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    Lawyer on Trump Election Call Quits Firm After Uproar

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLawyer on Trump Election Call Quits Firm After UproarThe law firm, Foley & Lardner, had distanced itself from Cleta Mitchell after a recording of the call revealed she helped the president pressure Georgia elections officials.The lawyer Cleta Mitchell blamed her resignation on “a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups.”Credit…Travis Dove for The New York TimesMichael S. Schmidt and Jan. 5, 2021, 7:03 p.m. ETA lawyer advising President Trump in recent weeks has resigned from her law firm after it was revealed that she participated in the call where Mr. Trump pressured Georgia officials to help him reverse the state’s election results, the firm said in a statement on Tuesday.The lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, has been advising Mr. Trump despite a policy at her firm, Foley & Lardner, that none of its lawyers should represent clients involved in relitigating the presidential election.“Cleta Mitchell has informed firm management of her decision to resign from Foley & Lardner effective immediately,” the firm said in its statement. “Ms. Mitchell concluded that her departure was in the firm’s best interests, as well as in her own personal best interests. We thank her for her contributions to the firm and wish her well.”Ms. Mitchell’s resignation was the latest evidence of the problems Mr. Trump has created for law firms throughout his time in office, as their employees and clients object to ties with the president.In an email to her clients and friends, Ms. Mitchell blamed her departure on “a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups via social media and other means against me, my law firm and clients of the law firm.” She vowed to “redouble” her efforts on what she called “election integrity.”The firm had begun to distance itself from her shortly after the call was first reported by The Washington Post on Sunday. As Mr. Trump has made increasingly specious claims about the election, he has been unable to attract high-profile, establishment lawyers to back his cause.Ms. Mitchell was among several Trump aides who joined him on the call on Saturday, in which Mr. Trump vaguely threatened Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with “a criminal offense” as he pressured him to “find” enough votes to change the state’s presidential results.Ms. Mitchell has represented far-right groups and conservatives for many years. She served on the board of the National Rifle Association and represented Tea Party groups that claimed they were illegally targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.On Sunday, in the hours after Ms. Mitchell’s participation on the call, the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project questioned on Twitter why clients like Major League Baseball would be associated with a firm that employed someone seeking to overturn the election.In Ms. Mitchell’s email to her clients and friends, she thanked Foley & Lardner for supporting her political practice “all these years despite ongoing assaults through the years against me, my clients and my work.”“With the ever more brazen attacks on conservatives and, most especially, anyone who supports and wants to help President Trump,” she wrote, “I realize that a large national law firm is no longer the right platform for me or my law practice.”She repeated her baseless claims of voter fraud.“Election integrity is something I have been quite passionate about for many, many years,” she added. “That was and remains my goal in trying to get to the truth about the Georgia election results. Those who deny the existence of voter and election fraud are not in touch with facts and reality.”Since the first year of Mr. Trump’s administration, his disregard for norms, the law and ethics have made it difficult for him to attract top legal talent from established firms. During the special counsel’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian election interference, several firms told their top white-collar lawyers that if they wanted to represent the president, they would have to quit.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Can Only Republicans Legitimately Win Elections?

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyCan Only Republicans Legitimately Win Elections?Trump and many of the G.O.P.’s leaders seem to think so, with ominous consequences for the future.Opinion ColumnistJan. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTwilight at a Trump rally in Georgia on Jan. 4.Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockOf the many stories to tell about American politics since the end of the Cold War, one of growing significance is how the Republican Party came to believe in its singular legitimacy as a political actor. Whether it’s a hangover from the heady days of the Reagan revolution (when conservatives could claim ideological hegemony) or something downstream of America’s reactionary traditions, it’s a belief that now dominates conservative politics and has placed much of the Republican Party in opposition to republican government itself.It’s a story of escalation, from the relentless obstruction of the Gingrich era to the effort to impeach Bill Clinton to the attempt to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama and on to the struggle, however doomed, to keep Joe Biden from ever sitting in the White House as president. It also goes beyond national politics. In 2016, after a Democrat, Roy Cooper, defeated the Republican incumbent Pat McCrory for the governorship of North Carolina, the state’s Republican legislature promptly stripped the office of power and authority. Wisconsin Republicans did the same in 2018 after Tony Evers unseated Scott Walker in his bid for a third term. And Michigan Republicans took similar steps against another Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, after her successful race for the governor’s mansion.Considered in the context of a 30-year assault on the legitimacy of Democratic leaders and Democratic constituencies (of which Republican-led voter suppression is an important part), the present attempt to disrupt and derail the certification of electoral votes is but the next step, in which Republicans say, outright, that a Democrat has no right to hold power and try to make that reality. The next Democrat to win the White House — whether it’s Biden getting re-elected or someone else winning for the first time — will almost certainly face the same flood of accusations, challenges and lawsuits, on the same false grounds of “fraud.”It’s worth emphasizing the bad faith and dishonesty on display here. At least 140 House Republicans say that they will vote against counting certain electoral votes on Wednesday. Among them are newly seated lawmakers in Georgia and Pennsylvania, two states whose votes are in contention. But the logic of their objection applies to them as well as Biden. If his state victories are potentially illegitimate, then so are theirs. Or take the charge, from Ted Cruz and 10 other Senate Republicans, that multiple key swing states changed (or even violated) their election laws in contravention of the Constitution. If it’s true for those cases, then it’s also true of Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, unilaterally expanded voting, however meagerly. And yet there’s no drive to cancel those results.The issue for Republicans is not election integrity, it’s the fact that Democratic votes count at all.That said, not every Republican has joined the president’s crusade against self-government. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas shares the presidential ambitions of Cruz and Josh Hawley and others who want to disrupt the electoral vote count. But where they see opportunity, he sees blowback. Here he is in a statement released by his office:If Congress purported to overturn the results of the Electoral College, it would not only exceed that power, but also establish unwise precedents. First, Congress would take away the power to choose the president from the people, which would essentially end presidential elections and place that power in the hands of whichever party controls Congress. Second, Congress would imperil the Electoral College, which gives small states like Arkansas a voice in presidential elections. Democrats could achieve their longstanding goal of eliminating the Electoral College in effect by refusing to count electoral votes in the future for a Republican president-elect.So do seven of his Republican colleagues in the House, who similarly argue that this stunt will undermine the Republican Party’s ability to win presidential elections:From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years. They have therefore depended on the Electoral College for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes — based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election — we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.But even as they stand against the effort to challenge the results, these Republicans affirm the baseless idea that there was fraud and abuse in the election. Cotton says he “shares the concerns of many Arkansans about irregularities in the presidential election,” while the House lawmakers say that they “are outraged at the significant abuses in our election system resulting from the reckless adoption of mail-in ballots and the lack of safeguards maintained to guarantee that only legitimate votes are cast and counted.” Even as they criticize an attempted power grab, they echo the idea that one side has legitimate voters and the other does not.It’s hard to say how anyone can shatter this belief in the Republican Party’s singular right to govern. The most we can do, in this moment, is rebuke the attempt to overturn the election in as strong a manner as possible. If President Trump broke the law with his phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia — in which he pressured Raffensperger to “find” votes on his behalf — then Trump should be pursued like any other citizen who attempted to subvert an election. He should be impeached as well, even if there’s only two weeks left in his term, and the lawmakers who support him should be censured and condemned.There’s no guarantee that all this will hurt the Republican Party at the ballot box. But I think we’re past that. The question now is whether the events of the past two months will stand as precedent, a guide for those who might emulate Trump.The door to overturning a presidential election is open. The rules — or at least a tortured, politically motivated reading of the rules — make it possible. Moreover, it is a simple reality of political systems that what can happen eventually will happen. It may not be in four years, it may not be in eight, but if the Republican Party continues along this path, it will run this play again. And there’s nothing to say it can’t work.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Trump, in Georgia Before Tuesday’s Election, Can’t Let Go of the Last One

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    Georgia Runoff

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    Trump Lawyer on Call Is a Conservative Firebrand Aiding His Push to Overturn Election

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    Georgia Runoff

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    To Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump's Georgia Call

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyTo Defend Democracy, Investigate TrumpThere needs to be a cost to trying to overthrow an election.Opinion ColumnistJan. 4, 2021Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAccording to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal office can be punished by up to five years in prison.Donald Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law.“This is probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.”At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency.Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results.It isn’t working this time for several reasons. Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory wasn’t close. Republican state officials like Raffensperger behaved honorably. Democrats control the House, and some Senate Republicans retain a baseline commitment to democracy.None of those conditions are likely to be permanent, though. Minimally decent Republicans are particularly endangered. Expect Trumpists to mount primary challenges to them and replace them with cynics, cranks and fanatics.True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.Some are trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House, Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”But there is little appetite in the House for impeaching Trump again, though he transparently deserves it. (“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on Monday.) Joe Biden doesn’t seem to want his attorney general to investigate Trump, though he’s also said he wouldn’t stand in his or her way. And experts point to numerous reasons federal prosecutors might decline to bring a case.The first is what we might call the psychopath’s advantage: Prosecutors would have to prove that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. “You’re not dealing with your ordinary fraudster or your ordinary criminal or even your ordinary corrupt politician,” said Bromwich. “He seems to believe a lot of the lies that he’s telling.”There’s also the sheer political difficulty of prosecuting a former president. “My guess is that in the weeks and months that a prosecutor takes to develop a case like that, they’re at the end of the day going to say, ‘The guy’s not in office, nothing happened, we’re not spending our resources on it,’” the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told me. “Which doesn’t take away from the really immoral nature of the call.”Taken on their own, most excuses for not investigating or prosecuting Trump make at least some sense. Launching an impeachment less than three weeks before Biden’s inauguration might appear futile. It could even feed right-wing delusions by creating the impression that Democrats think Trump might be able to stay in office otherwise. Both the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will be fully occupied dealing with the devastation to public health and the economy that Trump is leaving behind. Beyond its legal challenges, a federal prosecution of Trump would maintain his toxic grip on the country’s attention.Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Transcript: President Trump’s Phone Call With Georgia Election Officials

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    Electoral College Results

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    Fact-Checking Trump's Debunked Election Claims in Georgia Call

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationTrump Repeats Debunked Election Claims in Call With Georgia OfficialJan. 3, 2021, 8:34 p.m. ETJan. 3, 2021, 8:34 p.m. ETPresident Trump has made a litany of false claims about election results in Georgia.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Trump, in an hourlong telephone call with Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, repeated a number of false and misleading claims about election results in the state that have been circulating on social media. Here’s a fact check.What Mr. Trump Said“Then it was stuffed with votes. They weren’t in an official voter box, they were in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes. The minimum number it could be because we watched it and they watched it certified in slow motion instant replay if you can believe it, but it had slow motion and it was magnified many times over, and the minimum it was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.”False. Mr. Trump was most likely referring to debunked claims that a water leak at a vote counting location in Fulton County forced an evacuation and made it possible for trunks full of ballots to be rolled in. Election officials have said and surveillance videos show that this did not happen.A water leak caused a delay for about two hours in vote counting at the State Farm Arena, but no ballots or equipment were damaged. Georgia’s chief election investigator, Frances Watson, testified that a “review of the entire security footage revealed that there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables.”Throughout the phone call, Mr. Trump also repeatedly suggested that an election worker seen in the surveillance videos “stuffed the boxes” and “they thought she’d be in jail” — referring to a baseless conspiracy theory promoted on social media.What Mr. Trump Said“There were no poll watchers there. There were no Democrats or Republicans. There was no security there.”This is misleading. Election observers and journalists were present at State Farm Arena when the water leak occurred. They were not asked to leave, Ms. Watson said, but simply “left on their own” when they saw one group of workers, who had completed their task, leave.What Mr. Trump Said“So dead people voted. And I think the number is close to 5,000 people.”False. The actual number was two, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, told the president in the call.What Mr. Trump Said“You had out-of-state voters — they voted in Georgia but they were from out of state — of 4,925.”This is misleading. Ryan Germany, the chief counsel for Mr. Raffensperger’s office, refuted this description in the call.“Everyone we’ve been through are people that lived in Georgia, moved to a different state, but then moved back to Georgia legitimately,” he said. “They moved back in years ago. This was not like something just before the election. So there’s something about that data that, it’s just not accurate.”What Mr. Trump Said“In Fulton County and other areas — and this may or may not be true, because this just came up this morning — that they are burning their ballots, that they are shredding ballots, shredding ballots and removing equipment. They are changing the equipment on the Dominion machines, and you know that’s not legal.”False. Mr. Trump was likely referring to images of Fulton County ballots that circulated on social media and posted by a supporter, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.The photos showed piles of ballots that were visibly not filled out and wrapped in plastic. Mr. Byrne characterized the ballots as “counterfeit” and said they were later shredded.But those images were simply of emergency backup ballots, said Gabriel Sterling, a Republican official who is the voting system implementation manager in Georgia. State law requires counties to prepare additional paper ballots in case voting machines cannot be used.Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories and false rumors, did not remove any machinery from Fulton County, Mr. Germany told the president.What Mr. Trump Said“In Detroit, we had 139 percent of the people voted. That’s not too good. In Pennsylvania, they had well over 200,000 more votes than they had people voting.”False. About 51 percent of registered voters and 38 percent of the entire population cast a ballot in Detroit.The figure for Pennsylvania was a reference to faulty analysis conducted by state Republican lawmakers. The analysis relied on a voter registration database that Pennsylvania’s Department of State said was incomplete as a few counties — including Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties, the two largest in the state — had yet to fully upload their data. The department called the analysis “obvious misinformation.”What Mr. Trump Said“She got you to sign a totally unconstitutional agreement, which is a disastrous agreement. You can’t check signatures. I can’t imagine you’re allowed to do harvesting, I guess, in that agreement.”False. This was an inaccurate reference to a settlement between Georgia and the Democratic Party. Under the March settlement, officials must notify voters whose signatures were rejected within three business days and give them the chance to correct issues. It does not bar officials from verifying signatures and does not allow “harvesting,” or collecting and dropping off ballots in bulk.“Harvesting is still illegal in the state of Georgia. And that settlement agreement did not change that one iota,” Mr. Raffensperger said in the call.Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More