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      Romney: Trump’s lie that he lost 2020 election from voter fraud ‘like WWF’

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      Donald Trump’s “big lie” that he lost the 2020 US election because of voter fraud is “a bit like WWF”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday, referring to the gaudy and artificial world of professional wrestling, an arena in which Trump starred before entering politics.“It’s entertaining,” said the Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. “But it’s not real.”Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Romney was asked about former attorney general William Barr’s assertion to the Atlantic on Sunday that Trump’s claims were always “bullshit”.Barr said as much publicly in December – a month after Joe Biden’s win. He told the Atlantic the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, had wanted him to say so in November.Romney suggested most Americans have always known Trump is lying about electoral fraud, which he was told about by conspiracy theorists – “the MyPillow guy [Mike Lindell and] Rudy Giuliani” – rather than any official source.Most Americans, Romney suggested, would not take seriously such partisan operations as an ongoing recount in Arizona’s most popular county. Polling, however, shows belief in Trump’s claims shared by a majority of Republican voters.Romney also said Trump’s lie “is surely being used around the world to minimise the support for democracy”.“If the autocratic nations can point to the United States,” he said, “which is the birthplace really of this modern democracy, and can say, ‘Look, they can’t even run an election there that’s not fraudulent … that obviously is having an impact on on the cause of democracy and freedom around the world.”But in the US, Romney insisted, “it’s pretty clear. The election was fair. It wasn’t the outcome that the president wanted, but let’s move on.”Trump has not moved on. At a rally in Ohio on Saturday which marked his return to the campaign trail, supporters wore T-shirts saying “Trump won, deal with it”; “Trump 2024. Make votes count again”; and “Biden is not my president”.Trump told them: “This was the scam of the century and this was the crime of the century. We’re never going to stop fight for the true results of this election … Remember I’m not the one trying to undermine American democracy. I’m trying to save American democracy.”Romney was the only Republican in Congress to vote to impeach Trump twice. But he was joined at Trump’s second trial by six other GOP senators who thought Trump guilty of inciting the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by a mob seeking to overturn the election.Despite that, Republicans in the Senate blocked the formation of a 9/11-style independent commission to investigate the January attack. This week the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced the formation of a select committee.Republicans say that will be too partisan. Key witnesses such as the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who pleaded with Trump to call off the attack, seem unlikely to agree to appear.Romney said he hoped Pelosi would “appoint people that are seen as being credible and are willing to look at the evidence on a clear-eyed basis”.He added: “I voted in favour of a bipartisan commission. I think that would have had more credibility … and yet there will be a an effort to look back at what happened on 6 January. I think there are questions that are appropriate to be evaluated.“One question is why did it take so long for security to come to the Capitol and to rescue the Capitol police that were battling away, and to make sure that the Vice-President [Mike Pence] was safe and his family was safe, as well as other elected officials.“Why was the delay so long? Why didn’t the Pentagon for instance move more quickly? What happened in the White House?“… That was a terrible day in American history, and it’s going to be used against us around the world. It already is by China and Russia. It has huge implications. It should never happen again in any effort to understand why it happened, is in my opinion, appropriate.” More

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      Mike Gravel, former Alaska senator and anti-war campaigner, dies aged 91

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      Mike Gravel, a former US senator from Alaska who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and confronted Barack Obama about nuclear weapons during a later presidential run, has died. He was 91.Gravel, who represented Alaska as a Democrat from 1969 to 1981, died on Saturday, according to his daughter, Lynne Mosier. Gravel had been living in Seaside, California, and was in failing health, said Theodore W Johnson, a former aide.Gravel’s two terms came during tumultuous years when construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was authorized and when Congress was deciding how to settle Alaska Native land claims and whether to classify enormous amounts of federal land as parks, preserves and monuments.He had the unenviable position of being an Alaska Democrat when some residents were burning President Jimmy Carter in effigy for his measures to place large sections of public lands in the state under protection from development.Gravel feuded with Alaska’s other senator, Republican Ted Stevens, on the land matter, preferring to fight Carter’s actions and rejecting Stevens’ advocacy for a compromise. In the end, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, a compromise that set aside millions of acres for national parks, wildlife refuges and other protected areas. It was one of the last bills Carter signed before leaving office.Gravel’s tenure also was notable for his anti-war activity. In 1971, he led a one-man filibuster to protest the Vietnam-era draft and he read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page leaked document known as the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s history of the country’s early involvement in Vietnam.Gravel re-entered national politics decades after his time in the Senate to twice run for president. Gravel, then 75, and his wife, Whitney, took public transportation in 2006 to announce he was running for president as a Democrat in the 2008 election ultimately won by Obama.He launched his quest for the 2008 Democratic nomination as a critic of the Iraq war.“I believe America is doing harm every day our troops remain in Iraq – harm to ourselves and to the prospects for peace in the world,” Gravel said. He hitched his campaign to an effort that would give all policy decisions to the people through a direct vote, including health care reform and declarations of war.Gravel garnered attention for his fiery comments at Democratic forums. In one 2007 debate, the issue of the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran came up, and Gravel confronted Obama, then a senator from Illinois.“Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?” Gravel said.Obama replied: “I’m not planning to nuke anybody right now, Mike.“Gravel ran as a Libertarian after he was excluded from later debates. In an email to supporters, he said the Democratic party “no longer represents my vision for our great country”.“It is a party that continues to sustain war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism – all of which I find anathema to my views,” he said.He failed to get the Libertarian nomination.Gravel briefly ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He again criticized American wars and vowed to slash military spending. His last campaign was notable in that both his campaign manager and chief of staff were just 18 at the time.“There was never any … plan that he would do anything more than participate in the debates. He didn’t plan to campaign, but he wanted to get his ideas before a larger audience,” Johnson said.Gravel failed to qualify for the debates. He endorsed Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in the contest eventually won by now-President Joe Biden.Gravel was born Maurice Robert Gravel in Springfield, Massachusetts on 13 May 1930. In Alaska, he served as a state representative, including a stint as House speaker, in the mid-1960s. He won his first Senate term after defeating incumbent Ernest Gruening, a former territorial governor, in the 1968 Democratic primary.Gravel served two terms until he was defeated in the 1980 primary by Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening, who lost the election to Republican Frank Murkowski. More

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      Michigan Republicans find no voter fraud and say Trump claims ‘ludicrous’

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      An investigation into the Michigan election by state Republican lawmakers has concluded that there is no evidence of widespread fraud and dismissed the need for an Arizona-style forensic audit of the results.The news comes amid a broad push by many Republicans – from Donald Trump to state parties – to push unfounded lies about Joe Biden’s victory, often promoting baseless conspiracy theories and evidence-free accusations of fraud.The Michigan Republican report released on Wednesday followed 28 hours of legislative hearings starring local and national pro-Trump conspiracy theorists such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The report labeled many of their claims “ludicrous” and called on the state Democratic attorney general to open investigations into those who may have profited from making false claims.The report was authored by the Republican-controlled senate oversight committee and it said it found no evidence of dead voters, no precincts with 100% turnout and no evidence of a Detroit ballot dump that benefited Biden, as GOP activists have claimed occurred.“There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters,” the report reads.“Citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.”The report represents a stunning repudiation of the unsubstantiated claims made by the state’s pro-Trump activists and Trump himself in their bid to overturn the critical battleground state’s results. Biden won Michigan by about 154,000 votes, or three percentage points. The tally was upheld by judges appointed by both parties in state and federal court, the bipartisan boards of state canvassers and reviews by election officials.Still, Trump supporters have been applying intense pressure on state Republican officials to work to overturn the election results, and have censured or promised primary challenges for those who reject their far-fetched claims.Trump had not responded to the report as of Wednesday afternoon, but in May issued a characteristic threat to his party when he said that Michigan’s senators “should be run out of office” if they haven’t reviewed “the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020”.In the report, state senator Ed McBroom took aim at the pro-Trump activists who “who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain”.“If you are profiting by making false claims, that’s pretty much the definition of fraud,” McBroom said.The office of Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, said on Wednesday that it’s still reviewing the report.Despite that the report rebukes the conspiracy theories, the investigation found “glaring issues that must be addressed” in state election law, and the party is still pushing forward with a package of 39 controversial voting restrictions that it plans to ram through using a constitutional loophole that can bypass the veto of the Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer.The Democrat state senator Jeff Irwin, who serves on the oversight committee, was the lone vote against the report. He noted that Michigan has paper ballots that confirm the results and praised Republican committee members for being “willing to stand and say that Michigan has free and fair elections”, but he added that the recommendations for new restrictions are unnecessary.“They are responding to their GOP constituency more than they are offering good policy ideas,” he said. More

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      The sycophantic inner circle egging on Trump – and fueling his big lie

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      On 7 November 2020, after several days of vote-counting, Donald Trump lost the US presidential election. More than 60 unsuccessful lawsuits and one insurrection later, Trump has still lost the election, but the former president refuses to accept defeat.Egged on by a group of sycophants and fantasists, including a small-time Pennsylvania politician, a host on a far-right news network, and the CEO of a pillow company, Trump now plans to hold rallies at the end of June where he is likely to continue his fraudulent claims of a stolen election.Despite the election having been repeatedly investigated and declared “the most secure in American history” by a group of experts, the former president is said to be convinced the election result will be overturned.As are those in his close circle fighting a series of quixotic battles on his behalf.Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a Trump confidant who claims to have evidence that shows voting machines were hacked by China, told the Guardian Trump would be returned to office by August or – at the latest – September.“With me they just keep saying: ‘It’s a conspiracy, Mike Lindell – he’s crazy, blah blah blah,’ all this stuff,” Lindell said. “But I think it gives the whole country hope because they know me and they know I wouldn’t be out there if I wasn’t 100%.”Lindell, who is being sued for $1.3bn by the voting machine manufacturer Dominion over his repeatedly stated conspiracy theory that the company distorted the results of the election, might not be giving the whole country hope, but Trump and the 53% of Republicans who believe he won the election are certainly receiving a boost.Trump’s aspirations are also being bolstered by Doug Mastriano, a failed Republican candidate for Congress in 2018 who now represents one of the 50 state senate districts in Pennsylvania, and Christina Bobb, a host at One America News Network, a rightwing channel that has faithfully propagated claims of election meddling, despite no evidence of any widespread fraud.A lack of evidence has apparently not prevented Trump from believing the hype. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump is enthralled by a politically charged vote recount in Arizona, while according to the New York Times the 45th president, egged on by the likes of Lindell, does indeed believe he will be back in the White House this summer.“His main focus is on Maricopa county and all the audits that are actually going on in the country here,” said Lindell, whose friendship with Trump grew over the last four years and blossomed when the pillow connoisseur became one of the loudest voices crying voter fraud.“I think that gives him the most hope because everyone can see that,” Lindell said. Republicans have pushed for audits in several key states, despite previous audits having found no evidence of wrongdoing in any state in the country.While Trump is concentrating on his audits, Lindell has focused his energies on a mysterious batch of data he says he was given – he won’t reveal who handed it to him – on 9 January.Lindell claims that the data shows that Dominion and Smartmatic machines were hacked into by China, which changed votes from Trump to Biden. The results, he claims, are conclusive.“If you were at a crime scene, and you had a DNA of blood and you had a movie of who did it, this is kind of what you have here, only better,” Lindell said.The US government’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency disagrees. In a statement addressing “election security rumor vs reality”, the agency said voting system safeguards prevent exactly the thing Lindell is attempting to prove.Last November, top cybersecurity experts from inside and outside the government issued a joint statement saying the election was “the most secure in American history”. They added: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”None of that has deterred Lindell, who said he has spent more than $12m of his own money on his bid to overturn the election. “I’ve had private investigators, I’ve had lawyers, I’ve put money into my own social media platform, I just … every waking moment is on my efforts to get this out there,” he said.As Lindell barrages his way across the post-election conspiracy theory landscape, the other main attempt to overturn the election is happening at the local level.Republicans’ main hopes seem to rest on Arizona, where the Republican-controlled state senate is performing its own audit of the election result in Maricopa county, despite multiple audits having already affirmed the election results.The firm hired to conduct the audit, Cyber Ninjas, has little experience in elections, its CEO has promoted conspiracy theories that the election was fraudulent, and the audit has been funded, at least in part, by Trump-aligned figures, suggesting it may not be an entirely neutral effort. But it has excited many on the right.Bobb, the OANN host, has been a repeated visitor to the audit. “Why Christina Bobb’s OAN ‘coverage’ of the Arizona audit is deceptive – and dangerous,” read one headline in the Arizona Republic newspaper this week. Bobb has discussed the effort with Trump and his team, the Washington Post reported. While nominally acting as a reporter on the audit, Bobb has also been fundraising for the venture.Bobb interviewed Mastriano as the state senator visited the Maricopa county in early June and declared the goings on there as “the first forensic audit in the world”.The pair share more than just a passion for spurious election fraud claims. Like Bobb, Mastriano is said to have been whispering in Trump’s ear, and he has called for a Maricopa-style audit in Pennsylvania. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the far-right member of Congress, has backed a similar audit in her state of Georgia, where multiple recounts have already confirmed Joe Biden’s win. There is also a push for an audit in Michigan.There is no direct way for the supreme court to overturn the election – “in the same way sharks can’t grow legs on command and stroll on to land”, as Business Insider put it – but people like Lindell, Mastriano and Bobb will keep pushing. And in any case, shilling for Trump does have its benefits.Mastriano, unknown until recently, has seen a once scarcely imaginable rise in his fame and is expected to run for Pennsylvania governor next year. Trump has promised to campaign on his behalf, Mastriano told a local radio station, while Rudy Giuliani headlined a Mastriano event in May. Bobb has seen her profile inexorably increase and become a star in rightwing circles.Lindell, hunkered down with his secret data and his cybersecurity experts, seems unlikely to see any benefit, however.He was being mentioned as a candidate for Minnesota governor before his immersion in the election fraud conspiracy, which has cost him both credibility and the ability to sell his pillows at Bed Bath and Beyond, Kohl’s and other big-name stores.Nevertheless, Lindell will keep going on his lonely march. His next step, he said, would be to hold a “symposium” in July, where cybersecurity experts and journalists can examine his data. He hasn’t chosen a state yet, or a date, or sent out any invites, but he has high hopes.Once people had seen his information, Lindell said, he would petition the supreme court and ask it to overturn the presidential election and reinstate Trump.“Just because it hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean that, when a crime of this magnitude has been committed, you don’t look at it and you don’t take care of it,” Lindell said.“I think they’re gonna move very fast. It could be August, it could be off by a month or so.”He added: “It’ll be this year. I don’t see what other choice they have.” More

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      Trump tells Fox News he ‘didn’t win’ election but doesn’t drop fraud lie

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      Donald Trump has told Fox News he “didn’t win” the 2020 presidential election, and wishes Joe Biden well.The former president made the admission seven months after the election was called for his rival and five months after Biden’s inauguration, during a rambling phone interview with Fox show host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night.He did not drop his lie that the Democrat won thanks to electoral fraud.“We were supposed to win easily, 64m votes,” Trump said. “We got 75m votes and we didn’t win but let’s see what happens on that.”Biden won more than 7m more votes than Trump and won by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump called a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016.Nonetheless Trump has pursued his lie about electoral fraud both in court – where more than 80 lawsuits challenging the result have been thrown out – and in a speech which stoked the deadly attack on the US Capitol by supporters on 6 January.Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict. GOP senators also blocked the establishment of an independent, 9/11-style inquiry into the attack on the Capitol.Republicans in the states have pursued Trump’s lie about electoral fraud – Arizona, one of the key states won by Biden, mounted a controversial audit of ballots in its most populous county.Republicans in state governments have introduced laws to limit ballot access among communities more likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.Trump also told Hannity he hoped Biden “has no problems” in office.“I want him to do well,” he said. “I think the election was unbelievably unfair, but I want this guy to go out and do well for our country.”Biden returned to the US on Wednesday from Geneva, where he met the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, at the end of a European tour.Trump told Hannity Biden “gave a very big stage to Russia, and we got nothing … I think it was a good day for Russia”.Trump held a summit with Putin in Helsinki in 2018 which most observers thought was a good day for Russia and a humiliating one for the US.Most were outraged when Trump sided with Putin over Russian interference in the 2016 US election. He told Hannity the investigation of that interference and links between him and Moscow “made it difficult to deal with Russia”.He also complained about reporting of the Russia investigation, which produced convictions of numerous Trump aides but which under then attorney general William Barr left Trump untouched despite extensive evidence of attempts to obstruct justice.Biden is 78. Hannity suggested his mental acuity was slipping. Trump turned 75 this week. Though he complained the US under Biden was in a “shocking state”, Trump said that for Biden, “age is not the problem”.Trump retains a firm grip on the Republican party, stoking its attacks on Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus and rescue package and similarly priced infrastructure proposals as dangerously and radically leftwing.“This is far worse than Bernie was ever going to be,” he said. “Bernie Sanders would have never thought to suggest some of the things that are happening right now.”Though the Trump administration fast-tracked development of Covid-19 vaccines and began distribution, Biden accelerated the effort. Though the US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic passed 600,000 this week, most states are in the process of reopening.Trump told Hannity he believed the theory Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory in China. US intelligence agencies are investigating that theory and others.Trump leads most polls of possible Republican nominees for 2024, has announced a return to large-scale public events and has done little to suggest he will not mount another run for the White House.He told Hannity he would “be making a decision on 2024” after midterm elections next year, “but if you look at the numbers, people are liking me more than ever before.“I think the reason is they are watching what is happening to our country, they are watching no energy independence, never has there been a scene like what is happening at the border and the death that is being caused … they are looking at the economy and inflation, looking at interest rates and gasoline prices, and I guess it is making me very popular.”Trump, who bequeathed Biden an economy cratered by Covid-19, has also proved popular with prosecutors, facing mounting legal problems over his business dealings.In Washington, Democrats are demanding accountability for justice department actions under his administration, including obtaining the private records of reporters and congressmen in leak investigations. More

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      Woes mount for legal loyalists who pushed Trump’s election conspiracies

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      A crew of conservative lawyers still pushing disinformation that echoes Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged are now battling federal inquiries, defamation lawsuits and bar association scrutiny that threaten to cripple their legal careers.Former justice department officials say Trump’s legal loyalists are weakening trust in the American electoral system via persistent repetition of his baseless claims. They note that some are actively backing Republican drives in key states to change election laws seen as undermining voting rights for communities of color.Take Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump conspiracy promoter and ex-federal prosecutor.After a short stint on Trump’s legal team last December, where she made wild claims about election fraud due to a voting machine company’s alleged ties to Venezuela, which sparked a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against her, Powell in late May drew ridicule for telling a Dallas QAnon meeting that Trump could be “reinstated” this summer.There is also election law veteran Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s infamous January call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” 11,000-plus votes to block Joe Biden’s win. Mitchell is now leading a $10m FreedomWorks drive in seven states to tighten election laws in ways that are seen as crimping voting rights.Trump’s high-pressure call led the Fulton county district attorney to open a criminal inquiry.Meanwhile, Atlanta lawyer L Lin Wood, who worked with Powell in Georgia in a failed drive to reverse Biden’s win by filing baseless lawsuits alleging fraud, told Talking Points Memo he donated $50,000 to help fund a bizarre vote “audit” in Arizona’s largest county – even though Biden’s victory there has been certified.Known for his frenzied pro-Trump advocacy, including charging that Vice-President Mike Pence ought to be executed by a firing squad, Lin has other legal headaches in Georgia, where he is battling a state bar request for him to take a confidential mental competency exam after it conducted an extensive review into his alleged legal misconduct.Further, Georgia election officials in February launched an investigation into allegations that Wood may have voted illegally in the state last year after he had bought a home in nearby South Carolina. Wood has denied voting illegally.But among Trump’s fervent legal allies Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer during the campaign, faces the gravest threats in a widening federal investigation into whether he broke lobbying disclosure laws by representing foreign officials in Ukraine, while working to gather dirt there on Biden to boost Trump’s electoral chances.The federal inquiry, led by US prosecutors in the same New York office that Giuliani once headed, gained potentially damaging evidence in late April when FBI agents raided Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan and seized more than 10 cellphones and other electronic equipment.Other pro-Trump lawyers are also feeling legal heat.Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, who shared a $1m contract with a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges and reportedly helped Giuliani’s Ukraine efforts, seem to have been ensnared in part of the Giuliani investigation. Using a search warrant, federal agents took a Toensing cellphone in late April on the same day as the Giuliani raids, but Toensing has said she was told she is not a “target”.Former senior justice department officials voice dismay about the conduct of Trump’s legal allies.Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, said he was astounded by the turn that Giuliani, Powell and diGenova have taken in “becoming cheerleaders for Trump and his assault on democracy”.“I have known them all at times over the past several decades when they each held positions of respect and some distinction,” Ayer said. “It’s a real head-scratcher for me, given that background, that they have each become so utterly disconnected from reality in pursuit of a totally unworthy cause.”Other departmental veterans say pro-Trump lawyers probably have mercenary motives.“Lawyers who make preposterous and counterfactual statements to the public typically only do it when there’s something in it for them – and that usually means money,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of DoJ’s fraud section.But there’s no doubt that Trump’s legal allies are feeling painful fallout from making suspect charges.Both Powell and Giuliani have been hit with $1.3bn defamation lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems for conspiratorial statements that tied the Denver-based election equipment firm to nefarious fraud schemes.Powell and Giuliani have separately argued that the lawsuits ought to be dismissed. Powell has stressed that her dubious allegations were protected by the first amendment free speech rights.Still, Powell’s defense was damaged in May when her lawyers incongruously claimed she was just being hyperbolic in charging Dominion had ties to left-leaning Venezuela, and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.However, the legal threats facing Giuliani are notably higher due to the widening two-year-old inquiry by prosecutors into whether he was an unregistered foreign agent for Ukrainian officials who were aiding the lawyer in his quest to find damaging information about Biden.The criminal inquiry is reportedly focused on Giuliani’s part in Trump’s firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in May 2019, a move that Giuliani and two close associates – indicted separately on charges of campaign finance violations – promoted, and a key issue in Trump’s first impeachment.After the recent FBI raid that obtained his legal devices, Giuliani denounced the federal inquiry: he said he had not lobbied anyone in the US government on behalf of any foreign officials, and told Fox News the inquiry was “trying to frame him”.But more damaging details of Giuliani’s pro-Trump Ukraine blitz were released this past week by CNN, after it obtained a secret recording from 2019 where Giuliani aggressively cajoled a high-level Ukraine official to help Trump by investigating baseless conspiracies involving Biden whose son was on a Ukrainian gas company’s board.Further, after Giuliani’s lawyers cited attorney-client privilege to limit the use of potentially damaging materials from the raid, a New York judge acting on a request from federal prosecutors tapped a retired judge as a “special master” to review the materials seized, and decide what investigators can use as they pursue possible criminal charges. 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      ‘Pure insanity’: emails reveal Trump push to overturn election defeat

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      Donald Trump tried to enlist top US law enforcement officials in a conspiracy-laden and doomed effort to overturn his election defeat, a campaign they described as “pure insanity”, newly released emails show.The documents reveal Trump and his allies’ increasingly desperate efforts between December and early January to push bogus conspiracy theories and cling to power – and the struggle of bewildered justice department officials to resist them.“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which released the emails on Tuesday.At least five times, the documents show, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, instructed justice department officials to investigate false allegations of voter fraud, including a conspiracy theory called “Italygate”, which claims electoral data was changed from Europe by means including military satellites and with the knowledge of the CIA.On 1 January Meadows, a fierce Trump loyalist, sent Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general, a link to a YouTube video detailing the “Italygate” theory. Rosen forwarded the email to the then acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, who replied: “Pure insanity.”The documents also show that Trump pressured Rosen to make the justice department take up election fraud claims.But Rosen refused to arrange a meeting between officials and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has played a leading role in pushing the conspiracy theories. Meadows asked Rosen to help arrange a meeting with Giuliani, the emails show.Rosen wrote to a justice department colleague on 1 January: “I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”Meadows also sent an email to Rosen about alleged irregularities in Fulton county, Georgia, a state Joe Biden won narrowly. Rosen again forwarded the email to Donoghue and asked: “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below.”Trump, through an assistant, sent Rosen an email on 14 December with documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan – a debunked allegation a federal judge had already rejected.Forty minutes later, Trump announced that William Barr, his second and loyal attorney general but who proved reluctant to back the claims of a stolen election, would resign and be replaced by Rosen.Two weeks later, on 29 December, Trump’s White House assistant emailed Rosen and other justice department lawyers a draft legal brief they were urged to file at the US supreme court.The department never filed the brief. Emails released by the House committee showed that Kurt Olsen, a Maryland lawyer involved in writing Trump’s draft brief, repeatedly tried to meet Rosen but was unsuccessful.The draft brief backed by Trump argued that changes to voting procedures by Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, made amid the coronavirus pandemic to expand mail-in voting, were unlawful. Biden won all those states.Similar arguments were made in a lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and a Trump ally. The supreme court rejected that long-shot lawsuit in December.The House oversight committee has requested that former officials including Meadows and Donoghue appear for transcribed testimony. The committee previously requested Rosen’s testimony on 21 May.Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman, told MSNBC: “It would be more surprising if these emails were not sent. It’s really on brand for what Donald Trump was trying to do … to weaponise his own Department of Justice to overturn the will of the American voter. Frankly, we cannot allow this to pass without consequences.”Congress also is investigating the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters trying to stop the formal certification of Biden’s election victory.On Tuesday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said nearly 500 people had been arrested in connection with the attack.“The resolve and dedication with which the justice department has approached the investigation of the 6 January attack,” he said, “reflects the seriousness with which we take this assault on a mainstay of our democratic system, the peaceful transfer of power.“Over the 160 days since the attack, we have arrested over 480 individuals and brought hundreds and hundreds of charges against those who attacked law enforcement officers, obstructed justice and used deadly and dangerous weapons to those ends.” More

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      US election officials still plagued by threats for certifying Trump defeat

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      Late on the night of 24 April, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”That followed a 5 April text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident”.Those messages, which have not been previously reported, are examples of the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after Donald Trump’s November election defeat.While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide, from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers.The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims.The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the justice department will prosecute threats against election officials, amid other additional measures to protect democracy.Tricia Raffensperger has now spoken out publicly about the threats of violence to her family, and shared menacing text messages.Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66, began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in Georgia, long a Republican bastion.Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled weekly visits in her home with two young grandchildren, the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.“I couldn’t have them come to my house any more,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them.That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s election lies, were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. “Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement: “Vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for US election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December, is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.Many others whose lives have been threatened were low- or mid-level workers. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric could reverberate into the 2022 midterm congressional elections and the 2024 presidential vote. Many election offices will lose critical employees with years or decades of experience, predicted David Becker, executive director of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.“This is deeply troubling,” he said.Carlos Nelson, elections supervisor for Ware county in south-eastern Georgia, shares that fear.“These are people who work for little or no money, 12 to 14 hours a day on election day,” Nelson said. “If we lose good poll workers, that’s when we’re going to lose democracy.”In Georgia, Trump faces an investigation into alleged election interference, the only known criminal inquiry into his attempts to overturn the 2020 vote.Trump spokesman Jason Miller did not respond to Reuters’ questions, including why Trump has not forcefully denounced the torrent of threats being made in his name.One email, sent on 2 January to Georgia officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites, saying: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.”It was forwarded to the FBI, which declined to comment.In Georgia, threatening violence against a poll officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. Making death threats is a separate crime carrying up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.Criminal law specialists say the widespread threats could increase the legal jeopardy for Trump in the Georgia investigation. Among other matters, investigators are examining a 2 January call in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss.That statement suggests Willis may be examining whether Trump, or others acting with him, solicited or encouraged death threats against election officials, said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. Such intimidation could fit into a possible racketeering investigation into Trump if the threats were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the election, said Clint Rucker, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and former Fulton county prosecutor.Since launching her inquiry in February, Willis has added several high-profile attorneys to her team, including a leading racketeering expert, to assist on cases including the Trump investigation, Reuters reported on 6 March.“I think there’s going to be a big-picture look at all of it,” said Rucker, a Democrat, who once prosecuted a high-profile racketeering case with Fanni Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, which includes Atlanta.A Fulton county district attorney spokesman, Jeff DiSantis, did not respond to requests for comment on the office’s inquiries into election-related threats of violence.In April, two investigators from Willis’s office, met with the county elections director, Richard Barron seeking information on “hundreds” of threats against Barron and his staff, Barron said. He said his staff was made up almost entirely of Black election workers. “The racial slurs were disturbing and sickening,” he said of the threats.Barron’s election registration chief, Ralph Jones, 56, received abhorrent, racist messages, and strangers showed up at his house.“It was unbelievable: your life being threatened just because you’re doing your job,” he said.And Barron was bombarded with threats after Trump accused him of criminal election fraud at a rally in December. “I underestimated how hard he was going to push that narrative and just keep pushing it,” Barron said.Between Christmas and early January, Barron received nearly 150 hateful, vicious calls, many accusing him of treason or saying he deserved to he hanged or killed by firing squad, according to Barron and a Reuters review of some of the phone messages.Election officials in at least 11 Georgia counties received an email in January – during the Senate runoff that resulted in a historic win for the Democrats in both the state’s US Senate seats – threatening “death and destruction” unless Trump continued to be president, and the bombing of all election sites.It added: “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play,” apparently referring to the 2013 extremist attack on the Boston Marathon.During the Senate runoff, Vanessa Montgomery, 58, was a polling manager in the Georgia city of Taylorsville. When polls closed that night, she set off to deliver ballots to an elections office in Bartow county, a predominantly white, Republican district in north-western Georgia. Montgomery, who is Black, was traveling with her daughter, also a poll worker hired temporarily for the election.They were followed by an SUV, which nearly ran them off the road. They had to call 911 and be guided to safety. The scare triggered a panic attack in Montgomery, something she had not experienced since being an army officer in Bosnia, seeing people blown up by landmines.Her manager, Joseph Kirk, Bartow county elections supervisor, said he worried the ugly reactions to Trump’s loss could result in shortages of good election workers nationwide in future.Many other election officials told of incidents such as receiving violent, “ranting” calls, threatening people that could go to prison for “rigging” the election against Trump.Brad Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs, said she had received death threats and obscene images after a Trump supporter posted her contact details online.Hostile messages, including calls for public hangings of officials, began pouring in to the office after Trump called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” last year and continued as he refused to overturn the election results.“I don’t think any of us anticipated this level of nastiness,” said Fuchs, 31, who grew up in a conservative Christian family and has worked for years to help elect Republicans.Vivian Ho contributed reporting More