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      Special counsel pushes to use Pence against Trump in 2020 election case

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      Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and his efforts to recruit fake electors the centerpiece of his criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.The brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment can be kept and what evidence can be presented by prosecutors as she makes her decision.According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump’s conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the executive branch.At the White House on 4 January 2021, prosecutors wrote, Trump deliberately excluded his White House counsel from attending a meeting with Pence – meaning the only attorney in the room was Eastman.“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that the conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the brief said.View image in fullscreenAnd on a 5 January 2021 phone call, prosecutors wrote, Trump and Eastman were the only ones on the line to make a final effort to pressure Pence to drop his objections and agree not to count slates of electors for Joe Biden when he presided over the congressional certification the next day.“For the defendant’s decision to include private actors in the conversation with Pence about his role at the certification makes even more clear that there is no danger to the executive branch’s functions and authority, because it had no bearing on any executive branch authority,” it said.Prosecutors added that the conversations between Trump and Pence that they wanted to present at trial should be allowed because there was nothing official about them discussing electoral prospects as candidates for office.Referencing previously undisclosed evidence, prosecutors showed that Pence at various points suggested that “the process was over” and that Trump consider running again in 2024 – key evidence that Trump was on notice from his own running mate that he had lost the election.And prosecutors reiterated that charging the most damning evidence that Trump’s lawyers knew they were violating the law – emails where Eastman asked Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to consider one more “minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act – did not impact the functioning of the executive branch.The expansive brief also included prosecutors asking to take to trial evidence of Trump’s effort to pressure state officials to reverse the results and his effort to then rely on fake slates of electors.The response from Trump’s lawyers is almost certain to be that Trump was calling state officials because he was executing the clause in the US constitution that the president has a duty to ensure the general election was run without interference or fraud.But prosecutors included a pre-emptive rebuttal: “Although countless federal, state, and local races also were on the same ballots … the defendant focused only on his own race, the election for president, and only on allegations favoring him as a candidate in targeted states he had lost.” More

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      Mayor in Wisconsin removes ballot drop box as tensions rise over voting method

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      A Wisconsin mayor removed a ballot drop box from outside city hall and relocated it indoors last week – a performance that underscores the tensions and misinformation that surround election administration and the topic of ballot drop boxes in the state.Doug Diny, who donned a workperson’s hat and gloves to move the drop box, claimed he did so because he was worried the box, which had not yet been fully installed and did not have any ballots in it, could have been tossed in the river. The city has since re-installed the dropbox outside the Wausau municipal building.Since 2020, the use of ballot drop boxes – secured boxes where voters can return absentee ballots – has been a fixture of debate over the administration of elections in Wisconsin.With Covid-19 surging during the 2020 presidential election, about 60% of voters cast ballots early or by mail. By 2021, there were 570 ballot drop boxes in place across the state, according to the Wisconsin elections commission.In 2022, after conservative groups filed suit to ban the use of the drop boxes, the Wisconsin supreme court – then ruled by a conservative majority – outlawed the voting method. In July, a year after voters elected a liberal judge to the court and reversed the ideological balance of the court, the state supreme court overturned its previous decision. With just four months to go before the 2024 election, election clerks across the state were free to introduce drop boxes at their discretion.The ruling has not cooled tensions over the use of the secured voting boxes. With unfounded fears that US elections are vulnerable to fraud still swirling years after Donald Trump spread the lie that the 2020 election was rife with irregularities, the re-introduction of drop boxes in Wisconsin has repeatedly spurred controversy.In Dodge county, Wisconsin, the political outlet WisPolitics first reported that some municipal clerks who sought to bring back drop boxes reversed course after the county’s Republican sheriff urged them not to use drop boxes, claiming they could cause the perception of fraud.In Brookfield, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, residents rallied for a ballot drop box to be installed for the 2024 November elections. But after the municipal clerk, whose office oversees election administration, turned the decision about drop boxes over to common council, the council voted not to offer residents that option. Mike Hallquist, a local official in Brookfield who voted in favor of installing a drop box in the city, said that while “state law definitely provides the clerk their ability to make that decision,” he was comfortable weighing in “because it was at the request of the clerk”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde has even weighed in on the topic of drop boxes, calling on poll watchers to monitor drop boxes in majority-Democratic cities in a recording obtained by the Washington Post. Hovde reportedly asked: “Who’s watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?” The suggestion that ballot drop boxes would likely be “stuffed” with fake ballots echoes the debunked claim that circulated after the 2020 election that people had fraudulently cast ballots using drop boxes in swing states.It was in this fraught environment that Diny made a show of relocating an absentee drop box – a stunt that garnered instant headlines and outcry from voting rights groups in the state. Diny, who was not available for comment, has vowed to bring the issue before Wausau’s city council – although city council members almost certainly lack the legal standing to make such a decision unilaterally, and the city clerk, who does have the authority, remains in support of the dropbox.In an email to the Guardian, the Wausau city council president, Lisa Rasmussen, forcefully rejected Diny’s actions and emphasized that the Wisconsin elections commission and the Wisconsin supreme court give election clerks the discretion to use drop boxes – not local government.“Elected officials do not have the authority to make those choices. So, if the mayor opts to ask the council to decide something they have no authority to consider, it is likely all for show,” wrote Rasmussen. “I also remain hopeful that there is a measure of accountability for those actions since this type of thing could happen in any town and it is just not appropriate.”Diny is currently under investigation by the Portage county sheriff to determine if he violated the law in relocating the drop box. More

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      Vance refuses to say Trump lost the 2020 election in Walz debate

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      JD Vance refused to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and continued to sidestep questions over whether he would certify a Trump loss this fall during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.The exchange brought out some of the sharpest attacks from Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor, in what was otherwise a muted and civil back-and-forth with the Ohio senator.Walz asked Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance responded: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Walz then cut in with one of his most aggressive attack lines of the evening: “That is a damning non-answer.”Vance has previously said that he would have asked states to submit alternative slates of electors to Congress to continue to debate allegations of election irregularities in 2020. By the time Congress met during the last election to consider electoral votes, courts, state officials and the US supreme court had all turned away efforts to block legitimate slates of electors from being sent to Congress.Pressed by the CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell on whether he would again refuse to certify the vote this year, Vance declined to answer.“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square,” Vance said. “And that’s all I’ve said and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.” He later said that if Walz won the election with Harris, Walz would have his support.Trump has warned of a “bloodbath” if he does not win the election. He has also said supporters will not have to vote anymore if he wins in November. Both the Trump campaign and Republican allies are seeding the ground to contest a possible election loss in November.Vance tried to pivot away from the issue by suggesting January 6 was not as much of a threat to democracy as limiting discussion of Covid on Facebook. He also equated January 6 with Democrats protesting the 2016 election because of Russian interference on Facebook.Walz did not let those comments go unnoticed. “January 6 was not Facebook ads,” he said in one of his bluntest responses in the debate. “This is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say, he is still saying, he didn’t lose the election.”A Harris campaign official said the moment stood out in a focus group of undecided voters in battleground states. Walz earned the group’s highest support of the evening while Vance saw some of his lowest ratings for defending Trump. More

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      Trump makes last effort to keep hidden January 6 case evidence before election

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      Donald Trump’s lawyers made a last-ditch effort on Tuesday to limit the amount of evidence that could become public that special counsel prosecutors collected during their criminal investigation into the former US president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The prosecutors last week filed under seal a brief, which may be as long as 180 pages, to presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan that defends the viability of the charges against Trump even after the US supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling.Simultaneously, the prosecutors asked the judge to allow them to file a public version of the secret brief with quotations and references to grand jury testimony from some of Trump’s closest aides, such as his former chief of staff, and his former vice-president, Mike Pence.To protect the integrity of proceedings and to protect lesser-known witnesses, the prosecutors said they intended in their public filing to redact specific names and use job titles to give context to the information being referenced.The kinds of identifiers being proposed by prosecutors include, according to their filing: “Campaign Manager”, “Arizona’s Governor”, “Senior Campaign Advisor”, “executive assistant”, “the Defendant’s Chief of Staff”, “Georgia Attorney General” and “Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee”.View image in fullscreenOn Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers bitterly complained that the redactions were so specific that it would make public identification of the witnesses easy, accusing prosecutors of trying to damage Trump’s presidential campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day.“In numerous instances, the redactions and pseudonyms proposed by the Special Counsel’s Office fail to meaningfully mitigate the privacy and safety issues the Office references in the Motion and has previously discussed at length,” the Trump lawyers wrote.Trump’s lawyers also claimed that prosecutors were adopting a double standard over redactions: in the case they brought against Trump in Florida over his retention of classified documents, which has since been dismissed, prosecutors pushed for no identifying information whatsoever.“Use of functionally impotent redactions is flatly inconsistent with the Office’s approach to other filings here and in the Southern District of Florida, where they sought to anonymize even ‘Ancillary Names’ based on privacy concerns,” the Trump lawyers wrote.The situation reflects a role reversal for Trump and the special counsel. When it was more expedient for Trump to have witnesses identified in the documents case, so they could complain about the case in public, Trump pushed for looser redactions.But now that it is against Trump’s interests to have the identities of former officials who testified against him become public, Trump has sought for more restrictive redactions that would make public scrutiny of his plot to overturn the 2020 election harder.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe special counsel’s filing and Trump’s objections come in the aftermath of the supreme court conferring broad immunity from criminal prosecutions to former presidents for actions that related to their official duties in office.As part of the decision, the court’s conservative supermajority ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could remain and proceed to trial.The special counsel’s opening brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Much of the evidence Smith uses to make his case come from sensitive sources, such as grand jury testimony, which are secret.Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment should be kept as well as how much of the special counsel’s evidence can be unsealed to make her determination, although much of the evidence became public knowledge during the House January 6 committee’s hearings two years ago. More

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      Nevada Republicans dismiss 43ft nude Trump effigy as ‘deplorable’

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      A 43ft (13 meters) effigy of an entirely nude Donald Trump on the interstate from Las Vegas to Reno, Nevada, has been dismissed as “deplorable” and “pornographic” by Republicans in the state.In a statement, the Nevada Republican party said it “strongly condemns” the effigy of the former president, which hangs from a crane, weighs 6,000lbs, is made from foam and rebar, is titled Crooked and Obscene and is expected to be brought to other cities as part of a nationwide tour.“While families drive through Las Vegas, they are forced to view this offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue,” said the party’s statement, invoking the name of a city that was essentially founded to capitalize on gambling and sex.The artists behind the graphic effigy – who want to remain anonymous – told the Wrap that Trump’s nudity was “intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability and the public personas of political figures”.Political battles over statuary run hot and have become a feature of the Trump era after he won the presidency in 2016.For instance, hundreds of statues paying tribute to the white supremacist Confederacy that lost the US civil war have come down in southern states where the Confederacy was based after a spate of police killings victimizing Black Americans.The Trump effigy and the offense Republicans took over it drew attention days after he boasted at a political rally in Wisconsin of his “beautiful body”. It was taken down Monday with plans to move it to other swing states in November’s presidential election, during which Trump is seeking a return to the White House as the Republican nominee.The sculpture in Las Vegas came eight years after artist Joshua “Ginger” Monroe created statues of Trump that he told a Cleveland news outlet took four to five months of strenuous labor to create. He described it as a “hate-filled labor to create this monstrosity”.Monroe told Cleveland Magazine the following year: “The reason we show Trump’s veins [is] to show a visible representation of his thin skin.”At the same time, a 16ft effigy of Trump’s rival in November’s presidential race, Kamala Harris, has been put up at the United States Funhouse in West Hartford, Connecticut. The display is from Matt Warshauer, a professor and political historian at Central Connecticut State University – and it likens Harris to the Statue of Liberty.Warshauer says he sees Harris – whose statue is flanked by Halloween skeletons and ghouls – not as “a fundamental threat to the system”.“I see her as a stable force,” he said.A statement on the statue suggests it could be the last of Warshauer’s annual political displaying. It declares the piece as “the final year of Political Halloween”. More

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      Newsmax and Smartmatic settle 2020 US election defamation lawsuit

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      The voting machine company Smartmatic and the conservative outlet Newsmax have settled a closely watched defamation lawsuit days before it was set to go to trial in Delaware.A spokesman for the Delaware courts said the case had been settled on Thursday. He did not offer additional details. The trial was set to begin in Wilmington on Monday.The terms of the settlement are not public.“Newsmax is pleased to announce it has resolved the litigation brought by Smartmatic through a confidential settlement,” Bill Daddi, a spokesman for the network, said in a statement.After the 2020 election, Newsmax aired several false claims about the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. The network repeatedly aired false claims from Trump allies that the software was widely used across the country and that it had been hacked to change votes.Smartmatic sued Newsmax, Fox, One America News Network (OANN) and others for broadcasting their false claims. It settled the case with OANN earlier this year and the Fox case is still pending in New York.Smartmatic said in a statement: “We are very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax. We are now looking forward to our court day against Fox Corp and Fox News for their disinformation campaign. Lying to the American people has consequences. Smartmatic will not stop until the perpetrators are held accountable.”First amendment scholars were closely watching the case and several others like it to see whether libel law can be used as an effective tool to police misinformation.The case was set to be a kind of sequel to the defamation litigation between Dominion, another voting machine company, and Fox over 2020 election lies. That case was settled just before the trial was set to begin, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion $787.5m. Eric Davis, the judge who oversaw the Fox case, was also overseeing the Newsmax case.A settlement was not surprising in the case as trial neared. Davis ruled that Smartmatic could not seek punitive damages, a decision that significantly limited any possible financial payout for Smartmatic.Davis had also ruled that Newsmax could use the “neutral report privilege” as a defense in the case – a legal shield that allows media outlets to broadcast allegations if they are reporting on a newsworthy event and do so in a disinterested and neutral way. Davis had not let Fox used that defense in its litigation.Smartmatic executives were indicted by the justice department earlier this year on bribery charges in the Philippines. Even though the charges were completely unrelated to the 2020 election, it offered an opportunity for Newsmax lawyers to argue that the company’s poor reputation could not be attributed to what was said on its air.But Newsmax also had reasons to settle. In a pre-trial conference, a lawyer for the company had called it a “bet-your-company” case for the outlet. Newsmax, which is projecting $180.5m in revenue this year, saw a surge in audience under the Trump administration and a bump that caught Fox’s attention after the 2020 election as it broadcast false claims about voting.“The Newsmax surge is a bit troubling – truly is an alternative universe when you watch, but it can’t be ignored,” Jay Wallace, a Fox executive, wrote in an email to a colleague after the 2020 election.Unlike in the Fox and Dominion litigation, only a few details emerged in the case revealing internal discussions at Newsmax as they broadcast false claims about the election. One of the messages was an internal letter from Christopher Ruddy, the network’s CEO from November 2020, conceding the network did not have evidence of voter fraud.“Newsmax does not have evidence of widespread voter fraud. We have no evidence of a voter fraud conspiracy nor do we make such claims on Newsmax,” he wrote on 12 November 2020. “We have reported on significant evidence of widespread election irregularities and vote fraud. We will continue to report on that. We believe we should not censor allegations made by the President or his lawyers or surrogates. Our job is not to filter the news but report information and allow Americans to decide.”Another exchange included Bob Sellers, a Newsmax host, and a producer, wondering how long they would have to air false claims about the election. “How long are we going to have to play along with election fraud?” Sellers wrote on 9 November 2020. “Trump’s MO is always to play victim [] And answer this question. Is there anything at all that could result in another election? The answer is no. and are there enough votes that could be switched or thrown out from fraud or irregularities? No.”The lack of a trial may rob the public of the chance to hear about the state of mind of people who were behind broadcasting election lies, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah who has closely followed the defamation cases filed by those harmed by 2020 election lies.Still, she noted that Davis had already ruled that the statements at issue in the case were false, and cautioned against expecting defamation cases to be a cure for misinformation.“Defamation law can declare something a lie, but the question of whether a lie was told is only one of many questions that have to be asked and answered,” she said in an interview earlier this week. “It is a notoriously complex area of law, which means cases can be won or lost on a lot of grounds that have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the statement. And I am not sure that translates well to public discussion.”Lyrissa Lidsky, a media law professor at the University of Florida, also cautioned against expecting libel law to be a cure-all for disinformation.“Defamation law is not a panacea for election misinformation. There’s just no two ways about it,” she said. “It’s just a small piece.” More

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      Rudy Giuliani disbarred in Washington DC over role in Trump election plot

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      Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who built a career as an uncompromising crime-fighter, has been permanently disbarred from practising law in Washington DC in a ruling stemming from his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.The decision came in the form of a one-page order issued by the US capital’s court of appeal and followed a similar order issued in July in New York, Giuliani’s home state.Unlike that ruling, the decision in Washington was not directly related to his actions in Trump’s election-denying effort but was instead based on his failure to respond to a request that he explain why he should not be subject to the same penalty as meted out in New York.“ORDERED that Rudolph W Giuliani is hereby disbarred from the practice of law in the District of Columbia, nunc pro tunc [a Latin term used in legal parlance to mean retroactive] to August 9, 2021,” Thursday’s appeal court order said.In 2021, the appeals court had suspended Giuliani’s law licence in Washington after being notified of a similar decision in New York.The DC bar’s board of responsibility recommended in 2022 that Giuliani’s law licence be indefinitely revoked after its investigators found him guilty of unethical conduct over inaccurate and unsupported claims he made in testimony to a federal court in Pennsylvania while disputing the 2020 election results.The DC court of appeals order did not hinge on those findings. By contrast, the New York appeals court made similar judgments in issuing its ruling, asserting that Giuliani “repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public … and this Court concerning the 2020 Presidential election”.Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Giuliani called the order “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice”.“Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision,” he said.The order is the latest blow to the standing of a man who was dubbed “America’s mayor” for the leadership role he played in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, which happened when he was the city’s mayor.Last year, two election workers in Georgia won $148m in damages after he defamed them by accusing them of fraud. A week later he filed for bankruptcy. More

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      Special counsel can file oversized motion on Trump election interference case

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      Special counsel Jack Smith can file an oversized, 180-page motion on presidential immunity in Donald Trump’s Washington DC federal court election interference case, a judge ruled Tuesday.Judge Tanya S Chutkan’s decision stems from prosecutors’ 21 September request to exceed the typical 45-page limit for opening motions and oppositions. Smith’s motion must be filed by Thursday and will include both legal arguments and evidence and could provide additional insight into Trump’s efforts to throw out election results, though it is unclear when the public might be able to see that material given that it’ll initially be filed under seal.Trump faces four felony counts over his effort to subvert the 2020 election, though a July US supreme court ruling on presidential immunity threw the case into near disarray.The supreme court held that Trump and other presidents enjoyed immunity for official acts, but not unofficial ones, undermining charges related to his alleged pressure campaign on Justice Department officials.The supreme court remanded the case back to Chutkan, who must decide which claims in Smith’s case are official acts, and which are not official. Smith filed a new indictment against Trump in August, which does not dramatically change this criminal case, but revamps some parts to stress that Trump was not acting in an official capacity in his attempt to overturn election results.Prosecutors proposed in a 5 September hearing that they should file a brief on the immunity issue with “a comprehensive discussion and description of both pled and unpled facts … so that all parties and the Court know the issues that the Court needs to consider in order to make its fact-bound determinations that the Supreme Court has required.”In green-lighting prosecutors’ request to file an unusually sizeable motion, Chutkan noted the supreme ourt’s direction that she need to engage in a “close” and “fact specific” examination of this indictment and related accusations.“The length and breadth of the Government’s proposed brief reflects the uniquely ‘challenging’ and factbound nature of those determinations,” the judge said in her ruling. “The briefs’ atypical sequence and size thus both serve the efficient resolution of immunity issues in this case ‘at the earliest possible stage.’”Trump’s legal team had fought prosecutors’ request to file a lengthier brief, complaining that it would “quadruple the standard page limits” in the district. They also unsuccessfully opposed Smith’s filing of this brief now, and argued that immunity arguments shouldn’t take place until Trump files a motion to dismiss the case.Prosecutors said in court filings that they are poised to file their briefing under seal, given the “substantial amount of sensitive material” and later, file a public version that has redactions. More