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      Special counsel files new indictment against Trump over 2020 election

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      The justice department filed a new indictment against Donald Trump on Tuesday over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The maneuver does not substantially change the criminal case against him but protects it in the wake of a July supreme court decision ruling saying that Trump and other presidents have immunity for official acts, but not unofficial ones.“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” lawyers for Jack Smith, the special counsel handling the case, said in a filing that accompanied what is known as a superseding indictment.“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v United States.”The document retains the same four criminal charges against Trump that were originally filed last summer. But portions of the new indictment are rewritten to emphasize that Trump was not acting in his official capacity during his efforts to try to overturn the election.The new document, for example, removes mention of Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official who aided Trump’s attempt to try to overturn the election. Clark was the only government official who was listed as an unnamed co-conspirator in the original indictment.“Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials,” the supreme court wrote in its ruling in July.The supreme court also suggested that a president could be criminally immune in connection to acts between him and the vice-president. The superseding indictment reframes Trump’s interactions with Mike Pence, emphasizing that he was Trump’s running mate.At other points in the document, prosecutors emphasize that Trump was acting outside the scope of his official duties.“The defendant had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results,” the document says.Prosecutors also highlighted that Trump used his Twitter/X account both for official and personal acts. They noted that the rally he attended on the Ellipse, near the White House, on 6 January 2021 was a “campaign speech”.Even if the case is still unlikely to go to trial before the 2024 election in November, and even if the Trump lawyers file motions seeking to excise more parts of the indictment, the decision to pursue a superseding indictment may have been to avoid more delay.Trump has been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, which came as part of a broader strategy to push his legal troubles past November, in the hopes that he wins and can appoint a loyalist as the attorney general who would then drop the cases entirely.In July, the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official actions that extended to the “outer perimeter” of their office, most notably any interactions with the justice department and executive branch officials.The framework of criminal accountability for presidents, as laid out by the ruling, has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The court also ruled that the special counsel, Jack Smith, could not introduce as evidence at trial any acts deemed to be official, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent. More

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      in Elections

      Georgia election deniers helped pass new laws. Many worry it’ll lead to chaos in November

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      Conservative activists in Georgia have worked with prominent election deniers to pass a series of significant changes to the procedures for counting ballots in recent weeks, raising alarm about the potential for confusion and interference in the election certification process in a key swing state this fall.Since the beginning of August, the five-member state election board has adopted rules that allow local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before they are certified, and to allow any local election board member “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The same rule also requires local boards to reconcile any discrepancies between the total number of ballots cast and the number of voters who check in. If it can’t reconcile the numbers, the board is authorized to come up with a way to figure out which votes count and which do not.At its upcoming meeting in September, the board is also expected to approve a measure that would require local officials to hand-count ballots to check the machine tabulations. Experts have warned that hand-counts are unreliable, costly and time-consuming.Georgia law requires county officials to certify an election no later than 5pm on the Monday following election day (the deadline will be one day later this year because of a state holiday). Legal experts have noted that state law is clear about that deadline and that none of the recent rules change that.But at the same time, observers are concerned new changes are seeding the ground to give local county commissioners justifications to object to the certification of the vote.“State law clearly states the certification deadline. They can add on whatever they want, but cannot go against the existing state law that says it has to be certified by a specific date,” said Julie Houk, a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. At the same time, she added: “What’s going to happen when they have not completed a review of those thousands of records? Are the board members going to say ‘we can’t certify’ even though it requires them to?”“What’s going to happen if certain board members or boards determine that now that we have all the records we’ve demanded, we can’t get through them in time to certify?”The changes have caused considerable alarm in one of the most competitive battleground states this presidential cycle, which is expected to be extremely close. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 by 11,799 votes, a razor-thin margin.Georgia’s state election board, charged with making election rules consistent with Georgia law, was not really paid attention to until this year. But in recent months it has moved forward with a blitz of changes. Earlier this year, Republicans essentially forced out a member who had rebuffed proposed changes and replaced him with someone who has been more sympathetic to the changes.That new member, Rick Jeffares, has previously posted in support of Trump’s election lies, though he recently told the Guardian he believed the former president lost in Georgia in 2020. He also said that he had proposed himself for a job with the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration.The new rules enacted by the board have been shaped with input from the Republican party and a network of election denial activists. The precinct reconciliation rule adopted on Monday, for example, was presented by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton county commissioner who has run a private Telegram channel filled with election conspiracies. She said during the meeting on Monday she had worked with a number of people on the proposal, including Heather Honey, a prominent activist in the election denialism movement.Input on rules has also come from the state Republican party, the New York Times reported. Julie Adams, who is connected to a network of election deniers and has refused to certify two elections this year as a member of the Fulton county election board, has also had input on the rules, ProPublica reported.Trump has publicly praised three of the Republicans on the board who have constituted the majority to enact the new rules. During a rally earlier this month he called them “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.Three lawyers tied to Trump also spoke out in favor of the new rules on Monday. They included Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation who served on Trump’s voter fraud commission, Ken Cuccinelli, who had a top role in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, and Harry MacDougald, who is defending former justice department official Jeffrey Clark in the Georgia criminal case dealing with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.John Fervier, the Republican chair on the board who voted against the rule, said he was also concerned about refusal to certify elections.“We’ve seen boards, or board members recently, that refused to certify because they didn’t see X, Y or Z documents. I think this just even opens the door more to that,” he said.During Monday’s meeting, those who supported the rule insisted that local county commissioners could refuse to certify an election if they did not believe the tally was accurate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“One individual board member does not have authority to overrule other board members,” Thorne said. “Board members would have the right to disagree if they wanted to disagree. But hopefully by having this process in place, everyone will be confident and go ahead and certify.MacDougald, one of the lawyers supporting the proposal, suggested that a judge could not force a majority of election board members to certify a result they believed was incorrect. “The board members have the right to vote on certification, that necessarily gives them the right to vote against it,” he said.“Unless a board member has full confidence in the administration of the election, that it was done without error, they should not certify the election,” von Spakovsky said at the meeting.Election officials have expressed concern about the new rule that prevents them from counting any ballots in a precinct if the number of voters checked in doesn’t align with the number of ballots cast. These small discrepancies often occur because of human error – a voter might check in and leave with their ballot or a voter concerned about their mail-in vote counting might decide to cast a vote in person. These small discrepancies are almost always smaller than the margin of votes and are explained in a reconciliation report to the secretary of state after the election.There also could be problems with the portion of the rule that empowers local boards to come up with a way of tabulating the votes if the discrepancy, no matter how small, can’t be explained.“Let’s say I’m at a poll that has 500 ballots. And we go through and determined one of those 500 voters should not have cast that belt for whatever reason,” said Joseph Kirk, the election director in Bartow county, Georgia, which is about an hour north-west of Atlanta. “How do we know which ballot to take out of the box? They’re anonymous.”Even if the election result is eventually certified, any discovery found during the new investigatory phase could become fodder to continue to challenge the election results. In 2020 and 2022, Trump and allies seized on human errors to falsely argue that they were only the tip of a corrupt system.The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, an organization that represents election officials across the state, called on the board to stop making changes, warning that continuing to do so would cause confusion.“Any last-minute changes to the rules risk undermining the public’s trust in the electoral process and place undue pressure on the individuals responsible for managing the polls and administering the election,” said W Travis Doss, the group’s president and the executive director of the board of elections in Richmond county, Georgia. “This could ultimately lead to errors or delays in voting, which is the last thing anyone wants.” More

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      Fake electors from 2020 giving thousands to Trump-Vance campaign

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      The people who served as fake electors in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election have continued to donate to Donald Trump, JD Vance and other Republicans since then, campaign finance records show, underscoring the role they continue to play in US politics.Some fake electors face criminal charges for their actions. Some continue to hold key government roles.Meshawn Maddock, a former co-chair of the Michigan Republican party, has given more than $1,800 to Trump and allied fundraising groups this campaign cycle, according to federal campaign finance records. Maddock is one of the 16 fake electors in Michigan who were criminally charged by Dana Nessel, the Democratic Michigan attorney general, last summer and has pleaded not guilty. Tyler Bowyer, who has also pleaded not guilty for his role as a fake elector in Arizona, donated $645 this year to Trump.“It is incredibly rare for politicians to accept campaign contributions from people under indictment,” said Michael Beckel, the research director at Issue One, an election watchdog group. “It’s generally not good optics for politicians to accept money from people accused of serious wrongdoing. Political candidates generally don’t want to be tied to convicted or accused felons. Yet in certain circles, association with the people who served as fake electors for Donald Trump in 2020 may be a badge of honor.”“Former President Trump likely has fewer qualms about accepting campaign cash from people under indictment for serving as fake electors in 2020 than the typical politician,” he added. David Hanna, a fake elector from Georgia who was not criminally charged, has given at least $25,000 to Trump this year.In 2021 and 2023, Hanna also donated more than $6,000 combined to JD Vance’s senate campaign. Daryl Moody, another fake elector in Georgia who was not charged, donated $2,900 in 2022 to Vance. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has been supportive of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and has said that if he had been vice-president in 2020, he would have used his power overseeing the joint session of Congress to recognize fake slates of electors.“It doesn’t take a lot of work to figure out that Donald Trump and JD Vance are keeping extremist election-deniers in the fold as reliable henchmen and women to challenge the results of the fall election,” said Brandon Weathersby, a spokesperson for American Bridge 21st Century, a Super Pac that supports Democrats and initially flagged the donations to the Guardian.“They’ve taken thousands of dollars in donations from fake electors and welcomed them with open arms to the Republican national convention last month. Trump and Vance are actively selling out our democracy in exchange for the power to enact their Project 2025 agenda the day they step into the White House.”The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Several Republicans running for the US House have also received donations from fake electors. Eli Crane, a Republican representative from Arizona, in 2023 received $2,900 from Jim Lamon, a fake elector who faces criminal charges there. Yvette Herrell, a New Mexico representative, has accepted more than $3,000 from Rosie Tripp, who served as a fake elector in the state. In 2022, Herrell also received $2,900 from Deborah Maestas, a former New Mexico Republican party chair who served as a fake elector in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe campaigns of Crane and Herrell did not respond to requests for comment.In addition to continuing to donate to candidates, fake electors continue to play key roles in the Republican party. Michael McDonald, a fake elector criminally charged in Nevada, is the chair of that state’s Republican party (a Nevada judge threw out the case against the Nevada electors last month, and the attorney general is appealing). At least 18 fake electors also served as party delegates at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee last month, according to CNN, NPR and a local news report.In Wisconsin, Robert Spindell, a fake elector, continues to serve as one of three Republicans on the bipartisan Wisconsin elections commission, the body that oversees voting in the state. In Georgia, Burt Jones and Shawn Still, both of whom were fake electors, respectively serve as lieutenant governor and a state senator.Full slates of fake electors in Nevada, Michigan and Arizona face criminal charges for their activities. A handful of fake electors were charged in Georgia, while those in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Wisconsin have not faced charges. In Wisconsin, the fake electors reached a civil settlement agreeing that they would not serve as electors again in 2024. More

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      Lone Democrat on Georgia state board defends elections amid new rules

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      Sara Tindall Ghazal was scouring her closet as 8pm approached on Wednesday night. She was preparing for her first appearance on cable news, something she has avoided her entire career.In fact, Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia state election board (SEB), has shunned media attention and appearances since she was appointed to the board in 2021. Back then, even as Georgia became the focal point of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and as rightwing media and a nationwide network of election denial activists homed in on the state, Tindall Ghazal kept to herself, quietly carrying out her duties in previously obscure meetings of the board.But after two days of public board meetings last week in which her Republican counterparts on the board adopted myriad rules at the behest of some of those very election denier activists, Tindall Ghazal’s cable news debut had become unavoidable.“The makeup of this board has changed from being a board that followed the rule of law and made decisions based on what state and federal law required, and what was best for running elections, to one that is being driven by far-rightwing narratives,” she said.For more than 16 hours on 6 and 7 August, Tindall Ghazal had sat with her fellow board members, all Republicans, and listened to speakers complain that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – and propose rules that would prevent that from happening again in November but that Tindall Ghazal said will “cause chaos” in November.They include a rule that gives local election officials more power to refuse to certify election results, and another that provides more complicated procedures for voters filling out absentee ballots, as well as constant video surveillance at ballot drop box sites. Tindall Ghazal also voted against reopening a case pushed by election deniers that claims results in 2020 in Fulton county were flipped to benefit Joe Biden.Voting with her in dissent was John Fervier, a Republican and the board chair. Voting for the rules and investigation into Fulton county were a trio of Republicans who were praised by Trump at a recent campaign rally in Atlanta. All three have expressed beliefs in widespread election fraud that even conservative groups have said does not exist.“It’s an iterative process,” Tindall Ghazal said of the SEB’s descent into election denialism. “The narratives exist already and are deeply embedded in the minds of some of the board members and certainly much of the audience and petitioners, and everything that is done in the meetings is done to perpetuate those narratives.”Just as Tindall Ghazal’s Republican colleagues voted to reopen the case against Fulton county, Trump was already promoting the decision on his social media platform, Truth Social.“The Attorney General of Georgia MUST get moving on this,” Trump wrote. “So must Governor Kemp, and the Secretary of State.”Despite Trump’s Truth Social post, nothing has changed in the Fulton county case. Following his loss in 2020, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, ordered an audit of votes in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and home to heavily Democratic Atlanta.The audit found 345 more votes for Trump than had been counted during the election. But that didn’t change the fact that Biden had received 243,000 more votes than Trump in Fulton county, the audit confirmed.Still, election deniers like those who have successfully pressured the board in recent years to investigate claims of voter fraud have insisted that the case needs further attention. Last week, they got a major win, when the pro-Trump trio of SEB members Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston sent the case to the attorney general for a new investigation.“We take election integrity very seriously, and we will apply the constitution, the law and the facts as we have always done,” a spokesperson for the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican, told the Associated Press.The SEB also passed rules that Tindall Ghazal said were “far outside our authority as a rule-making body”. Of the rules passed last week, Tindall Ghazal says the most problematic is one that allows for county election board members in Georgia’s 159 counties to refuse to certify results – which courts have largely ruled is a “ministerial” task not up to the discretion of local election officials – if a “reasonable inquiry” can be conducted into allegations of election fraud or errors.“Reasonable inquiry is about as uncertain a standard as I can think of,” Tindall Ghazal said.Several Democratic members of the state legislature spoke out against the rule, as did voting rights groups. Former chair of the Fulton county board of elections Cathy Woolard, a Democrat, said that the certification rule will invite scores of lawsuits challenging the ability of county election board members to use their discretion to hold up certification of election results.“It’s hard for me to imagine the sheer volume of lawsuits that will be filed to challenge the process, the rules, the disregard for the rule of law,” Woolard said.In voting with Tindall Ghazal against the certification rule, Fervier, a political appointee of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, previewed the legal fight ahead over certification.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Please make sure the votes are in the record for any potential future litigation,” Fervier said at the meeting.At a recent Trump rally in Atlanta, Johnston stood and waved to the crowd as they applauded her, King and Jeffares for “fighting for victory”, as Trump himself put it.“They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said, naming the three of them but not Fervier.“Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”After a second, eight-hour day on the dais on 7 August, Tindall Ghazal said she needed “some protein” before preparing for her first major television interview. Her hair was already sorted: close-cropped in a growing-out buzz from losing her hair to chemotherapy treatments for stage two breast cancer.Tindall Ghazal received her cancer diagnosis during a meeting of the state election board in October, then had a mastectomy the following month. The episode was “transformative”, she said, proving that she had a strong network of family and friends to support her. Undergoing the procedure and chemo, Tindall Ghazal never missed an election board meeting.“I don’t do well when I have too much time on my hands, so having the board work kept my mind busy on something that I care deeply about.,” Tindall Ghazal said.An eighth-generation Georgian and attorney, Tindall Ghazal has monitored elections and peace talks for former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center in Syria, Rwanda and Liberia, where she met her husband, Patrick, in 1998. After leaving the Carter Center, Tindall Ghazal became the director of voter protection for the Democratic party of Georgia.In 2021, Georgia Democrats appointed her to the SEB. At the time, she knew she’d be the only Democrat – but she also had faith that Republicans on the board would work for the benefit of all Georgians. For a time, Tindall Ghazal says, that was the case. Republicans had appointed relative moderates to the board.Since 2021, three moderate Republican appointees have been replaced by King, Johnston and Jeffares. Johnston has been receptive to complaints and calls for investigations from election denial activists, the Guardian found in March; Jeffares has openly posted about his belief in Trump’s election lies, although he told the Guardian that he believed Trump legitimately lost in Georgia in 2020. King, a conservative media personality with no experience managing elections, is married to Kelvin King, who ran against the former football star Herschel Walker in the Republican primary in 2022 but lost. (Walker went on to lose to Raphael Warnock in the general election.) King hosts a podcast and appears on a political panel at a TV station in Atlanta, but has no experience administering elections, nor does Jeffares.Leftwing groups like Fair Fight Action, which was founded by the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, said the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares had been chosen for their roles on the board not because of their experience administering elections, but because of their fealty to Trump.“The state election board has become a Maga government body, with three new members likely chosen not because they have elections experience, but because they’re seen as loyalists who will defer to Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies,” Fair Fight’s communications director, Max Flugrath, said in a statement.As non-elected officials hearing complaints about elections, ballots and other minutiae of the election process, the SEB was a relatively obscure government body whose meetings have not typically provided scenes of great political theater. But that changed in 2020, when the SEB became the focus of election denial activists’ attempts to prove the election was stolen from Trump. Now the board’s meetings have garnered greater attention from a nationwide network of election deniers, Georgia’s political press, voting rights advocacy groups and left-leaning watchdogs.Trump’s mention of King, Johnston and Jeffares put an even bigger spotlight on the previously obscure body. Johnston, who attended Trump’s rally and waved at the cheering crowd, did not return a request for comment, but King said that while she did not attend the rally, if she had, she was well within her rights to “attend any Republican event freely as I would expect [Tindall Ghazal] to do the same if she wishes”. Jeffares also didn’t attend the rally, he said. In a lengthy conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares, a Trump supporter, said he believed Trump lost fair and square in Georgia in 2020, but repeatedly expressed belief in possible election fraud taking place in the state, especially in Fulton county.Jeffares said he wasn’t watching Trump’s rally in Atlanta when the ex-president mentioned his name. He heard about it several days later.“It makes me mad that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers, Jeffares said. “I didn’t even watch it, but when I heard he mentioned our name, you know my first thought was? Damn, we’re in trouble now.”But Jeffares’ concern over Trump’s mentioning of the board’s work didn’t stop him from saying he’d be open to a position in a second Trump administration. In a conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares said he proposed himself as a candidate for a regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal came during a conversation with a former Trump campaign adviser, Brian Jack, who is running for a US congressional seat in November. Jeffares, who runs a company that deals with sewage and wastewater projects, helped Jack with his campaign, he said.“I said if y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it,” Jeffares said. “That’s all I said.”With a Democratic ticket marked by surging enthusiasm following the replacement of Biden as candidate with Kamala Harris, Georgia’s status as a swing state has once again become a focal point of both Republican and Democratic campaign strategy. As the state election board continues to implement rules that will affect how Georgia’s elections are run – and is dominated by pro-Trump Republicans who hold the majority – the focus on Tindall Ghazal and her work on the board may be about to get a lot bigger.“All I know is this is where we are, and I am just trying to stop a disaster,” she said. More

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      Supreme court immunity ruling to cause new delay in Trump 2020 election case

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      Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is expected to be delayed by another month after special counsel prosecutors said they had not finished assessing how the US supreme court’s immunity decision would narrow their case.On Thursday, the prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team told Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge presiding over the case, that they needed her to delay until 30 August a deadline to submit a possible schedule for how to proceed with a complicated fact-finding mission ordered by the court.“The Government continues to assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States, including through consultation with other Department of Justice components,” prosecutors wrote in a two-page court filing.“The Government has not finalized its position on the most appropriate schedule for the parties to brief issues related to the decision. The Government therefore respectfully requests additional time to provide the Court with an informed proposal.”The supreme court ruled last month that former presidents are entitled to some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, marking a victory for Trump.Precisely what prosecutors are now stuck on remains unclear, although the ruling struck some of the charges against Trump and is expected to see Chutkan needing to pare back the indictment further.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct includes Trump pressing justice department officials to open sham investigations, Trump obstructing Congress from certifying the election, including by trying to co-opt his vice-president, Trump helping prompt the Capitol attack, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors.View image in fullscreenThe supreme court decided that criminal accountability for presidents has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The ruling meant that the charges related to core executive functions will be thrown out, and for Chutkan to determine through a fact-finding exercise if any other charges that might come under official acts must be expunged.Whether Chutkan will do the fact-finding on legal arguments or legal briefs, or will consider evidence perhaps given by witnesses, was supposed to become clearer after Trump and the special counsel jointly submitted the now-delayed scheduling brief.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s lawyers are expected to ask for few or no witnesses, the Guardian has previously reported. And in a statement on Truth Social, Trump called anew for the case to be tossed: “It is clear that the supreme court’s historic decision on immunity demands and requires a complete and total dismissal.”The deadline for the scheduling brief was the first activity in the case since December, when it was frozen after Trump asked the US court of appeals for the DC circuit and then the supreme court to consider his argument that he had absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.The supreme court issued its immunity ruling on 1 July, but the case only returned to Chutkan’s jurisdiction last week because of the court’s 25-day waiting period for any rehearing requests, and an additional week for the judgment to be formally sent down to the trial judge.Trump has already been enormously successful in delaying his criminal cases, a strategy he adopted in the hope that winning the 2024 election would enable him to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who he could direct to drop the charges.It is all but impossible now for the special counsel to bring the case to trial before election day, given Trump can make interim appeals for any decisions that Chutkan makes about the impact of the immunity decision. More

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      First conviction in Arizona fake electors case as Republican activist pleads guilty

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      A Republican activist who signed a document falsely claiming Donald Trump had won Arizona in 2020 became the first person to be convicted in the state’s fake elector case.Loraine Pellegrino, a past president of the group Ahwatukee Republican Women, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document, the Arizona attorney general’s office spokesperson, Richie Taylor, said on Tuesday, declining to comment further. Records documenting her guilty plea have not yet been posted by the court. Still, court records show Pellegrino was sentenced to unsupervised probation. Before the plea, she faced nine felony charges.Seventeen other people had been charged in the case, including 10 other Republicans, who had signed a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried Arizona in the 2020 election. Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Joshua Kolsrud, an attorney representing Pellegrino, said in a statement that his client has accepted responsibility for her actions. “Loraine Pellegrino’s decision to accept a plea to a lesser charge reflects her desire to move forward and put this matter behind her,” Kolsrud said.On Monday, Jenna Ellis, former Trump’s campaign attorney who worked closely with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, entered a cooperation agreement with prosecutors who have asked for her charges to be dismissed. The remaining defendants, including Giuliani and Mark Meadows, Trump presidential chief of staff, have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.Pellegrino and 10 other people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors had met in Phoenix on 14 December 2020 to sign the false document. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme.Arizona authorities unveiled the felony charges in late April. Overall, charges were brought against 11 Republicans who submitted the document falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona, five lawyers connected to the former president and two former Trump aides.Trump himself was not charged in the Arizona case but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment. More

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      Ex-Trump attorney agrees to cooperate in Arizona fake electors case

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      Jenna Ellis, Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign attorney charged in Arizona as part of the fake electors scheme, has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for getting her charges dismissed.Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, announced the deal on Monday, sharing a legal agreement that shows Ellis agreed to sit for interviews and turn over documents related to the scheme. The agreement also calls on Ellis to “testify completely and truthfully at any time and any place requested by the Arizona attorney general’s office”.In exchange, Ellis will avoid potential jail time for her role in the scheme.“This agreement represents a significant step forward in our case,” Mayes said in a statement. “I am grateful to Ms Ellis for her cooperation with our investigation and prosecution. Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court.”In Arizona, 18 people were charged – the 11 people who falsely attested that Trump had won the state’s electors, and seven others from Trump’s circle who helped coordinate the scheme.Ellis previously pleaded guilty in Georgia to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings in that state’s election subversion case. Her plea deal in Georgia resulted in five years’ probation, a fine and community service in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors. Her plea came quickly after two others pleaded guilty in the case, and she subsequently had her law license suspended.Documents filed in the Arizona case cite the Georgia plea agreement, saying that it was “in the interest of justice” for the judge to accept the Arizona deal because it comes from “the same conspiracy charged in this case”.Ellis, and the others indicted in the Arizona case, faced nine felony charges related to fraud, forgery and conspiracy. All pleaded not guilty.Arizona is one of seven states where Trump and his allies sought to install “alternate” electors who claimed Trump won in their states. In five of the states, prosecutors have worked to bring charges against at least some of those involved. More

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      Judge rejects Trump effort to dismiss 2020 federal election subversion case

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      The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s election subversion case in Washington DC rejected on Saturday a defense effort to dismiss the indictment on claims that the former president was prosecuted for vindictive and political purposes.Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling is the first substantive order since the case was returned to her Friday following a landmark US supreme court opinion in July that conferred broad immunity for former presidents and narrowed special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump.In their motion to dismiss the indictment, defense lawyers argued that Trump was mistreated because he was prosecuted even though others who have challenged election results have avoided criminal charges. Trump, the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential race, also suggested that President Joe Biden and the US justice department launched a prosecution to prevent him from winning re-election.But Chutkan rejected both arguments, saying Trump was not charged simply for challenging election results – but instead for “knowingly making false statements in furtherance of criminal conspiracies and for obstruction of election certification proceedings”. She also said that his lawyers had misread news media articles that they had cited in arguing that the prosecution was political in nature.“After reviewing [the] defendant’s evidence and arguments, the court cannot conclude that he has carried his burden to establish either actual vindictiveness or the presumption of it, and so finds no basis for dismissing this case on those grounds,” Chutkan wrote in her order.Also Saturday, she scheduled a 16 August status conference to discuss next steps in the case.The four-count indictment, brought in August 2023, accuses Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Biden through a variety of schemes, including by badgering his vice-president, Mike Pence, to block the formal certification of electoral votes.Trump’s lawyers argued that he was immune from prosecution as a former president, and the case has been on hold since December as his appeal worked its way through the courts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court, in a 6-3 opinion, held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for core constitutional duties and are presumptively immune from prosecution for all other official acts. The justices sent the case back to Chutkan to determine which acts alleged in the indictment can remain part of the prosecution and which must be discarded. More