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      Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals react to indictment: ‘Very serious allegations’

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      When news broke on Thursday that Donald Trump would be indicted for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, most of his Republican presidential primary opponents rushed to his defense, blaming the charges on the “weaponization of federal law enforcement”, as the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said.But several Republican candidates have shifted their tone since the indictment was unsealed on Friday, revealing the full extent of the serious charges Trump faces. Those Republicans’ willingness to challenge the former president’s claims of “political persecution” could mark a new chapter in the 2024 primary fight, although the candidates may have to change their tune if Trump becomes the nominee.According to the indictment filed by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, Trump willfully withheld 31 classified documents from federal officials and obstructed justice in his efforts to conceal the materials. Some of those documents included highly sensitive government information on America’s nuclear programs, military vulnerabilities and planned responses in the event of a foreign attack. The former president pleaded not guilty to all 37 federal counts at his arraignment in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday.The nature of the classified information kept in ballrooms and bathrooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida caught the attention of his vice-president and now primary opponent, Mike Pence. While Pence had previously attacked the department of justice over the indictment, he told the Wall Street Journal editorial board on Tuesday that he considered his former boss’s alleged actions to be indefensible.“Having read the indictment,” Pence said, “these are very serious allegations. And I can’t defend what is alleged. But the president is entitled to his day in court, he’s entitled to bring a defense, and I want to reserve judgment until he has the opportunity to respond.”Pence, whose son and son-in-law served in the US military, specifically chastised Trump over endangering service members.“Even the inadvertent release of that kind of information could compromise our national security and the safety of our armed forces,” Pence said. “And, frankly, having two members of our immediate family serving in the armed forces of the United States, I will never diminish the importance of protecting our nation’s secrets.”That line was echoed by former South Carolina governor and presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Although Haley initially responded to news of the indictment by condemning “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics”, she begrudgingly acknowledged on Monday that Trump’s alleged behavior represented a grave threat to Americans’ safety.“If this indictment is true, if what it says is actually the case, President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” Haley told Fox News. “I’m a military spouse. My husband’s about to deploy this weekend. This puts all of our military men and women in danger.”The South Carolina senator Tim Scott softened his own impassioned defense of Trump after the indictment was made public. While Scott lamented “a justice system where the scales are weighted” on Thursday, he told reporters on Monday that Smith’s indictment represented a “serious case with serious allegations”.But those three candidates did not go as far as the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has been far more outspoken in his criticism of Trump. At a CNN town hall on Monday, Christie credited Smith’s team with crafting “a very tight, very detailed, evidence-laden indictment”.“Whether you like Donald Trump or you don’t like Donald Trump, this conduct is inexcusable, in my opinion, for somebody who wants to be president of the United States,” Christie said.Christie, who was once a Trump loyalist before turning against the former president, attributed the retention of the classified documents to “vanity run amok”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He’s saying I’m more important than the country,” Christie said. “And he is now going to put this country through this when we didn’t have to go through it.”Even after the release of the incriminating indictment, however, some Republican candidates have continued to circle the wagons in Trump’s defense. Presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy traveled to Miami for the arraignment on Tuesday, and he spoke to supporters about the need to pardon Trump if he is convicted.“This is my commitment: on January 20, 2025, if I’m elected the next US president, to pardon Donald J Trump for these offenses in this federal case,” Ramaswamy, a long-shot candidate, said. “I have challenged, I have demanded that every other candidate in this race either sign this commitment to pardon on January 20, 2025, or else to explain why they are not.”Although Haley has criticized Trump’s recklessness, she said she would be inclined to pardon him if she becomes president.“When you look at a pardon, the issue is less about guilt and more about what’s good for the country,” Haley said on Tuesday. “I think it would be terrible for the country to have a former president in prison for years because of a documents case.”But with Trump continuing to dominate in polls of likely primary voters, it appears unlikely that Haley or any other Republican candidate will be in the position to issue a pardon. Given that the Republican National Committee has demanded presidential candidates pledge their support for the eventual nominee, whispers of criticism among Trump’s opponents may soon dim to silence, as they did in 2016.As Republicans have clashed over Trump’s fate, Joe Biden has remained above the fray, seemingly content to watch his rivals tie themselves in knots over a former president accused of jeopardizing national security. When asked about the arraignment on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, responded in the same way she has for days: no comment. More

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      Special counsel reportedly examining Trump’s firing of cybersecurity official

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      The US special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat is examining his firing of a cybersecurity official whose office said the vote was secure, the New York Times said.Jack Smith, who is also investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents, has subpoenaed former Trump White House staffers as well as Christopher Krebs, who oversaw the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) under Trump, the Times said, citing unnamed sources.Trump fired Krebs in November 2020, days after Cisa issued a statement calling the 3 November election “the most secure in American history”, as the then-president made his unsupported accusations that the vote was rigged.Cisa, part of the Department of Homeland Security, works to protect US elections. Krebs told associates at the time he expected to be fired.Representatives for Smith declined to comment on the New York Times report. Representatives for Krebs and Trump could not be reached for comment.The frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, Trump has persisted in making unfounded claims of widespread election fraud and promised pardons for supporters who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a failed effort to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.Smith is leading a grand jury investigation into Trump’s actions. A special bipartisan House committee last year urged the Department of Justice to charge Trump with crimes including inciting or aiding an insurrection.In Georgia, a county prosecutor is investigating alleged interference in the 2020 election, with charging decisions expected by 1 September.Trump faces several other legal threats, including Smith’s investigation of classified documents found at Trump’s residence in Florida after he left the White House.In March, a New York grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election. The New York attorney general has sued Trump and his company for alleged fraud. In a civil trial in New York, Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, relating to an allegation of rape.Trump denies all allegations and accuses prosecutors of a political “witch-hunt”. More

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      Man who debunked Mike Lindell’s ‘blatantly bogus’ data wants his $5m

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      Robert Zeidman was not planning on making the trek to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in August 2021 for a “cyber symposium” hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who was pledging to unveil hard data that showed China had interfered with the 2020 election.Zeidman, a 63-year-old consultant cyber forensics expert who goes to the shows in Las Vegas with his wife and plays poker in his spare time, voted twice for Trump because he did not like the alternative candidates. He thinks there was some fraud in the 2020 election, though not enough to overturn the result. And he believed it was possible that Lindell could have discovered evidence voting machines were hacked in 2020. He was curious to see Lindell’s evidence, and a bit skeptical, so he thought he would follow along online.But Lindell – one of the most prolific spreaders of election misinformation – was pledging $5m to anyone who could prove the information was not valid data from the 2020 election, and Zeidman’s friends encouraged him to go.Zeidman decided to hop on a plane from his home in Vegas, figuring he would meet a lot of interesting people and be there for a historic moment.“I still had my doubts about whether they had the data,” he said in an interview on Monday. “But I thought it would be a question of experts disagreeing or maybe agreeing about what the data meant.“I didn’t think it would be blatantly bogus data, which is what I found.”An arbitration panel ruled in Zeidman’s favor last month ordering Lindell’s LLC to pay, within 30 days, the $5m he pledged to anyone who could disprove his data. Lindell has refused to pay since the arbitration ruling on 19 April, and Zeidman filed a suit in federal court in Minnesota last week requesting enforcement of the arbitration ruling. If the judge sides with him it would allow Zeidman to collect the money.Zeidman’s filing came after Lindell filed his own court papers last week in state court seeking to vacate the arbitration panel’s ruling (the filing said a rationale for doing so would be forthcoming). He said in an interview that the arbitrators were biased against him. But Brian Glasser, one of Zeidman’s attorneys, noted that Lindell and Zeidman’s legal team had each picked one of the arbitrators on the panel, and those two had picked the third, whom Lindell agreed to. Federal law only allows a federal court to vacate an arbitration decision where the result was produced by corruption, fraud, or in an instance where the arbitrators exceeded their powers.Lindell won’t have to immediately pay while the cases are pending in court. Glasser, Zeidman’s attorney, predicted it would be resolved quickly and was certain Lindell would lose.“There are no circumstances under which he will prevail on his chance to overturn it,” he said.The suit is one of several Lindell faces after the 2020 election. He also faces defamation suits from two different voting equipment companies, Dominion and Smartmatic, as well as a separate case from Eric Coomer, a former Dominion employee. The suits against Lindell, as well as litigation against conservative news networks like Fox, Newsmax, and OAN have become understood as efforts to hold those who spread misinformation about the election accountable for their lies. Dominion reached a landmark $787.5m settlement in a defamation case against Fox earlier this year.“People who attempt to destroy our democracy and put up $5m in support of their effort should pay it when they’re obligated to,” Glasser said.It wasn’t long after Zeidman signed the contest rules on 10 August and began to study the data that he began to see that it didn’t prove anything about election fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, the 11 files Lindell’s team handed over didn’t really say anything at all.There was a silent video of someone using a debugging tool without any explanation. There was a file of binary data – ones and zeroes – without any explanation of how to extract any meaningful data from it. “Very suspicious,” Zeidman said. There was also another text file provided to Zeidman that he managed to convert and see was gibberish.“It was perfectly formatted in a word document. It was almost as if someone had typed into a word document just random characters,” he said. “Like somebody had either typed it, or more likely designed a tiny little program to write into a word document thousands of pages.”Eventually, he wrote up a 15-page report concluding the files Lindell provided “unequivocally does not contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election”. The three-judge panel Lindell picked to judge the contest ultimately determined that Zeidman had not won. Zeidman, believing that he was entitled to the prize, sought a ruling from an arbitration panel. The panel issued its decision in his favor a little over a month ago.“Mr Zeidman performed under the contract. He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data. Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover,” the the three arbitrators wrote.Lindell said in a telephone interview that the panel’s ruling was wrong, and said he was taking legal action to vacate the arbitration panel’s ruling. He said his data was “solid as a rock”.“Whatever they did, it’s the wrong decision, and it’s going to come out in court,” he said.Zeidman “has a strong moral code” and said this is not the first time he has taken something to arbitration to prove a point.And while he conceded it would be nice to have $5m, he said he’s not doing it for the money. “I needed to win the arbitration to get some independent confirmation that I had disproved Lindell’s data,” he said.He plans to donate some of the money to non-profits that he put off giving to last year because of expenses, including those incurred because of the legal case. And he plans to donate some of the money to a “legitimate” organization reviewing voter integrity, he said.“When I first met Lindell, I thought he was eccentric but had his heart in the right place and trying to do the right thing,” he added. “As I went on, I found no rational person would believe what he’s saying. I think he’s not rational.” More

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      Georgia prosecutor signals charges in 2020 election inquiry may come end of July

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia signalled Thursday that charging decisions in the case may come starting the final week of July, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.The indication from the prosecutor, Fani Willis, first came during a meeting with her full team where she told them to make preparations to work remotely during the final week of July and through the first weeks of August, the people said.Willis made no explicit mention of Trump during the meeting, but the specific timing is understood to reflect the expected window for indictments after previous indications suggested charging decisions would come during the court term that runs July to September.The district attorney’s office hours later told the county superior court chief judge Ural Glanville asking judges not to schedule trials and in-person hearings from 31 July to 18 August because most of her staff would be remote in a letter seen by the Guardian and first reported by the New York Times.A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to a request for comment.The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, while prosecutors at the federal level are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.A special grand jury in Atlanta that heard evidence for roughly seven months recommended charges for more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews, though Willis will have to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.Willis originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who sought to help Trump stay in power as so-called fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end.Prosecutors then also spent several weeks on a potential conflict issue resulting from the fact that not all of the fake electors defended by lawyer Kimberly Debrow were offered immunity deals. The dispute resolved itself last week after the fake elector without a deal found a new lawyer.The meeting on Thursday afternoon appears to have been convened in part to give staff a more specific window for when indictments could arrive after Willis outlined her prosecutorial intentions in the case in a letter to the Fulton county sheriff Patrick Labat last month.“In the near future, I will announce charging decisions,” Willis wrote in the letter. “I am providing this letter to bring to your attention the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.”Trump is understood to have two main areas of legal jeopardy in Georgia: the calls he made to officials like the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in an effort to reverse his election defeat in the weeks after the 2020 election, as well as his role in assembling the fake electors.But at the heart of the investigation are the steps that Trump and his campaign aides took – knowing it was probably illegal – in assembling 16 pro-Trump electors to surreptitiously gain entry to the Georgia state capitol and submit unauthorized electoral college votes for Trump to Congress. More

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      Alarm after lawyer who aided Trump’s 2020 election lie attacks campus voting

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      Rightwing election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a key ally of Donald Trump as he pushed bogus claims of fraud to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win, is facing intense fire from voting watchdogs and bipartisan criticism for urging curbs on college student voting, same day voter registration and absentee voting.The scrutiny of Mitchell, who runs the Election Integrity Network at the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute to which a Trump Pac donated $1m dollars, was sparked by recent comments Mitchell made to Republican donors, and a watchdog report criticizing her advisory role with a federal election panel.Long known for advocating stricter voting rules that are often premised on unsupported allegations of sizable voting fraud, Mitchell last month promoted new voting curbs on students in a talk to a group of wealthy donors to the Republican National Committee, efforts that critics call partisan and undemocratic.Mitchell’s private RNC address to rich donors zeroed in on curbing college campus voting rules, automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters and same-day voter registration, as the Washington Post first reported.The talk by Mitchell, who has done legal work for Republican committees, members of Congress and conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association, focused on college campuses in key swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin, all of which have large college campuses.In an audio of her remarks obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor, Mitchell slammed college voting procedures.“What are these college campus locations? What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”Further in one part of her presentation cited by the Post, Mitchell charged blithely that “the Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs. Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.”It’s unclear if the RNC will back the latest proposals made by Mitchell, who the committee has worked with previously. But an RNC spokesperson offered effusive praise of Mitchell to the Post, saying: “As the RNC continues to strengthen our Election Integrity program, we are thankful for leaders like Cleta Mitchell who do important work for the Republican ecosystem.”But voting rights watchdogs voice alarm at Mitchell’s proposals to the RNC donor crowd.“Mitchell’s comments behind closed doors give up the game,” said Danielle Lang, the lead voting rights litigator with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “The current wave of additional voter restrictions is about only one thing: punishing disfavored populations of voters.”Lang added: “Sadly, we should not be surprised that Mitchell, who was central to attempts to overturn the will of the people in 2020, speaks so blithely about attacking voters she dislikes.”Similarly, Republicans and Democrats alike deplore Mitchell’s comments to the RNC contributors.“It’s absurd for Cleta Mitchell or others to suggest our path to victory is by making it harder for young people to vote,” said ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent. “Republicans should not fear how people vote. Good candidates with good messages should resonate with voters.”Key Democrats agree.“Mitchell seems to have a very difficult time separating her partisan agenda from the responsibility we all have to uphold a basic democratic respect for the right to vote,” Democrat House member Jamie Raskin told the Guardian.Mitchell didn’t respond to a Guardian request for comment about her RNC remarks.Besides the firestorm over Mitchell’s RNC remarks, she is facing more heat related to other recent efforts she has made to restrict voting rights.Mitchell has served for over a year on a bipartisan advisory board for the federal Election Assistance Commission, a post that she’s used to promote curbs on mail in voting, voter registration and student voting, according to an April report from the watchdog group American Oversight.American Oversight’s study, which came after it obtained Mitchell emails from 2020- 2022 using the Freedom of information Act, included some exchanges where Mitchell suggested legal challenges to absentee voting rules and attacked a voting rights group while serving on the EAC advisory board.“Cleta Mitchell played a central role in former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” said American Oversight executive director Heather Sawyer “So it isn’t surprising that she has used her role as an advisor to the Election Assistance Commission to push an explicitly anti-voting agenda.”“She has disparaged voting rights organizations, called for challenging absentee voting procedures, and is urging new rules that would make voting harder for students and working people. Mitchell’s partisan and ideological commitment to restricting ballot access has no place at an agency tasked with helping states administer free and fair elections.”The fears over Mitchell’s blunt advocacy for curbing student and other voting rights, comes after her role advising Trump as he tried to overturn Biden’s win in 2020 has received legal scrutiny in Georgia. It also comes amid criticism of aggressive poll watching drives she pushed for in 2022 through her Election Integrity Network.Mitchell was subpoenaed last year, along with several other key Trump lawyers and allies including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, by a special grand jury in Georgia in a wide ranging criminal probe by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis into efforts by Trump and his allies to thwart Biden’s win in the state.A major focus of that inquiry is Trump’s hour-long conference call on 2 January 2021, which Mitchell participated in, pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to just “find” him 11,780 votes to block Biden’s win there.Trump falsely claimed that “we won by hundreds of thousands of votes” and vaguely warned Raffensperger of a “criminal offense” to which the Georgia official replied “the data you have is wrong”.The Fulton county inquiry is widely expected to lead to several indictments including quite possibly Trump, and Willis has said she will make final decisions about who will be charged this summer.Just days after the 2021 call with Raffensperger, Mitchell abruptly left her long time law firm Foley & Lardner, and soon joined the Conservative Partnership Institute as senior legal fellow, where she has led its self styled Election Integrity Network and advocated for curb voting rights.CPI has flourished financially since Mitchell and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, CPI’s senior partner, joined in early 2021.CPI’s tax filings for 2021 showed grants and contributions of $45m up from $7.1m the prior year.In other conservative circles, Mitchell wields considerable influence as a board member of the right wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and as chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s board.Now though, Mitchell’s latest attacks on student voting rules are viewed by watchdog groups and some members of Congress as badly misguided, and emblematic of her partisan agenda.“We should applaud, not bemoan, equitable access to voting for students.Our young people will inherit our democracy but participate at some of the lowest rates,” Lang of the Campaign Legal Center said. “While that is improving, young people still face disproportionate burdens in voter registration and voter access.”In a similar vein, Raskin said: “Mitchell’s attacks on college student voting are directly reflective of the GOP’s increasing electoral losses among young people.”Mitchell and Republicans, he added, ought to focus on policies and candidates that “actually appeal to young voters, rather than a legislative program to stop them from voting.”. 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      Half of Trump’s ‘fake electors’ accept immunity in Georgia investigation

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      Half of the 16 so-called fake electors in Georgia who sought to falsely declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election have accepted immunity deals in the local criminal investigation into the matter, their lawyer said in a court filing on Friday.The immunity deals to the eight came in April, according to the filing, after the Fulton county district attorney’s office called their lawyer and said prosecutors were willing to make the arrangement – about four months after the lawyer asked about the prospect of such deals.With half of the fake electors now apparently immune from prosecution, the scope of a potential conspiracy indictment ensnaring Trump and the electors – identified as targets in the case – may have narrowed, not least because the immunity deals did not compel any incriminating information in return.The filing also raised new questions about how prosecutors might handle the fake electors more broadly, after the lawyer for the eight, Kimberley Debrow, effectively accused the district attorney’s office of misrepresenting key facts in an earlier motion seeking to have her disqualified.The latest twist in the Georgia election criminal investigation comes as the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, is expected to ask a grand jury starting in mid-July to return charges against Trump and dozens of people involved in efforts to reverse his defeat in the state of Georgia.Last month, the district attorney’s office sought to disqualify Debrow from the case entirely, citing her clients’ testimony that they were not told of immunity offers, and citing a conflict of interest after some of her clients implicated another one of her clients in a separate crime.In the 68-page brief filed on Friday, Debrow vehemently disputed the claims, saying that transcripts and recordings of interviews – submitted to the court for a confidential review – showed that none of her clients told prosecutors that immunity offers were not brought to them in 2022.The filing also revealed that although eight fake electors received immunity deals, two of the fake electors – whose identities were not disclosed and were until recently her clients – had not. One of them is understood to be Cathy Latham, a local Republican party leader.A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Debrow claimed in the filing that the transcripts of interviews with her clients showed one of the prosecutors, Nathan Wade, sought to intentionally confuse them by suggesting they were offered immunity last year, though no actual offers had been made before April 2023.In one instance, Debrow claimed, the prosecutor threatened to “tear up” the immunity deal that was already in force and binding if Debrow did not stop clarifying that the discussions about immunity prior to April were only potential offers.“Here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Either [Elector E] is going to get this immunity, and he’s going to answer the questions – and wants to talk – or we’re going to leave. And if we leave, we’re ripping up his immunity agreement,” Wade is said to have told Debrow and her client.Debrow also claimed she could find no testimony in her clients’ interview transcripts showing them implicating another fake electors in a further crime, noting that the district attorney’s office had refused to say what the alleged crime was, or who had made the allegations.“All of the electors remain united in their collective innocence and defenses, and none testified or believe that they or any other elector committed any wrongdoing, much less ‘criminal acts’,” the filing said.Debrow added that even if it were true that some of clients incriminated another of her clients, it would not matter since they could not be prosecuted as a result of the immunity deals. More

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      Dominion is not done fighting 2020 election lies. A look at its other cases

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      When Dominion settled its closely-watched $787.5m defamation lawsuit against Fox last month, its lawyers made it clear that the company would continue to pursue legal action against those who spread false claims about the company and the 2020 election.The company still has major defamation cases pending against Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne and Mike Lindell – all allies of Donald Trump who were some of the most prominent figures that spread election lies involving the voting machine company on television and elsewhere after the 2020 election.“Money is accountability and we got that today from Fox, but we’re not done yet. We’ve got some other people who have some accountability coming towards them,” Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer who represented the company, said outside the courthouse after the settlement was reached.Dominion also has ongoing defamation lawsuits against Newsmax and One America News Network, conservative outlets that prominently promoted lies about the 2020 election. Smartmatic, another voting company, is also suing many of the same figures and has its own $2.7bn defamation suit against Fox and its own cases against many of the same defendants.In order to win, Dominion will have to clear the high bar of showing that those responsible for making the defamatory statement knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Dominion built an unusually strong case against Fox, producing reams of evidence showing that executives and top hosts knew the claims about the election were false. The strength of its Fox case doesn’t necessarily mean it will have an ironclad case against OAN and Newsmax, said Anthony Glassman, a defamation lawyer.“There is no way to know whether you’re likely to get as strong a sense of the internal operations of each company as you did from Fox. Each company most likely operates in very different ways which may provide them with different defenses and make it more of a challenge to win,” he said.The cases against the individuals are at once both more simple and potentially more challenging than the ones against the news networks. Dominion only needs to show the individuals disregarded the truth and made false statements. But it may be harder to produce a paper trail showing that they genuinely knew what they were saying was false or recklessly disregarded the truth.“The trove of high-profile damning evidence – that key folks at Fox knew the election wasn’t stolen and thought the Dominion statements were ‘crazy’ – becomes less relevant,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah. “Dominion needs evidence that Guilani and Powell themselves either knew it was false or recklessly disregarded its falsity. We haven’t yet gotten a full look at what it might have gathered on that front.”Evidence is already emerging suggesting that at least Giuliani and Powell knew that their statements were false. In the Fox case, Dominion obtained an email in which one of Powell’s sources, who had no expertise in election administration, falsely claimed Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff and Diane Feinstein’s husband had an interest in Dominion and that the machines were flipping votes for Biden. The source claimed she had visions and said Antonin Scalia was murdered. She acknowledged some of what she had written was “wackadoodle”, but Powell passed it on to Fox host Maria Bartiromo, who asked Powell about similar claims on her show shortly thereafter.Abby Grossberg, a former Fox employee suing the network, also released a recording she made of Giuliani on 8 November 2020 in which he admits he doesn’t yet have evidence to support some of the outlandish claims he’s making about Dominion.Here’s a look at where Dominion’s cases stand:Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike LindellDominion separately filed suit against Giuliani, Powell and Lindell in federal district court in Washington DC. Giuliani and Powell represented Trump in court after the election, filing numerous lawsuits based on easily disprovable claims of fraud. Lindell is the CEO of MyPillow – the company is also named as a defendant in the suit – and a Trump ally who became one of the most prominent funders of efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The company is seeking more than $1.3bn in damages from each. It is also seeking a court order against Powell and Lindell forcing them to remove any statements ultimately proven to be false and defamatory and blocking them from making any further false statements about Dominion.In August, US district judge Carl Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee, declined to dismiss the case against all three.Discovery in the case is ongoing (Lindell has tried to avoid complying with it) and will be completed in September. Nichols has set a February conference, to set a trial date, which could come as soon as the middle of next year.Patrick ByrneDominion is suing the former Overstock.com CEO, one of the biggest funders and propagators of election misinformation, for defamation in federal court in Washington DC. The company is seeking $1.6bn in damages as well as $1.3m in other expenses related to Byrne’s false claims about the election.The complaint, filed in August 2021, specifically cites Byrne’s efforts to produce a report analyzing data in Antrim county, Michigan, that falsely claimed Dominion machines were flipping votes. The document became a key source for those who made false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Byrne was also a key funder of a widely-criticized review of votes in Maricopa county, Arizona, that further sowed doubt about Dominion equipment, but ultimately affirmed Biden’s victory there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“After the election, Byrne manufactured and promoted fake evidence to convince the world that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a massive international conspiracy among China, Venezuelan and Spanish companies, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), prominent Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Dominion, which, Byrne falsely claimed, committed fraud and helped steal the 2020 presidential election,” the complaint says.Nichols allowed the case to go forward last year.Discovery is scheduled to be completed later this year. A trial date has not yet been set, but could take place as soon as the middle of next year.NewsmaxDominion is suing Newsmax in Delaware superior court for broadcasting false claims about the company after the 2020 election that are similar to the ones Fox broadcast. The case is being overseen by Eric Davis, the same judge who oversaw the company’s case against Fox. Dominion is seeking $1.6bn in damages, plus an additional $1.3m it says it had to spend on security and combating the false claims put out about the company.“Newsmax made the intentional and knowing choice to depict – and then publicize, endorse and fuel – the lies about Dominion as truth, creating and promoting an alternate reality that duped millions of Americans into believing that Dominion stole the 2020 election from President Trump,” the complaint, filed in August 2021, says. “It repeatedly broadcast the lies of facially unreliable sources – lies which Newsmax itself adopted, endorsed, promoted and manufactured. And it acted this way because the lies attracted Trump’s public stamp of approval, attention and admiration, along with huge ratings boosts and profit windfalls.”Davis declined to dismiss the case last year. “The complaint supports the reasonable inference that Newsmax either knew its statements about Dominion’s role in the election fraud were false or had a high degree of awareness that they were false,” he wrote in June.In 2021, Newsmax apologized to Eric Coomer, a Dominion employee, who it falsely said had rigged votesDiscovery in the case is ongoing.One America News NetworkDominion sued OANN in federal court in Washington, alleging that the company embraced and broadcast outlandish claims about the company in an effort to position itself as an alternative to Fox.“Spurred by a quest for profits and viewers, OAN – a competitor to media giant Fox – engaged in a race to the bottom with Fox and other outlets such as Newsmax to spread false and manufactured stories about election fraud,” Dominion lawyers wrote in their complaint, filed in August of 2021.“Dominion quickly became the focus of this downward spiral of lies, as each broadcaster attempted to outdo the others by making the lies more outrageous, spreading them further and endorsing them as strongly as possible.”Nichols, who is also overseeing the case, declined to dismiss the case last November. Discovery is ongoing. A trial date has not yet been set, but it could take place some time next year. More

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      in Elections

      Mike Pence testifies to grand jury about Donald Trump and January 6

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      Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday in Washington about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the matter, a day after an appeals court rejected a last-ditch motion to block his appearance.The former vice-president’s testimony lasted for around seven hours and took place behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors hearing evidence in the case remains uncertain.His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.The two interactions are of particular investigative interest to Smith as his office examines whether Trump sought to unlawfully obstruct the certification and defrauded the United States in seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.Pence had privately suggested to advisers that he would provide as complete an account as possible of what took place inside and outside the White House in the weeks leading up to the 6 January Capitol attack, as well as how Trump had been told his plans could violate the law.His appearance came the morning after the US court of appeals for the DC circuit rejected an emergency legal challenge seeking to block Pence’s testimony on executive privilege grounds, and Trump ran out of road to take the matter to the full DC circuit or the supreme court.The government has been trying to get Pence’s testimony for months, starting with requests from the justice department last year and then through a grand jury subpoena issued by Smith, who inherited the complicated criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power.The subpoena came under immediate challenges from Trump’s lawyers, who invoked executive privilege to limit the scope of Pence’s testimony, as well as from Pence’s lawyer, who argued his role as president of the Senate on 6 January meant he was protected from legal scrutiny by the executive branch.Both requests to limit the scope of Pence’s testimony were largely denied by the new chief US judge for the court James Boasberg, who issued a clear-cut denial to Trump and a more nuanced ruling to Pence that upheld that he was protected in part by speech or debate protections.Still, Boasberg ruled that speech or debate protections did not shield him from testifying about any instances of potential criminality.The former vice-president’s team declined to challenge the ruling. But Trump’s legal team disagreed, and filed the emergency motion that was denied late on Wednesday by judges Gregory Katsas, Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStarting weeks after the 2020 election, Trump tried to cajole Pence into helping him reverse his defeat by using his largely ceremonial role of the presiding officer of the Senate on 6 January to reject the legitimate Biden slates of electors and prevent his certification.The effort relied in large part on Pence accepting fake slates of electors for Trump – now a major part of the criminal investigation – to create a pretext for suggesting the results of the election were somehow in doubt and stop Biden from being pronounced president.The pressure campaign involved Trump, but it also came from a number of other officials inside and outside the government, including Trump’s lawyer John Eastman, other Trump campaign-affiliated lawyers such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and dozens of Republican members of Congress.Pence was also unique in having one-on-one discussions with Trump the day before the Capitol attack and on the day of, which House January 6 select committee investigators last year came to believe was a conspiracy that the former president had at least some advance knowledge. More