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      Ex-Trump lawyer says ‘boss’ was not going to leave White House

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      An attorney for Donald Trump has told prosecutors in Georgia that one of the former president’s top aides told her in December 2020 that Trump was “not going to leave” the White House “under any circumstances”, despite having lost the election to Joe Biden.The revelation from Jenna Ellis came during an interview with the Georgia district attorney’s office in Fulton County. Ellis is cooperating as part of a plea agreement in the Georgia election interference case against Trump and various allies.Sections of the video recordings were published on Monday by ABC News and the Washington Post, along with excerpts from interviews with lawyer Sidney Powell and two other defendants who have reached plea agreements in the case in exchange for testifying.Ellis said the longtime Trump aide – his deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino – told her “the boss” would refuse to cede power. She also alluded to two other “relevant” instances for the case but did not disclose them in the video, apparently prevented from doing so by attorney-client privilege.Ellis described Scavino’s response to her scepticism that Trump had any more legal avenues left to challenge his election loss, saying: “And he said to me, you know, in a kind of excited tone: ‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.’”.The recordings of the four defendants’ statements were required under the terms of their plea deals, in order that their knowledge of events could be used in cases against other defendants.The Post also reviewed statements from Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall and lawyer Kenneth Chesebro. Chesebro claimed he gave Trump a summary of a memo in which he offered advice on the alternate slates of electors, which were created in a plot to cast fake ballots for Trump in states that Biden had legitimately won. The statements could provide evidence Trump knew of the plot.Powell also explained her sudden rise, and that of other previously lesser known lawyers, to becoming key advisers to Trump in the last days of his presidency: “Because we were the only ones willing to support his effort to sustain the White House. I mean, everybody else was telling him to pack up and go.”Trump faces a total 90 criminal charges in four separate indictments. He is accused of election subversion, retention of government secrets and illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also faces civil lawsuits over his business affairs, and a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true”. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and sought to portray himself as a victim of political persecution.He continues to hold commanding poll leads over the rest of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. More

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      Standing My Ground review: Capitol cop Harry Dunn on January 6 and the Trumpist threat

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      If you think you’ve read everything you need to know about the violent attempt to overthrow the US government on 6 January 2021, this insider’s book by a 6ft 7in African American Capitol police officer will change your mind.Harry Dunn has written a 237-page cri de coeur for himself and for the US. It is a story that is more important than ever when so many crazed Republicans continue to revere the traitor whom the justice department says is directly responsible for this singularly shameful episode in American history.On that terrible day, Dunn and hundreds of his fellow Capitol cops were in hand-to-hand combat with scores of drunken and drug-addled seditionists. The police officers were attacked with everything from metal bike racks to flagpoles and banisters ripped from the stairs of the building.“You could hear the screaming and hollering as the battle raged on,” Dunn writes. “Blood was streaming down officers’ faces. They were yelling, grunting, and trying to force the rioters back. Many of them were blinded and coughing after being doused with pepper spray, bear spray, and even WD-40.”In the years since then, Dunn has beaten back post-traumatic stress disorder with the help of his family, his friends, professional therapists and sympathetic Congress members like Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Raskin took Dunn to lunch after the officer called the congressman’s office to tell him he was the source of an anonymous quote in a story in BuzzFeed which – to Dunn’s delight – Raskin had tweeted out.Since then, Dunn has made dozens of public appearances and written this book, with a single goal: “I want the people responsible for that day, including Trump … to pay a price, just like we paid a price … I will always be standing my ground to make sure our democracy exists. And I’ll ask that you stand with me so that nothing like this ever happens again.”Dunn reserves his greatest anger for those he and his fellow officers risked their lives for in the face of that furious mob. He was “full of rage” when it became clear that “Republicans were walking away from their earlier condemnation of the attack … Congress members … whom I had guarded and protected through State of the Unions [and] inaugurations … had suddenly turned on me. It angered me that loyalty to a single individual could overwhelm otherwise decent people … who had fallen into the darkness and forgotten their oaths of office.”He writes about how the day was particularly traumatic for Black police officers, because they were repeatedly called the N-word, as well as being beaten and sprayed and kicked and pummeled.He compares their treatment by Trump and others to the notorious assault in 1946 of a decorated Black second world war veteran named Isaac Woodard, who was pulled from a Greyhound bus because “the bus driver hadn’t liked the way Woodard asked to use the restroom” outside Augusta, Georgia. Local police officers beat him savagely and “the police chief used his baton to gouge Woodard’s eye sockets until both eyeballs ruptured beyond repair. Woodward was blind from that day forward.”“Now multiply that betrayal by two thousand times,” Dunn writes, “because that’s how many Capitol and Metropolitan police department officers were viciously assaulted by Americans whose democracy we defend every day.”After that, “we were betrayed by our president, many of our elected officials, and thousands of other Americans we had sworn to protect”.Dunn testified before the January 6 House committee and at trials for some of the terrorists who have been convicted for their crimes. Just like Woodard, “we were wearing our uniforms and badges, signifying our service to our nation”. But also just like Woodard, “to them we were throw-away people to be despised, hated and derided … merely because of the color of our skin … January 6 was never about politics. It wasn’t about election fraud. That was an excuse for people to do some shit they had wanted to do in the first place.”Last week’s election results in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania – like the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 – proved once again that a majority of Americans reject the extremist agenda embraced by the Maga movement and its hideous head.Having finally recovered from most of the injuries inflicted on that fateful day in January 2021, Dunn feels he’s “been given a new lease on life, another chance to make a difference and that is what I want to do”. He ends the book with a plea to readers to do exactly what he is trying to do with that second chance: become a tireless foot soldier in the never-ending fight against racism and ignorance and book burning in America.He writes: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
      Standing My Ground is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Trump gloats over retirement of Republican who attacked election lie

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      Donald Trump welcomed the news that Ken Buck, a prominent conservative who criticized his party for questioning the validity of Joe Biden’s election win, will quit Congress at the next election, crowing: “Good news for the country!”Buck, from Colorado, announced his retirement on MSNBC on Wednesday and said he was “disappointed that the Republican party continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen and rely on the January 6 narrative and political prisoners from January 6 and other things”.In the wake of the 2020 election many expected Republicans to move past Trump, but subsequently – and despite multiple indictments – Trump has in fact solidified his grip on the party and is now the overwhelming favorite to be its 2024 presidential nominee. The departure of figures like Buck only makes Trump’s control more complete.Trump, the originator and chief perpetuator of the election fraud lie, which he used to incite the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, used his Truth Social platform to call Buck “a weak and ineffective Super RINO if there ever was one”, using the acronym for “Republican in name only”.Buck, 64 and a former federal prosecutor, is a stringent conservative who has nonetheless emerged as a Trump critic, as the former US president faces 91 criminal charges (including state and federal election subversion) and civil trials.In August, Buck called the Georgia electoral subversion case against Trump, under racketeering law, “a nuclear bomb where a bullet would have been appropriate”.Buck also made those remarks to MSNBC, which Trump has long called “MSDNC”, a reference to the Democratic National Committee and the network’s liberal stance.On Wednesday, Trump said Buck “knew long ago he could never win against MAGA [Trump’s campaign slogan, ‘Make America great again’], so now he is … auditioning for a job at Fake News CNN, MSDNC, or some other country-destroying leftwing outlet.”In his August remarks, Buck said his Colorado constituents were split over Trump, many believing the former president was “being treated unfairly”.In Congress, he said, it was “difficult” being a Republican when “the news is constantly about Donald Trump and these indictments and his actions during a time of the election and until and after 6 January 2021. And so I think that it is difficult to break through that noise right now and try to get a positive message.”In October, Buck opposed the candidacy for House speaker of Jim Jordan of Ohio, a prominent Trump supporter. That stance, Buck said, prompted death threats and eviction from a constituency office.In a video posted to social media on Wednesday, Buck repeated his message to his party.“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing January 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponisation of our justice system. These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law.”Buck also said he did not plan to leave the Republican party. He would not say he would not support Trump for president, saying only a “Trump-Biden redo” would present “a very difficult decision”. More

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      Minnesota supreme court to hear case challenging Trump’s 2024 eligibility

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      Attorneys at the Minnesota supreme court will argue on Thursday that former President Donald Trump should not be allowed to appear on the state’s ballots for president because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and role in the insurrection.A group of voters wants the courts to weigh a clause in the 14th amendment, which disqualifies an “officer of the United States” who has taken an oath to defend the constitution from holding office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country. In dozens of pages in their initial court filing, they cite examples of Trump’s election interference, from the fake electors scheme to his comments to rioters on 6 January 2021.“Despite having sworn an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, Trump ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or [gave] aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,’” the voters argue.The lawsuit is one of several the former president faces in his bid to return to the White House, not to mention the various criminal and civil actions he is currently defending against. A similar petition is the subject of a trial in Colorado this week. Legal experts say the Reconstruction-era clause is ripe for the courts, though it has never been used to forestall a presidential candidate in this way.Free Speech for People, a left-leaning group, represents the voters in the case, who include the former Minnesota secretary of state Joan Growe and the former Minnesota supreme court justice Paul H Anderson.Trump’s attorneys and the Republican party have fought back against the suit, claiming the matter is a political question instead of a legal one. Trump’s campaign also claims there’s “no evidence that President Trump intended or supported any violent or unlawful activity seeking to overthrow the government of the United States, either on January 6 or at any other time.“This request is manifestly inappropriate,” Trump’s team wrote in a brief. “Both the federal Constitution and Minnesota law place the resolution of this political issue where it belongs: the democratic process, in the hands of either Congress or the people of the United States.”The Trump campaign fundraised off the 14th amendment cases this week, pointing to the Colorado trial and calling it the “next desperate attempt by Crooked Joe and the Radical Democrats to slow down our campaign”.The Minnesota secretary of state, Steve Simon, a Democrat, has supported the idea of the courts deciding the question, though has not weighed in on whether Trump should be on the ballot in the state’s March 2024 primary.Groups have sought to bar politicians from the ballot for their roles in the insurrection before, though the arguments haven’t been successful. It’s expected that one of the cases involving Trump could be taken to the conservative US supreme court.The cases challenging Trump’s eligibility popped off after an article from two law professors argued the former president would be excluded from seeking the high office again because of a clause in the 14th Amendment. One of the professors, Michael Stokes Paulsen, teaches at Minnesota’s University of St Thomas School of Law. More

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      Liz Cheney calls new House speaker ‘dangerous’ for January 6 role

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      The new Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, is “dangerous” due to his role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former Wyoming Republican congresswoman and January 6 committee vice-chair Liz Cheney said.“He was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong,” Cheney told Politics Is Everything, a podcast from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “And I think that the country unfortunately will come to see the measure of his character.”She added: “One of the reasons why somebody like Mike Johnson is dangerous is because … you have elected Republicans who know better, elected Republicans who know the truth but yet will go along with the efforts to undermine our republic: the efforts, frankly, that Donald Trump undertook to overturn the election.”Johnson voiced conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s victory in 2020; authored a supreme court amicus brief as Texas sought to have results in key states thrown out, attracting 125 Republican signatures; and was one of 147 Republicans who voted to object to results in key states even after Trump supporters attacked the Capitol.The events of 6 January 2021 are now linked to nine deaths, thousands of arrests and hundreds of convictions, some for seditious conspiracy. Trump faces state and federal charges related to his attempted election subversion (contributing to a total 91 criminal counts) yet still dominates Republican presidential primary polling.Cheney was one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the House January 6 committee, which staged prime-time hearings and produced a report last year. In Wyoming, she lost her seat to a pro-Trump challenger. The other January 6 Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, chose to quit his seat.Like Kinzinger, Cheney has now written a memoir, in her case titled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. She has also declined to close down speculation that she might run for president as a representative of the Republican establishment – her father is Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary and vice-president – attempting to stop Trump seizing the White House again.Johnson ascended to the speakership last month, elected unanimously after three candidates failed to gain sufficient support to succeed Kevin McCarthy, who was ejected by the far-right, pro-Trump wing of his party.The new speaker’s hard-right, Christianity-inflected statements and positions have been subjected to widespread scrutiny.Cheney told Larry Sabato, her podcast host and fellow UVA professor: “Mike is somebody that I knew well.”“We were elected together [in 2016]. Our offices were next to each other, and Mike is somebody who says that he’s committed to defending the constitution. But that’s not what he did when we were all tested in the aftermath of the 2020 election.“In my experience, and I was very, deeply involved and engaged as the conference chair, when Mike was doing things like convincing members of the conference to sign on to the amicus brief … in my view, he was willing to set aside what he knew to be the rulings of the courts, the requirements of the constitution, in order to placate Donald Trump, in order to gain praise from Donald Trump, for political expedience.“So it’s a concerning moment to have him be elected speaker of the House.” More

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      Ex-Trump lawyer scrambled for Georgia plea deal after key pair folded

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      Donald Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis scrambled to secure a plea deal for herself in the Georgia election subversion case after watching two other indicted lawyers fold, it was revealed on Wednesday.The haste in which her legal team acted to snag an advantageous agreement for their client was laid out by Ellis’s own attorney Frank Hogue in an exclusive interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.He said surprise guilty pleas by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, charged alongside Trump in Fulton county over the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, injected urgency into discussions with the prosecutor, Fani Willis.“I think what really accelerated it was Powell and Chesebro falling as they did, one right after the other. It looked like timing was of the essence for us,” Hogue told the Journal-Constitution.A tearful Ellis, 39, pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings last week, becoming the fourth of 19 defendants to admit a role in the plot by Trump and his allies to keep him in office.She avoided a trial and the possibility of up to a five-year prison sentence. Her cooperating with prosecutors could include her testifying against Trump in his upcoming trial on 13 charges including racketeering, forgery, perjury, filing false documents and false statements.Negotiations took place over a three-day period, Hogue said, although he did not say if they were initiated by the prosecution or defense. Originally, he said, Willis offered a deal in which Ellis would plead guilty to an offense under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) often used in mob prosecutions.“That was about a three-second conversation. Long enough to say, ‘No, we’re not doing Rico,’” he said.The final deal was struck on the afternoon of 23 October, and announced in court the following morning, he told the newspaper’s legal podcast Breakdown.Hogue said it was “a good deal” for Ellis, because it ensured she was able to keep her license to practice law or maintain a pathway to earning it back if it was surrendered.“To get out of it with five years’ probation, terminate in three, which I’m sure it will for her, and the restitution and the other conditions of probation, none of it’s onerous for her,” he said.“She’s already back in Florida and resuming her life and doesn’t have to face any of this any more. So for her, my feeling is it’s a good result.”Unlike Chesebro and Powell, Ellis chose to read out in court a personal apology. Wiping away tears, she said she looked back at her experience with “deep remorse”.“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information,” she said.“What I should have done, but did not do, was make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”In a radio appearance last month, Ellis said she also regretted ever becoming part of Trump’s team of lawyers. Instead, she switched allegiance to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.“Why I have chosen to distance is because of [Trump’s] frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong,” she said on her American Family Radio show.Ellis could be a star witness against Trump and the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, an alleged mastermind of the election plot who pleaded not guilty last month to 13 charges, including one of racketeering. Asked if Giuliani should be worried, Hogue said: “I think he should be. I think there’s enough for Mayor Giuliani to worry about that wouldn’t have anything to do with Jenna Ellis.“She wouldn’t be a help to him, I don’t think, if she was to be called as a witness,” he added. “But I think his troubles extend far beyond her.” More

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      You can’t fight the Republican party’s ‘big lie’ with facts alone | Peter Pomerantsev

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      Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s.She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world.“From the moment you leave your house, you ask: what does the regime want?,” a Syrian explained to her. “The struggle becomes who can praise the government more.” The bigger the lie you uttered, the more loyal you were.“The regime’s power resides in its ability to impose national fictions and to make people say and do what they otherwise would not,” Wedeen concluded. “This obedience makes people complicit; it entangles them in self-enforcing relations of domination, thereby making it hard for participants to see themselves simply as victims of the state’s caprices.”I was reminded of Wedeen’s research when the US Congress finally selected a speaker after weeks of chaos. Their choice, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is best known for ardently supporting ex-president Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Jo Biden, was rigged. Johnson was the head of the committee to question the integrity of the election. He constructed spurious legal arguments that tried to discredit the vote, though his proposals were thrown out by the US supreme court. He raised the unfounded theory that the voting machines used in the election were tampered with.This claim is so groundless that Fox, the network that supported the allegation, had to pay nearly a billion dollars in a settlement with Dominion, the company that makes the machines.Many of the Republican representatives who supported Johnson’s candidacy have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified. Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here.And in a sense, they are. Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit. For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight.Along with Wedeen’s Syrian example, I’m reminded of the Czech dissident and playwright Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, where he tells the story of a greengrocer in communist-era Prague who puts up pro-regime posters in his shop window. The greengrocer doesn’t believe the communist slogans; the people who make the slogans don’t believe in them; and the people who read them don’t believe in them.But as long as everyone plays along, the system continues. It’s the act of not believing and yet pretending, rather than of fervently believing, which is the power of such systems. Your will is corroded: you are made into moral mincemeat that can be shaped any which way by the leader.Havel nobly suggested that in order to fight such a system, what was needed was to “live in truth”, start being honest. Republican politicians face none of the danger communist-era Czechoslovaks or Syrians under the Assads have, but living in truth seems beyond them.Contradicting Trump’s absurdities risks falling out of favour with the leader and his supporters.Altogether, about 40% of Americans think the 2020 vote was illegitimate, and about 60% of Republicans (the figures fluctuate). A democracy will struggle to survive, let alone flourish, when such huge swathes of its population see it as their badge of loyalty not to trust its most fundamental processes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut if the “rigged” election claim is more about identity than evidence, it also means it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation. The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie.Pledging loyalty to the “big lie” is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfils. Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency.Self-styled “populists” can flourish in what sociologists call “civic deserts”: frequently rural areas where the old institutions that bonded communities, the local clubs and town halls have disappeared and where civic engagement is particularly low.But such communities can start to be regenerated for a digital age with, for example, online as well as offline town halls; reinvigorated local news that responds to people’s priorities; and online municipal budget making and other innovations that help people feel part of a community and have ownership over local politics.Historical lessons from understanding and fighting propaganda can be useful here too. When he investigated the psychology of German soldiers in the second world war, the British psychiatrist Henry Dicks thought that counterpropaganda needed to stress the bonds people had that went beyond belonging to the Nazi Volk: the emotional bonds they felt with loved ones and relatives, for example.The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It’s a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists? More

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      Mark Meadows reportedly testified to grand jury after receiving immunity

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      Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows testified to a federal grand jury about efforts by the former president to overturn the results of the 2020 election after receiving immunity from special counsel prosecutors, ABC News reported on Tuesday.The testimony that Meadows provided to prosecutors included evidence that he repeatedly told Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election that the allegations about fraud were unsubstantiated, ABC reported.Exactly when Meadows was granted immunity and when he testified before the grand jury in Washington remains unclear but he appeared at least three times, ABC reported. Trump was indicted in August for conspiring to defraud the United States among other charges stemming from the investigation.The cooperation of Meadows in the criminal case against Trump would be a victory for the special counsel, Jack Smith, because Meadows was among the closest advisers to Trump in the post-2020 election period and had direct knowledge of virtually every aspect of the charges.Meadows could be a major witness against Trump in the special counsel’s case given his proximity to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, from the fake electors scheme to Trump’s pressure on the then vice-president Mike Pence to stop the congressional certification of the results.As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was also around Trump on January 6 as the then White House counsel Pat Cipollone implored Trump not to go to the Capitol for fear of being “charged with every crime imaginable”, as Meadows’ former aide Cassidy Hutchinson recounted to the January 6 committee.But it was unclear how valuable the information Meadows provided to prosecutors actually will be for trial purposes. In the classified documents investigation, the justice department gave immunity to the Trump adviser Kash Patel, whose information was nowhere in the indictment.The testimony from Meadows is also unlikely to materially affect Trump’s defense. Trump has consistently argued there were some advisers who said the election was stolen, and some who said it was not – and he agreed with the people alleging there was outcome-determinative election fraud.As part of the immunity deal with prosecutors, the evidence Meadows gave before the grand jury cannot be used against him for federal charges. Neither spokesperson for the special counsel nor a lawyer for Meadows could be immediately reached for comment.“Wrongful, unethical leaks throughout these Biden witch-hunts only underscore how detrimental these empty cases are to our democracy and system of justice and how vital it is for President Trump’s first amendment rights to not be infringed upon by un-constitutional gag orders,” a Trump spokesperson said.Meadows was not charged by prosecutors in federal district court in Washington when Trump was indicted, but he was charged weeks later alongside Trump by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, as part of a sprawling Rico indictment over the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.Like Trump, Meadows pleaded not guilty in the Fulton county case. A federal judge last month denied Meadows’ motion to transfer the case from state to federal court. Meadows appealed that decision to the 11th circuit, and oral arguments are scheduled to take place in December. More