis’s filing on Friday details how Wade stepped away from lucrative other legal work to handle the case and took on a reduced governmental rate to work on the case. More

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      Fani Willis: what does relationship with Trump prosecutor mean for Georgia case?

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      The case brought against Donald Trump in Georgia is a powerful, sprawling indictment that charges the former US president and his top allies with violating the state’s racketeering statute over their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In January, the case was roiled by an explosive complaint filed by Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman, who alleged that a secret personal relationship between the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and her deputy Nathan Wade, amounted to a conflict of interest that warranted their disqualification.The latest twist in the weeks-long saga came on Friday, when Willis acknowledged in a court filing that she had a relationship with Wade, but that it began after he had been retained to work on the Trump case.Here’s what you need to know.What has just happened?Willis and Wade, a special prosecutor working on the case against Trump and 14 other defendants, confirmed for the first time on Friday they had a romantic relationship. Previously, evidence had emerged in Wade’s divorce proceedings that he had used some of the more than $650,000 he earned from his work for her to pay for vacations for the two of them. Bank records showed Wade had paid for tickets for the pair to go to California in 2023 and Miami in 2022.What do the Trump team argue?Trump’s allies and lawyers allege that the relationship between the district attorney and one of her top prosecutors on the team is an improper one that affects the investigation. That is important as the Georgia case was seen as a powerful blow to the former US president, with a strong chance of finding him guilty for his actions in 2020. Because the case is in Georgia state court, it is also immune from Trump’s interference should he win the 2024 election.What could that mean for the case?There is little doubt that Trump’s lawyers will now seek to exploit this situation and use it to undermine the credibility of the case and delay the proceedings. But experts have generally been skeptical the relationship will result in disqualification or getting the case removed.Even if nothing were to happen legally because of the scandal, it offers huge political ammunition to Trump to argue that the case is flawed and motivated by politics and personal ambition. In an election year, that could be crucial.What does Willis say?Willis wrote in the Friday filing that she had no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification” and urged McAfee to dismiss the request to disqualify her without a hearing.She noted that Roman had failed to offer any evidence that the relationship affected any decisions of the case. The mere existence of a relationship, she wrote, was not grounds for disqualification. She noted that some of the defense lawyers in the case were married or had personal relationships.She also noted that neither she nor Wade benefited financially from the prosecution. The two do not have a joint bank account or other shared expenses. And when they travel together for personal reasons, they split the costs and bear their own expenses, her office wrote.“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this Court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” she wrote.What happens next?A hearing has been set for 15 February by the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case. McAfee is expected to decide based on the evidence presented then whether Willis should be disqualified, either because he finds there is an actual conflict of interest, or because he finds an appearance of impropriety, a lower standard that has been previously used in some cases.If McAfee decides to reject Roman’s motion to disqualify Willis, Roman could challenge his ruling at the Georgia state court of appeals, a move that would almost certainly delay the case by weeks or months, setting back the start of a potential trial. A trial date has not been set for Trump and his co-defendants.If McAfee decides to grant Roman’s motion and relieves Willis and her office from prosecuting the case, it would be handed to the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, which would then appoint a replacement prosecutor. More