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      The charges against Trump and allies in Fulton county – full text of indictment

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      A grand jury in Georgia has issued an indictment accusing Donald Trump of efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.Prosecutors brought 41 counts against Trump and his associates, including forgery and racketeering, which is used to target members of organized crime groups.Prosecutors also charged 18 other people, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.Read the full text of the indictment below. More

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      ‘He’s going to be very surprised’: Georgia DA Fani Willis prepares to face off with Trump

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      The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this: In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.The film’s montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis relentlessly poring over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.We’d watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she’d refuse to back down from the task at hand. She’d advocate for what she believed to be right even when it wasn’t popular. She’d appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as: “Lady justice is actually blind. This is the reality. If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.”According to some of Willis’s colleagues who have worked with her over more than 20 years, all of this would be an accurate depiction of the district attorney. Defense attorney Brian Steel has known Willis her entire career and says she’s both “extremely honest” and “extremely hard working”. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs described her as “transparent”, a “zealous advocate for the state” and the “best trial attorney” in the Fulton county district attorney’s office.“What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is,” he said.Still, there are nuances that film has always eschewed in order to tell a more succinct story. Willis’s career, like most people’s, is full of the type of complexities that don’t always fit neatly into a box. What’s clear from speaking with several of her colleagues in Atlanta’s legal community, however, is that the district attorney’s entire career has been preparing her for this moment in the spotlight.On Monday night Willis brought an indictment with numerous charges against former US president Donald Trump and 18 others – including such high-profile names as Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows – for their attempts to overturn the election. The announcement of criminal charges, part of a sprawling racketeering case, was the culmination of more than two years of work.In early 2021, Willis had just been elected district attorney when she announced plans to investigate Trump. She took office by unseating her former boss, who had served as the DA in Georgia’s most populous county (which includes the state’s capital, Atlanta) for six terms, or 23 years.Her investigation has focused on Trump’s efforts to subvert the will of Georgia’s voters, including his campaign’s plot to assemble a slate of fake electors and Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes”, which would make him the winner over Joe Biden in the state.In her first term as DA – and amid ongoing conversations about criminal justice reform in Georgia and beyond – Willis has not only prepared to face off with a former president and his legal team, she’s also been tough on crime in a number of other ways, too.Since running for office, the Democratic official has made no apologies for being a liberal with conservative-leaning views on criminal justice or the fact that she was endorsed and received funding from a police union during her campaign. As DA, she’s indicted Grammy-award winning rapper Young Thug and his music collective under Georgia’s racketeering statute, fought appeals from teachers she previously prosecuted during a high-profile standardized test cheating scandal, and sought the death penalty for a man who murdered four women during a shooting spree that targeted Asian spas in metro Atlanta.“She’s a prosecutor through and through. She wholeheartedly believes in the work, for better or for worse, depending on which side of the lane you fall on,” said Devin Franklin, policy counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights.In 2020, Willis unseated the six-term Democratic incumbent Paul Howard, securing 73% of the vote, at a time of both local and national unrest. For many residents of Fulton county, her campaign not only offered a new direction for the DA’s office, which had become plagued by controversies, but it also promised to address increasing concerns about reports of a crime wave and the resignation of about 200 officers from the Atlanta police department.“It was a strange period of time,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor. “I think there was just a general agitation in the community.”An Inglewood, California, native who attended Howard University and then Emory University for law school, Willis began working in the Atlanta solicitor’s office in 2000. In that role, she handled petty crimes before working for her predecessor in the Fulton county district attorney’s office in 2001.In Howard’s office, she was eventually tasked with prosecuting high-profile murder cases and, notably, the Atlanta public schools cheating trial. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has referred to the case as the “largest school-cheating scandal in US history”. Eleven educators were found guilty in the racketeering case, which spanned six months of testimony to become the longest trial in Georgia history. Twenty-one people accepted plea deals. Willis served as one of three lead prosecutors throughout the trial.Anna Simonton, an editor and reporter for the criminal justice news organization the Appeal, co-wrote the book None of the Above about the trial. (The other author, Shani Robinson, was convicted during the trial and continues to proclaim her innocence. She is currently out on an appeal bond.) Simonton said she wasn’t familiar with Willis until she began reporting on the trial.“In reading the trial transcripts, she began to emerge to me as a distinct part in the prosecution team and someone who was very theatrical,” she said. “One of her tactics was to really pull on the emotions of the jury. I was surprised by some of the things I was seeing her say in the transcript because of how bombastic it was at the time.”The reporter said the district attorney’s office’s use of the racketeering statute served as a “dragnet” for a large number of educators with varying to no levels of culpability.Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act was enacted in 1980, a decade after the federal version, which has a notably narrower scope. The federal statute, for instance, requires that prosecutors show proof that there is a threat of ongoing racketeering activity. In Georgia, only two related acts are needed to prove a pattern.Howard was leading the Fulton county DA’s office when prosecutors used the Rico Act against the Atlanta public school educators. Still, the trial gave Willis the knowledge and confidence to use the tool more than any of her predecessors once she became district attorney. She’s since hired attorney John E Floyd, a leading Rico expert, to help with these types of cases.Kreis said the Atlanta public schools trial gives a preview of how Willis might prosecute Trump and associates.“You had all of these teachers who knew what they were doing was wrong,” he said. “No one would think falsifying test scores was a good thing or a proper thing, but they didn’t know exactly what other teachers or schools were working together. But they were all working towards the same impermissible end.”“I think the 2020 election aftermath and attempts to overthrow the election are very similar to that,” he added. “There’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of different actors and they all don’t necessarily have the same degree of information as all of the others, and they all don’t get together to say ‘let’s do this unlawful thing,’ but they know that they’re a part of a machine that’s doing something that they shouldn’t.”Some in Fulton county aren’t excited about the expansive use of the Rico Act in the past decade.“Rico is so broad in Georgia that it really is a free-for-all,” Franklin said. “It allows for the substance of the case to become secondary and it allows for prosecutors to just tell a narrative of whatever they want to tell because the pattern of racketeering only has to be two occurrences that don’t necessarily have to be related to one another. It just felt abusive and leans into this concept of prosecutors as bullies who just want to get what they want as opposed to using the tools at their disposal to achieve community safety and justice.”Defense attorney Steel is currently representing Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffrey Williams, in a racketeering case that is poised to unseat the educators’ trial as the longest in Georgia history. (The trial began the first week in January. A jury has yet to be selected.)Steel maintains that Williams is “totally innocent and wrongfully charged” and “not a part of any conspiracy”.NAACP president Griggs isn’t short on praise for Willis, but even he has been critical of her use of the statute. Specifically, Griggs was one of the defense attorneys in the Atlanta public schools cheating trial. His client was convicted, although she has since had her record expunged and sealed, and has returned to teaching. “With that particular case, I think it was a waste of time,” he said.Still, Griggs said he credits Willis for the organization and transparency she’s brought to the district attorney’s office and warned against underestimating how likable she can be with jurors.“I know Fani and I’m looking forward to seeing her actually try this case herself,” he said. “Especially after the former president has gone after her personally. I think he’s going to be very surprised when he’s sitting across from her for months on trial. He’ll find out how great of a lawyer she really is.”No matter what perceptions voters have had of her until this point, Georgia State professor Kreis said Willis is likely to have a “clean slate” with her liberal base in Fulton county if she’s able to secure a conviction against Trump. More

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      Trump’s Georgia charges are a win for voting rights leaders

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      After nearly three years, two statewide recounts and a violent attack on the US Capitol, Donald Trump is finally facing criminal charges over his relentless campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the battleground state of Georgia.On Monday, the former president and his allies were indicted on a total of 41 counts in Fulton county, Georgia, where the district attorney, Fani Willis, has been investigating the former president and his associates since 2021. The 13 charges against Trump himself include racketeering, forgery and perjury. News of the Georgia indictment came less than two weeks after Trump pleaded not guilty to a separate set of federal charges stemming from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 attack and 2020 election subversion efforts.For the voting rights leaders who worked tirelessly to deliver Democratic wins in Georgia, Trump’s indictment in Fulton county marked a clear rebuke of his extensive efforts to disenfranchise the state’s voters, reaffirming the sanctity and the power of the ballot.“This indictment is a win for voting rights and democracy because it strengthens our ability to defend it from its most imminent threat: Donald Trump,” said Xakota Espinoza, a spokesperson for the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight. “It is critical that we send a message that our democracy is sacrosanct, whether it is at the ballot box or courthouse.”The Fulton county indictment represents a crucial turning point in a drama that has been unfolding since Biden was declared the winner of Georgia in November 2020. Two statewide recounts in Georgia confirmed Biden defeated Trump by roughly 12,000 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1992. The victory was heralded as a landmark achievement for Democrats, particularly the Black voters who make up much of the party’s base in Georgia.Kendra Davenport Cotton, chief executive officer at the New Georgia Project Action Fund, emphasized that the validity of Biden’s win in Georgia had been determined beyond question long before Trump’s indictment. But the charges against Trump reassert the electoral power of the multiracial coalition that carried Biden to victory.“We believe facts. Biden won the 2020 race because Georgia voters showed up and showed out in record breaking numbers,” Cotton said. “The folks that I work with here at NGP Action Fund have always known the power of Georgia voters and have always known what Georgia voters are capable of – especially Black, brown and young voters.”But after Biden won the presidential race, Trump and his associates immediately went to work challenging the legitimacy of the election results, as Smith outlined in his own indictment filed earlier this month. After dozens of his election lawsuits failed, Trump then attempted to pressure state leaders to overturn Biden’s wins in key battleground states.In Georgia specifically, Trump placed an infamous phone call to the secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to demand that he “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s victory. Days later, a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Biden’s win. Shortly after that violent day, Willis began the investigative work that culminated in a grand jury approving an indictment against Trump on Monday.“[The indictment] is holding a former president accountable for attempting to overturn the results of a free, fair and legitimate election just because he lost right,” Cotton said. “Georgia voters specifically deserve to have some retribution for what he did during that time and what he continues to do.”Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 race was stolen, which has spurred more election denialism among the former president’s most fervent supporters. Voting rights leaders hope that Trump’s indictment in Georgia, as well as the federal case against him, will deter others from engaging in similar anti-democratic efforts in the future.“The former president’s election denial conspiracies birthed a new anti-democratic movement that produced anti-voter legislation, threats to election workers, and undermined faith in democracy with lies and false allegations,” Espinoza said. “This indictment should serve as a warning to future anti-voter politicians that the will and voices of Georgia voters cannot be silenced, and there is no place for election-denying conspiracy theorists in our democracy.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Trump’s indictment may help prevent other election subversion efforts in the future, much of the damage cannot be reversed. As the country waited for news from Fulton county, Cotton found herself thinking about Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who served as election workers in 2020 and became a central focus of right-wing conspiracy theories.Trump’s allies claimed video footage showed Freeman and Moss tabulating fraudulent ballots after counting had officially concluded on election night, a claim that swiftly debunked by Georgia election officials. A report released by the Georgia state election board in June concluded: “All allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”Despite the falsity of the allegations, some of Trump’s supporters continued to harass the two women for months. Testifying last year before the House select committee investigating January 6, Moss said she and her family had received numerous death threats, making her afraid to leave her home or introduce herself to strangers.Freeman told the committee: “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”The trauma experienced by Freeman and Moss cannot be erased, Cotton said, but she wondered if Trump’s indictment might provide them with some solace.“These are not individuals who wanted to do anything but serve their community, to be good public servants,” Cotton said. “I hope that, from him being held accountable, that they find a sense of peace and justice.” More

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      in Elections

      Georgia grand jury indictment: what we know so far in Trump case

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      A grand jury in Georgia has issued an indictment accusing the Donald Trump of efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
      Prosecutors brought 11 counts against Trump and his associates, including forgery and racketeering, which is used to target members of organized crime groups.
      Prosecutors charged 18 other people, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
      The Trump campaign has responded to the indictment, saying, “President Trump will continue to power through this unprecedented abuse of power”.
      A news conference featuring district attorney Fani T Willis is expected to take place after the indictment is released.
      The court briefly posted a document on its website earlier on Monday listing several felony charges against Trump, but quickly removed it without explanation. Willis’s office said at the time no charges had been filed and declined further comment.
      Over the course of a two-year investigation, Willis has examined Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure state leaders to reverse his 11,000-vote loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the state and organise a slate of illegitimate electors to undermine the process of formalising Biden’s victory. She has also looked into an alleged attempt by Trump’s allies to manipulate voting equipment in rural Coffee county.
      Trump has denied any wrongdoing and accuses Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, an elected Democrat, of being politically motivated.
      Trump, 77, has been criminally indicted three times so far this year, including once by US special counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat. He has long dismissed the many investigations, including two impeachments, he has faced in his years in politics as a politically motivated “witch-hunt”. More

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      Georgia grand jury returns indictments in Trump 2020 election inquiry

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      An Atlanta-area grand jury returned at least one indictment on Monday night in the investigation of Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results in the state of Georgia, according to a cover page for charging papers and a person familiar with the matter.The specific charges and the names of the defendants were not immediately clear. In the Fulton county courthouse, the indictments were walked over to Georgia superior court judge Robert McBurney, who did not make public any of the contents of the indictments.But the high-profile investigation led by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, is widely expected to result in charges against Trump and multiple allies, especially given the nature of the witnesses summoned to testify to the grand jury on Monday.The witnesses included Geoff Duncan, the former Georgia lieutenant governor, and the reporter George Chidi, who had initially been scheduled to testify on Tuesday but were summoned to appear a day early, a move that signaled the prosecutors wanted to wrap proceedings the same day.Charges against Trump would mark significant legal peril for him, since the charges come at the state level and he would not be able to undo any potential convictions through measures such as a self-pardon or appointing a partisan attorney general even if he was re-elected president in 2024.In recent months, the district attorney’s office identified multiple general and state election law violations by Trump and Republican operatives as they sought to subvert the 2020 election, from pressuring state officials to organizing fake slates of electors to breaching voting machines.The prosecutors examined whether there was scope to construct racketeering charges from the outset, hiring experts on the Rico law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) in Georgia, which is more expansive than its federal counterpart and requires only the showing of an “interrelated pattern of activity” of a criminal enterprise.Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, noted that Georgia’s Rico statute was a favorite tool for the Fulton county district attorney, referencing the 2014 Atlanta public schools trial where teachers and officials conspired to cheat on standardised tests.“I think the 2020 election aftermath and attempts to overthrow the election are very similar to that, where there’s just a lot of moving parts and a lot of different actors,” he said.“They all don’t necessarily have the same degree of information as all the others do. They all don’t get together and say, ‘Let’s do this unlawful thing’ but they know they’re part of a machine that’s doing something they shouldn’t,” Kreis explained.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe district attorney’s office spent more than two years investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and impaneled a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.When the prosecutors on the Trump case eventually presented the evidence to the grand jury meeting on Mondays and Tuesdays, the process went faster than anticipated, and at least two witnesses who had been scheduled to testify on Tuesday had their summons moved up by a day.The expedited grand jury presentment came after the clerk for the court appeared to accidentally post an incomplete docket report outlining a number of charges against Trump just after midday, even though more witnesses were still scheduled to testify.Trump’s lawyers railed against the incident, saying in a statement: “The Fulton county district attorney’s office has once again shown that they have no respect for the integrity of the grand jury process. This was not a simple administrative mistake.“A proposed indictment should only be in the hands of the district attorney’s office. Yet it somehow made its way to the clerk’s office and was assigned a case number and a judge before the grand jury even deliberated. This is emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations.” More

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      in US Politics

      Election-interference charges loom for Trump as docket posted then removed

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      The indictment of Donald Trump over his attempted election subversion in Georgia loomed closer on Monday amid an apparent false alarm about charges being filed and a series of angry statements from the former president punctuating a day of prosecution presentations in court.At about midday, a two-page docket report posted to the Fulton county court website indicated charges against Trump including racketeering, conspiracy and false statements. The appearance of the report set off a flurry of news media activity, but then the document vanished.A spokesperson for the district attorney said reports “that those charges were filed [are] inaccurate. Beyond that we cannot comment.”Trump, 77, already faces 78 criminal charges in three other indictments: over hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, his retention of classified documents and his election subversion at the federal level.Despite such unprecedented legal jeopardy, Trump dominates Republican primary polling as the first televised debate nears at the end of this month.Lawyers for Trump have mounted a free speech defense to charges over election subversion. On Monday, Trump was characteristically free with his speech.Using his Truth Social media platform, he lashed out at his perceived persecutors, in one instance appearing to attempt to intimidate a witness against him.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton county grand jury,” Trump wrote, misspelling the first name of Geoff Duncan, a Republican witness who said he was due to appear before the grand jury on Tuesday.“He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this witch hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the election fraud that took place in Georgia.”Experts agree that in Trump’s conclusive 2020 defeat by Joe Biden there was no widespread electoral fraud in Georgia or any other state. The federal indictment secured by the special counsel Jack Smith this month contained extensive evidence that Trump was repeatedly told as much but advanced his lie regardless.In Atlanta on Monday, prosecutors began presenting to a grand jury.A former Democratic state senator, Jen Jordan, told reporters as she left the Fulton county courthouse she was questioned for about 40 minutes. News outlets reported that a former Democratic state representative, Bee Nguyen, and Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the office of the Georgia secretary of state, were seen arriving too.For two and a half years, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has been investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia. Barriers and street closures around the courthouse in downtown Atlanta, and statements made by Willis, indicated that indictments could come this week.Nguyen and Jordan attended state legislative hearings in December 2020, during which the former New York mayor turned Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and other aides made false claims of widespread fraud in Georgia.The Trump lawyer John Eastman appeared during at least one of those hearings, saying the election had not been held in compliance with Georgia law and lawmakers should appoint a new slate of electors.Sterling and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, pushed back against allegations of widespread problems. Both are Republicans.On 2 January 2021, Trump called Raffensperger to say officials should help “find” the votes he needed to beat Biden. The release of a recording of that call prompted Willis to open her investigation.In his social media posts on Monday, Trump said: “Would somebody please tell the Fulton county grand jury that I did not tamper with the election. The people that tampered with it were the ones who rigged it.” He also abused the DA as “Phony Fani Willis” and said she “wants desperately” to indict him.Citing unnamed sources briefed on the matter, the Guardian has reported that Willis is set to announce charges this week against more than a dozen defendants, including crimes related to election law and a racketeering charge, the latter under a statute commonly used to fight organised crime.Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Donald Trump braced for fourth criminal indictment – US politics live

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      From 3h agoGood morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out.
      Donald Trump appeared to warn former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, against testifying before the Fulton County grand jury in the state’s 2020 election investigation.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury,” Trump posted on Truth Social today.Trump added:
      He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia.
      His post came days after the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s January 6 case in Washington DC, warned against making “inflammatory statements” that could intimidate witnesses in that trial.Duncan confirmed he had been asked to testify before the grand jury on Tuesday hearing evidence of alleged meddling in the 2020 presidential election.“Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness,” Duncan tweeted.The US will send Ukraine a new military aid package worth around $200m, secretary of state Antony Blinken announced.The latest security aid package includes air defense munitions, artillery rounds, anti-armor capabilities, and additional mine-clearing equipment, according to the statement.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, please follow our live blog. After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign on Sunday evening tried to walk back on comments he made earlier in the day in support of a nationwide abortion restriction after the first three months of pregnancy.In an interview at the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy told NBC News that he believes “a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life”.Asked if he would sign a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy if he were elected president, he said “yes, three months”.
      Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.
      But in a later statement, Kennedy’s campaign team said he had “misunderstood” the reporter’s questions, citing a “crowded” and “noisy” exhibit hall at the fair.The statement continued:
      Mr Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion.
      In response, NBC reporter Ali Vitali shared a transcript of the full exchange and said she asked her questions multiple times to make sure the presidential candidate understood the subject.Twice impeached and now arrested and indicted three times. Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida and Washington over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is simultaneously reeling from a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation toward writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.And more criminal charges could be on the way for Trump in Georgia as early as this week.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have gathered evidence directly connecting members of the former president’s legal team to the voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a report.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.Investigators are in possession of text messages and emails indicating the breach was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, CNN reported, citing sources.Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach shared a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to the report.Investigators have also probed the involvement of Trump’s then attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the sources said.Georgia former state senator Jen Jordan has been spotted at the Fulton County courthouse today, according to NBC.Jordan had been expected to testify before a grand jury as part of the Georgia prosecutor’s investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his election loss in the state.The indictment that the Fulton County district attorney, Fanis Willis, may bring against Donald Trump as early as this week could be the most sprawling case against the former president in response to his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.“I think people are going to be surprised at the level of preparedness and the level of sophistication of the prosecution,” Clint Rucker, a former prosecutor in Fulton County, told AP.He added that he was not surprised the investigation has taken so long. While Willis is likely to let her team of prosecutors handle the trial, he said there was no question that she is calling the shots.
      When she says stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go,’ that’s not being braggadocious’. It’s her saying pretty much to anybody who’s interested, ‘Look, we’re ready.’
      The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this:
      In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
      The film’s montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis relentlessly poring over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.We’d watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she’d refuse to back down from the task at hand. She’d advocate for what she believed to be right even when it wasn’t popular. She’d appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as: “Lady justice is actually blind. This is the reality. If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.”According to some of Willis’s colleagues who have worked with her over more than 20 years, all of this would be an accurate depiction of the district attorney.Defense attorney Brian Steel has known Willis her entire career and says she’s both “extremely honest” and “extremely hard working”. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs described her as “transparent”, a “zealous advocate for the state” and the “best trial attorney” in the Fulton county district attorney’s office. He said:
      What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is.
      Read the Guardian’s full profile of Willis here. The district attorney’s office in Georgia has spent more than two years investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies kicked off an aggressive pressure campaign in an attempt to overturn the election results in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner.Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, which became the consuming focus of the former president and his allies, according to a Washington Post report today. Those close to Trump pushed state officials to identify fraud that would cast Biden’s victory in doubt, it writes.
      In the process, they personally targeted individual election workers with false claims of cheating, unleashing waves of threats, and amplified conspiracy theories about rigged machines that persist today. In the end, after Trump sought to use every lever of power to overturn the results, top state Republicans stood in his way, refusing to buckle under the pressure.
      Some of the most fantastical claims of fraud came directly from Trump and his allies, “who amplified baseless accusations on conservative media and unleashed new waves of outlandish tips from rank-and-file Republicans”.The former president’s accusations also turned election workers in Georgia and other states into targets of harassment and threats.
      They spread false claims that thousands of mail ballots should be discarded because of questionable signatures, that a mother-daughter team of election workers in Atlanta had triple-tallied counterfeit votes, that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another.
      For the purposes of the Trump case, prosecutors in Georgia will be required to show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors have been examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Donald Trump and his allies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney, Fani Willis, had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      Donald Trump expected to face 2020 election charges in Georgia this week

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected early this week to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants that could include the former president, according to two people briefed on the matter.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week. The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day.For weeks, the prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the sources said.The expansive Rico statute, for the purposes of the Trump case, would require only that prosecutors show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors were examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Trump and his allies, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”. More