Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Special Grand Jury in Georgia Recommended Charging Lindsey Graham in Trump Case

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      A special grand jury made the recommendation last year after hearing from dozens of witnesses on whether Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election.A special grand jury that investigated election interference allegations in Georgia recommended indicting a number of Trump allies who were not charged, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser.In its final report, which a judge unsealed on Friday, the panel also recommended charges against Boris Epshteyn, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s main lawyers, as well as a number of other Trump-aligned lawyers, including Cleta Mitchell and Lin Wood.Mr. Trump and 18 allies were charged in a racketeering indictment that was handed up last month by a regular grand jury in Fulton County, Ga.The special grand jury, which Fulton County prosecutors convened to help with the investigation, met at an Atlanta courthouse from June to December of last year. It spent much of that time hearing testimony from 75 witnesses on the question of whether Mr. Trump or any of his allies had sought to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.Under Georgia law, the panel could not issue indictments itself. In the Trump case, that task fell to a regular grand jury that was seated over the summer. The regular grand jury heard evidence from prosecutors for one day in early August before voting to indict all 19 defendants whom prosecutors had sought to charge.The special grand jury’s mandate was to write a report with recommendations on whether indictments were warranted in the investigation, which was led by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Ms. Willis asked to convene a special grand jury because such panels have subpoena powers, and she was concerned that some witnesses would not cooperate without being subpoenaed.Portions of the report were publicly released in February, but those excerpts did not indicate who had been recommended for indictment, or on what charges. The release of the full nine-page report this week was ordered by Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court.Read the Report by the Special Grand Jury in Georgia That Investigated President TrumpThe special grand jury investigated whether Mr. Trump interfered in the 2020 election in the state. Their report included recommendations on whether indictments were warranted, and for whom.Read DocumentMr. Epshteyn declined on Friday to comment about the report. Others whom the advisory panel recommended for indictment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.After the special grand jury recommended indictments of about 40 people, the district attorney had to weigh which prosecutions would be the most likely to succeed in court. A potential case against Mr. Graham, for example, would have been hampered by the fact that there were conflicting accounts of telephone calls he made to a top Georgia official. Mr. Graham has repeatedly said that he did nothing wrong.Fulton County prosecutors indicated in court filings last year that they were interested in those calls by Mr. Graham, a onetime critic of Mr. Trump who became a staunch supporter. They were made shortly after the November 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.Mr. Raffensperger has said that in those calls, Mr. Graham suggested the rejection of all mail-in votes from Georgia counties with high rates of questionable signatures, a step that would have excluded many more Democratic votes than Republican ones. But the phone calls are not known to have been recorded, and recollections differ about exactly what was said — factors that probably figured in the decision not to charge Mr. Graham.In a filing seeking Mr. Graham’s testimony, prosecutors said that he “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about re-examining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” and “made reference to allegations of widespread voter fraud” during those calls.A few weeks after the calls, Mr. Trump followed up with a call of his own to Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, saying that he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes, enough to reverse his loss in Georgia. Mr. Trump’s call, which was recorded, is the basis for a number of charges in the 98-page indictment.Mr. Graham has characterized as “ridiculous” the idea that he had suggested to Mr. Raffensperger that he throw out legally cast votes, and the senator’s lawyers have argued that he was carrying out a legitimate investigative function as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a bid to avoid testifying before the special grand jury last year, Mr. Graham waged a legal battle that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately, he was forced to testify.Afterward, he said that he had spent two hours giving testimony behind closed doors, where he said he “answered all questions.”Mr. Graham has been critical of prosecutors in the Georgia case and the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump, characterizing them as liberals who were “weaponizing the law” to unfairly target the former president.After the Georgia indictment, Mr. Graham told reporters in South Carolina that he was not cooperating with the Fulton County prosecutors, dismissing the idea as “crazy stuff.”“I went, had my time, and I haven’t heard from them since,” he said. More

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      Trump Georgia Case: Defendants Powell and Chesebro to Get Early Trial Together

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      Sidney Powell followed Kenneth Chesebro in demanding a speedy trial, but neither defendant in the election interference case wanted to be tried with the other.Two of Donald J. Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case will go to trial together on Oct. 23, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, had asked to be tried separately from one another.The ruling from Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, however, is contingent on the case remaining in state court — a situation that could change if other defendants succeed at moving the case into a federal courtroom.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is still holding out hope that all 19 defendants in the racketeering case can be tried together. One of her prosecutors said during a hearing on Wednesday that the state would take approximately four months to present its case, calling roughly 150 witnesses. That estimate does not include the time it would take to pick the jury.But during the hearing, Judge McAfee said he remained “very skeptical” that a single trial for all 19 defendants could work. For one thing, some of the accused, including Ms. Powell and Mr. Chesebro, have invoked their right to a speedy trial while others have not.The questions raised at the hearing underscore the tremendous logistical challenges prosecutors face in the racketeering case charging the former president and his allies with a multipronged effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It is one of four criminal trials looming for Mr. Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election.So far, since his indictment in the Georgia case, Mr. Trump’s only request has been to sever his case from those of his co-defendants who are seeking a speedy trial.A federal judge is mulling requests from five defendants to move their cases to federal court. Mr. Chesebro demanded a speedy trial in state court.Ms. Powell made a similar demand soon after, but neither defendant wanted to be tried with the other. Both asked the judge to sever their cases from each other’s.Lawyers for Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell noted that even though their clients were charged with participating in a conspiracy to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss in Georgia, the two were charged with very different roles in it.Prosecutors say that Mr. Chesebro, a lawyer, took part in a sweeping plot to create slates of fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in several key swing states that he had lost. The charges against Ms. Powell, also a lawyer, stem from her involvement in a data breach by Trump supporters in an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.In court filings, Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers argued that the allegations against Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell were “akin to oil and water; wholly separate and impossible to mix (into one conspiracy).” One of the lawyers, Scott Grubman, raised the possibility that the same jury hearing his client’s case would be subjected to weeks, if not months, of testimony about the data breach that he was not involved in.Attorney Brian T. Rafferty, who is defending Sidney Powell, argues before Judge McAfee on Wednesday,Pool photo by Jason GetzBrian T. Rafferty, a lawyer for Ms. Powell, sounded a similar theme, arguing that Ms. Powell’s defense was “going to get washed away” by lengthy discussions about the fake electors scheme.But Will Wooten, a deputy district attorney, argued that Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell were part of the same overarching racketeering conspiracy. “The conspiracy evolved: One thing didn’t work, so we move on to the next thing,” he said. “That thing didn’t work, so we move on to the next thing.”Judge McAfee, in the end, decided that Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell would get a fair trial if tried together. He also noted that it would save time and money to combine them. Still, when or where all 19 defendants will ultimately face trial remains uncertain. The efforts to move the case to federal court have been led by Mark Meadows, a defendant who served as White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump. Such a move would expand the jury pool into suburban counties that are somewhat more supportive of Mr. Trump, and it would increase the likelihood of the United States Supreme Court, a third of whose members were appointed by Mr. Trump, getting involved in potential appeals.Defendants would still be tried under state laws, however, and the case would not be subject to a president’s power to pardon federal crimes.While typically only federal officials can get their cases moved to federal court, it is possible that if even one defendant succeeds at it, the others will come with him or her.Some defendants who were not federal employees at the time the alleged crimes took place are claiming that their role as bogus Trump electors qualifies them for a move to federal court. A lawyer for Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator, argued last month in a legal filing that Mr. Still was acting “in his capacity as a contingent United States presidential elector” and thus “was, or was acting under, an officer of the United States.”Ms. Willis’s office scoffed at that assertion, arguing in a motion filed Tuesday that Mr. Still “and his fellow fraudulent electors conspired in a scheme to impersonate true Georgia presidential electors; their fiction is not entitled to recognition by this Court.”Mr. Trump, like the other defendants, has pleaded not guilty, waiving an arraignment that was supposed to have taken place on Wednesday. He continues to use the Georgia investigation as an opportunity to raise money.“Today was supposed to be my scheduled arraignment in Atlanta,” he wrote to potential donors on Wednesday, adding that, “Instead, I want to make today a massive grassroots fundraising day.” More

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      Giuliani Is Liable for Defaming Georgia Election Workers, Judge Says

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      The ruling means that a defamation case against Rudolph W. Giuliani, stemming from his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, can proceed to a trial where damages will be considered.A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Rudolph W. Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers by repeatedly declaring that they had mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.The ruling by the judge, Beryl A. Howell in Federal District Court in Washington, means that the defamation case against Mr. Giuliani, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after his election loss, can proceed to trial on the narrow question of how much, if any, damages he will have to pay the plaintiffs in the case.Judge Howell’s decision came a little more than a month after Mr. Giuliani conceded in two stipulations in the case that he had made false statements when he accused the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, of manipulating ballots while working at the State Farm Arena for the Fulton County Board of Elections.Mr. Giuliani’s legal team has sought to clarify that he was not admitting to wrongdoing, and that his stipulations were solely meant to short circuit the costly process of producing documents and other records to Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss so that he could move toward dismissing the allegations outright.Although the stipulations essentially conceded that his statements about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were false, Mr. Giuliani has continued to argue that his attacks on them were protected by the First Amendment.But Judge Howell, complaining that Mr. Giuliani’s stipulations “hold more holes than Swiss cheese,” took the proactive step of declaring him liable for “defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and punitive damage claims.”In a statement, Mr. Giuliani’s political adviser, Ted Goodman, slammed the opinion as “a prime example of the weaponization of our justice system, where the process is the punishment.” He added that “this decision should be reversed, as Mayor Giuliani is wrongly accused of not preserving electronic evidence.”Judge Howell’s decision to effectively skip the fact-finding stage of the defamation case and move straight to an assessment of damages came after a protracted struggle by Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss to force Mr. Giuliani to turn over evidence they believed they deserved as part of the discovery process.In her ruling, Judge Howell accused Mr. Giuliani of paying only “lip service” to his discovery obligations “by failing to take reasonable steps to preserve or produce” reams of relevant information. His repeated excuses and attempts to paint himself as the victim in the case, the judge went on, “thwarted” the two women’s “procedural rights to obtain any meaningful discovery.”“Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straightforward defamation case,” Judge Howell wrote.The remedy for all of this, she added, was that Mr. Giuliani would have to pay nearly $90,000 in legal fees Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had incurred and would suffer a default judgment on the central issue of whether he had defamed the women.The lawsuit filed by Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss in December 2021 was among the first to be brought by individual election workers who found themselves targets of criticism and conspiracy theories promoted by right-wing politicians and media figures who claimed that Mr. Trump had won the election. The two women sued other defendants, including the One America News Network and some of its top officials, but ultimately reached settlements with everyone except Mr. Giuliani.The campaign of harassment against Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss came after Mr. Giuliani and others wrongly accused them of pulling thousands of fraudulent ballots from a suitcase in their vote-counting station and illegally feeding them through voting machines. The story of that campaign was featured prominently in a racketeering indictment against Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and 17 others that was filed this month by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga.The indictment accused Mr. Giuliani of falsely telling state officials in Georgia that Ms. Freeman had committed election crimes in an effort to persuade them to “unlawfully change the outcome” of the race on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Other members of the criminal enterprise, the indictment said, “traveled from out of state to harass Ms. Freeman, intimidate her and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit.”Last year, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss — who are mother and daughter — appeared as witnesses at a public hearing of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 and related what happened after Mr. Giuliani amplified the false claims about them.Although Fulton County and Georgia officials immediately debunked the accusations, Mr. Giuliani kept promoting them, ultimately comparing the women — who are Black — to drug dealers and calling during a hearing with Georgia state legislators for their homes to be searched.Mr. Trump invoked Ms. Freeman’s name 18 times during a phone call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. In the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,800 votes — enough to swing the results in Georgia from the winner, Joseph R. Biden Jr.“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Ms. Freeman testified to the House panel, adding as her voice rose with emotion, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”Mr. Giuliani has blamed his failure to produce documents to Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss on his own financial woes. Facing an array of civil and criminal cases, Mr. Giuliani has racked up about $3 million in legal expenses, a person familiar with the matter has said.He has sought a lifeline from Mr. Trump, but the former president has largely rebuffed requests to cover Mr. Giuliani’s legal bills. Mr. Trump’s political action committee did pay $340,000 that Mr. Giuliani owed to a company that was helping him produce records in various cases, but he had still sought to avoid turning over documents to Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, prompting the judge’s ruling on Wednesday.The defamation suit by the women is only one of several legal problems Mr. Giuliani faces.In addition to the Georgia indictment, Mr. Giuliani is facing a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused him of “a viral disinformation campaign” to spread false claims that the company was part of a complex plot to flip votes away from Mr. Trump during the 2020 election.Last month, a legal ethics committee in Washington said that Mr. Giuliani should be disbarred for his “unparalleled” attempts to help Mr. Trump overturn the election.He was also included as an unnamed co-conspirator in a federal indictment filed against Mr. Trump this month by the special counsel, Jack Smith, accusing the former president of plotting to illegally reverse the results of the election. 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      Wisconsin Elections Official Targeted in Partisan Clash Over Voting

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      Meagan Wolfe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator since 2018, has been demonized by former President Donald J. Trump’s allies in the battleground state.Republicans in Wisconsin pushing to oust the state’s nonpartisan head of elections clashed on Tuesday with voting rights advocates and some local clerks during a rancorous public hearing in Madison, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.With their new supermajority in the State Senate, Republicans fought over the reappointment of Meagan Wolfe as the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator.The agency’s head since 2018, Ms. Wolfe has become a steady target of right-wing attacks, fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s grievances about his defeat in the battleground state in 2020. Many of them hinge on his falsehoods about election fraud and the use of electronic voting machines and ballot drop boxes.Ms. Wolfe did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be ousted. Among them was Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice whom Republicans tasked with leading a 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results in the state. The review, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million, found no evidence of significant fraud.“A majority of people in Wisconsin have doubts about the honesty of elections in this state,” he said at the hearing. “That’s disgraceful.”On Tuesday, Ms. Wolfe declined to comment through a spokesman for the elections commission, who shared a copy of a letter that she sent to legislators in June that had sought to dispel election misinformation.“I believe it is fair to say that no election in Wisconsin history has been as scrutinized, reviewed, investigated and reinvestigated as much as the November 2020 general election,” her letter said. “The outcome of all those 2020 probes produced essentially the same results: the identification of a relatively small number of suggestions for procedural improvements, with no findings of wrongdoing or significant fraud.”Meagan Wolfe, the administrator, did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be removed.Ruthie Hauge/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the hearing, Ms. Wolfe’s supporters described her as a model of competency who guided a network of state, county and local election officials through the pandemic and has done so in an impartial manner. They warned that her removal would result in chaos.“Considering what happened after the 2020 elections and since, we are in a world of crazy for next year,” said Lisa Tollefson, the clerk of Rock County, in the southern part of the state. “With the actions and accusations that have been made toward election officials, we are certainly seeing the highest turnover in county clerks and municipal clerks in our history.”Dan Knodl, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate committee, challenged her “world of crazy” remark.“Are you predicting something, or you have information that something is on the horizon?” he said.Ms. Tollefson answered that the political climate was only likely to intensify in Wisconsin and pointed to the hard-fought election in April that flipped Wisconsin’s Supreme Court from conservative to liberal.Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, Democrats argued that the Legislature did not have the authority to vote on Ms. Wolfe’s reappointment, noting that state law requires her renomination to come from the commission.A June vote by the commission on whether to appoint her to another four-year term ended in an impasse, with three Democrats abstaining over concerns that Republicans would use their supermajority in the Senate to remove her. By doing nothing — declining to renominate or take any other action — the commission can effectively keep Ms. Wolfe in her current role under state law.Republicans have challenged the statute, and the issue is expected to end up being decided by the courts.Ann S. Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, referred to the move by G.O.P. lawmakers to oust Ms. Wolfe as a “circus.”Mr. Knodl bristled at her language and said he was not about to abdicate oversight.“Whether it’s circuslike or not, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Thank you for attending the circus.”Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, a government watchdog group, said Ms. Wolfe’s removal would be a major blow to the state, which is likely to once again be a crucial battleground for the presidential race.“The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voters and citizens can and will lose confidence and trust in our elections,” he said. More

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      Giuliani’s Upper East Side Apartment Is For Sale

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      Judith Giuliani, his ex-wife, said, it’s “no longer a home,” while Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer told a judge recently that the former mayor is “close to broke.”Apartment 10W at 45 East 66th Street went up for sale for $6.5 million in July. The prewar apartment includes “an abundance of sunshine, high ceilings, and beautiful hardwood floors,” according to the listing. The layout is “thoughtful and inviting.” The dining room is “ideal for a tranquil breakfast or cozy dinner.” Oh, and “pets are welcome” in this co-op building.The seller, Rudolph W. Giuliani, could certainly use the cash. His lawyer, Adam Katz, filed an article about the apartment being listed for sale as an exhibit to show that Mr. Giuliani, 79, “was close to broke.” That was earlier this month at a court hearing where lawyers for Smartmatic, an election technology company that sued Mr. Giuliani and Fox News in 2021 over false claims of election fraud, argued that Mr. Giuliani was using his financial state as an excuse for not sharing discovery documents.There “are a lot of bills that he’s not paying, from a $57,000 phone bill to significantly more,” Mr. Katz said at the hearing. “I think that this is very humbling for Mr. Giuliani.” It’s a precipitous fall for “America’s Mayor” — the lawsuit is among several legal matters entangling Mr. Giuliani. Last week, he surrendered at an Atlanta jail for the racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Giuliani has been identified as a co-conspirator.The controversies have left stains not just on Mr. Giuliani’s reputation, but on the apartment’s as well. It was raided by the F.B.I. in 2021, overshadowing its walking distance to Nobu and Bergdorf Goodman.Years ago, “it was a very positive thing” to prospective buyers that Mr. Giuliani lived there, said Dolly Lenz, a luxury real estate agent, who has had multiple listings in the co-op.“It was like, it’s America’s mayor, he chose this building — all very good things ascribed to him living in the same building,” she said. But today, Ms. Lenz said she “would suspect it would be wildly different.”The Sotheby’s broker currently listing Mr. Giuliani’s apartment is Serena Boardman who New York magazine once called the “broker to the fallen stars” when she won the task of marketing a different disreputable owner’s property — Bernie Madoff’s Manhattan penthouse. She did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Katz also did not respond.The Giulianis first moved into the apartment in 2002. By then, Mr. Giuliani was a national household name in the wake of 9/11.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe PenthouseJudith Giuliani, Mr. Giuliani’s ex-wife, recalled the apartment’s glory days, which coincided with Mr. Giuliani’s peak as a national household name in the wake of 9/11. By 2002, his mayoral term had ended, and he embarked on his apartment search on the Upper East Side while staying at a hotel, the New York Post reported at the time. He needed a home that matched his heft, and he wouldn’t settle — Ms. Giuliani said that he wanted a top-floor apartment.After some negotiating, they snagged the 66th Street co-op apartment for $4.77 million.“He never even saw the apartment until we had already decided to buy it,” she said, adding that the interior design and decoration was done by her. “I found it, I decorated it, I made it his home.” There, she hosted many luncheons, holidays and charity events — but it was primarily about hosting and entertaining friends and family, not work, Ms. Giuliani said. “It was home for us,” said Ms. Giuliani, 68, who was married to Mr. Giuliani for 15 years. “He was my husband, and he loved coming home,” she said. “It was a place where he went for it to be a respite.” In the paneled library room, Ms. Giuliani installed a special humidifying system and plasma TV for Mr. Giuliani, “where he could smoke cigars and relax and watch his Yankee games.”One of the main appeals of the apartment was that it was “built for entertaining,” Ms. Giuliani said. “The dining room seats 40 people,” she said. “I loved giving my themed luncheons — make an Easter egg for Easter, Valentine’s — I’m known for that, I still do that.” The Giulianis’ guest lists were just as impressive; the Kissingers, Vera Wang and George Pataki, among others, attended the events, she said. Difficult times were spent there too. “Rudy had prostate cancer, when we first met, which we also lived through in that apartment,” Ms. Giuliani said. In 2014, Mr. Giuliani tried to stop the construction of a new penthouse in the building. “It was extremely important to Rudy that he lived in a penthouse,” Judith Giuliani said.Seth Wenig/Associated PressOver the years, Mr. Giuliani’s real estate portfolio also included a Hamptons home which he bought for $3.2 million in 2004, a private locker at the storied Nat Sherman smoking lounge in Midtown Manhattan and two Palm Beach condos — “I’m just going to play some golf and relax,” he told the New York Daily News while in Florida in 2009.But the Upper East Side apartment has remained at the center of his assets. The gothic-style apartment complex was built between 1906 and 1908, and it was designated as a landmark in 1977. When architects applied to build a new penthouse addition at the top of the building, Mr. Giuliani sought to block the construction. In 2014, Curbed reported that Brian Morgenstern, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, said that a “penthouse on top of a penthouse on top of a penthouse” would be too much. The concern, on Mr. Giuliani’s part, was perhaps because at the time, his apartment was on the top floor, and he didn’t want to lose his own penthouse status.“At the time that we bought it, it was a penthouse. It was extremely important to Rudy that he lived in a penthouse,” she said. The new addition was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Mr. Giuliani was no longer at the top.The Giulianis got married in 2003, but divorce proceedings were underway by 2018. “I’m sad to know that the hero of 9/11 has become a liar,” Ms. Giuliani told The Times in 2019.Matthew Peyton/Getty Images‘I Wish Rudy Well.’His marriage would soon wane.By 2018, Ms. Giuliani filed for divorce. Mr. Giuliani’s dealings with Mr. Trump were well underway and public opinion started to turn against him. “I’m sad to know that the hero of 9/11 has become a liar,” Ms. Giuliani told The Times in 2019, of the legal battle to get from the divorce what she felt she was owed.Though she had decorated the apartment and had fond memories of her parties, “I wanted to move on,” said Ms. Giuliani, who is represented by the lawyer Dror Bikel. “He was, after all, the Mayor of the City of New York, at one point a very well respected one. So, it seemed logical that he would have that apartment.”But it’s “no longer a home,” Ms. Giuliani said. His decision to film in the library for a podcast series in 2020 “gobsmacked me.” And then came the search by the F.B.I., as part of a criminal investigation into his Ukraine dealings as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. “No matter how things ended up, there were many, many, many happy memories in that apartment,” said Ms. Giuliani. “And I wish the next person well, and I wish Rudy well.” Alain Delaquérière More

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      How Free Speech and Willful Blindness Will Play Out in the Trump Prosecution

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      More than a decade ago, a divided Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Alvarez that an elected member of a district water board in California could not be prosecuted criminally for lying to an audience about winning the Medal of Honor. The court ruled that efforts to criminalize mere lying, without linking the lie to an attempt to gain a material advantage, posed an unacceptable threat to robust exercise of First Amendment rights.Given that decision, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor investigating former President Donald Trump, was right in concluding that Mr. Trump has a First Amendment right to lie to the general public.So, where’s the legal beef in the indictment arising from the events that culminated in the storming of the Capitol brought by Mr. Smith against Mr. Trump? It’s in the fact that Mr. Smith isn’t merely charging the former president with lying; he is contending that Mr. Trump lied to gain an unlawful benefit — a second term in office after voters showed him the exit. That kind of speech-related behavior falls comfortably within what the justices call “categorical exceptions” to the First Amendment like true threats, incitements, obscenity, depictions of child sexual abuse, fighting words, libel, fraud and speech incident to criminal conduct.As the court put it in 1949 in the case of Giboney v. Empire Storage and Ice Co., “it rarely has been suggested that the constitutional freedom for speech and press extends its immunity to speech or writing used as an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute.”That is why Mr. Smith will most likely seek to prove that the former president was engaged in “speech incident to criminal conduct” when he and his co-conspirators lied to state legislators, state election officials, gullible supporters, Justice Department lawyers and Vice President Mike Pence in an illegal effort to prevent Joe Biden from succeeding him as president. Since Mr. Trump is charged with, among other crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted, Mr. Smith would clearly be right in arguing that the Alvarez decision doesn’t apply.Characterizing Mr. Trump’s words as “speech incident to criminal conduct” would neatly solve Mr. Smith’s First Amendment problem, but at a substantial cost to the prosecution. To win a conviction, the government must persuade 12 jurors to peer inside Mr. Trump’s head and find beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew he was lying when he claimed to be the winner of the 2020 election. If Mr. Trump actually believed his false assertions, his speech was not “incident to criminal conduct.”How can Mr. Smith persuade 12 jurors that no reasonable doubt exists that Mr. Trump knew he was lying? The prosecution will, no doubt, barrage the jury with reams of testimony showing that the former president was repeatedly told by every reputable adviser and administration official that no credible evidence of widespread electoral fraud existed, and that Mr. Pence had no choice but to certify Mr. Biden as the winner.But there also will likely be evidence that fervent supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts fed his narcissism with bizarre false tales of result-changing electoral fraud, and frivolous legal theories justifying interference with Mr. Biden’s certification as president-elect. Those supporters could include Rudy Giuliani; Sidney Powell, a lawyer and purveyor of wild conspiracy theories; Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, who apparently plotted with Mr. Trump to unseat the acting attorney general and take control of the department; and John Eastman, the lawyer who hatched the plan that Mr. Pence refused to follow to keep Mr. Trump in power.Maybe Mr. Trump himself will swear to his good faith belief that he won. With all that conflicting testimony, how is a conscientious juror to decide for sure what was really going on inside his head?The answer lies in the Supreme Court’s doctrine of “willful blindness.” A dozen years ago, in the case of Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for all but one justice, ruled that proof of willful blindness is the legal equivalent of proving guilty knowledge.As Justice Alito explained it: “Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances.”In other words, when a defendant, like Mr. Trump, is on notice of the potential likelihood of an inconvenient fact (Mr. Biden’s legitimate victory), and closes his eyes to overwhelming evidence of that fact, the “willfully blind” defendant is just as guilty as if he actually knew the fact. While this argument is not a slam dunk, there’s an excellent chance that 12 jurors will find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Trump hid from the truth by adopting willful blindness.Burt Neuborne is a professor emeritus at New York University Law School, where he was the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice. He was the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1981 to 1986.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. More

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      President Emmerson Mnangagwa Re-elected in Zimbabwe

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      President Emmerson Mnangagwa won another five-year term, but did so by intimidating voters and manipulating the campaign process, the opposition says.President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe claimed victory on Saturday in an election marred by widespread allegations that the governing party, ZANU-PF, had committed fraud.Mr. Mnangagwa’s victory over his closest competitor, Nelson Chamisa, after his first full term in office strengthened ZANU-PF’s grip on power in a nation it has led since independence from Britain in 1980. Over the past two decades, Zimbabwe has suffered under disastrous economic policies that have led to soaring prices, high unemployment and a medical system lacking basic drugs and equipment.Mr. Mnangagwa won 52.6 percent of the vote compared with 44 percent for Mr. Chamisa, according to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which is responsible for running the election and has faced withering criticism of showing bias toward ZANU-PF.Mr. Chamisa’s party, Citizens Coalition for Change, quickly denounced the results and vowed to challenge them.“We reject any result hastily assembled without proper verification,” Promise Mkwananzi, the party spokesman, wrote on Twitter shortly after the results were announced. “We will not relent on the people’s victory!”With Mr. Mnangagwa, 80, winning another five years in office, Zimbabwe is likely to continue to struggle to break out of its isolation from Western nations, which have demanded greater democracy and respect for human rights in exchange for helping it grapple with $18 billion in debt.Zimbabwe, a southern African nation of 16 million, has a history of election irregularities, and such tactics helped Robert Mugabe, a liberation leader turned autocrat, maintain power for nearly four decades. Mr. Mugabe was removed in a coup in 2017 by Mr. Mnangagwa and his allies. The following year, Mr. Mnangagwa eked out a victory over Mr. Chamisa in an election, winning just over 50 percent of the vote.This year’s voting, held on Wednesday, was marred by chaotic delays of more than 10 hours at some polling locations because the country’s electoral commission failed to deliver ballots on time. Thousands of voters found themselves camping overnight at polling stations because of the delays, which mostly affected urban areas, where Mr. Chamisa and his party hold most of their support.The Zimbabwean police drew global condemnation for arresting dozens of members of one of the country’s most respected election watchdogs on election night, accusing them of plotting to sow discord by releasing projected election results. The night after the raid, ZANU-PF officials offered their own election projections at a news conference, and drew no ire from the police.Before the results were announced, several independent foreign observer missions criticized the fairness and credibility of the elections. The European Union’s mission offered among the most biting critiques, saying in a statement that the government curtailed fundamental freedoms by passing repressive laws “and by acts of violence and intimidation, which resulted in a climate of fear.”Although Election Day was peaceful, “the election process fell short of many regional and international standards, including equality, universality and transparency,” the statement said.A woman casts her vote at a primary school in Glen Norah, Harare, Zimbabwe, on Thursday.Philimon Bulawayo/ReutersChristopher Mutsvangwa, the spokesman for ZANU-PF, said the allegations of vote rigging were “all humbug.” The election mechanics were foolproof, he said, with agents from every party allowed to observe the vote counting and sign off on the results in each precinct.“We have shown the whole world that we have exercised democracy,” he said.Before the voting on Wednesday, ZANU-PF used the machinery of the state to shut down opposition rallies and try to get candidates thrown off the ballot in court, analysts said. The governing party also deployed Forever Associates Zimbabwe, a pseudo-military organization run by people with close ties to the government’s intelligence agency, to intimidate voters in rural communities, said Bekezela Gumbo, a principal researcher at the Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital.The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is stacked with officials with ties to ZANU-PF, Mr. Gumbo said. Critics said that the commission had failed to produce a definitive voter roll and kept adjusting polling locations, potentially leading to confusion with voters showing up at the wrong places to cast their ballots.The electoral commission blamed court challenges that held up the printing of ballots for delays in voting on Election Day. But critics noted that the delays were mostly in Harare and other urban areas that are opposition strongholds.The commission invited all of the presidential candidates to observe the tabulation on Saturday before the results were announced.“If this is not a demonstration of transparency, then I probably do not know the definition of this word,” said Rodney Kiwa, the deputy chairman of the commission.On Wednesday afternoon, Mirirai Moyo, a mother of three, had returned to her market stall in a suburb of Harare after a failed effort to cast her vote in the morning. There were no ballots at her polling station, she said.“I can’t go back because it’s late now,” she said. “It’s sad now. This is what ZANU-PF wanted because it knew there would be people like me who won’t be able to stick around the polling stations till late.”Voters also woke up Wednesday to fliers scattered about the streets of Harare and the southern city of Bulawayo falsely claiming that Mr. Chamisa’s party was urging people not to vote, an apparent effort to suppress opposition turnout.Near some polling sites, ZANU-PF set up tables where officials were purportedly conducting exit polls. They asked voters for their personal information and whom they voted for, and in some cases intimidated citizens before they cast their vote, according to multiple news reports and social media.Zimbabwe Electoral Commission officials and polling agents carry ballot boxes from a polling station to a command center in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Thursday.Aaron Ufumeli/EPA, via ShutterstockMany had held out hope that a defeat for Mr. Mnangagwa, a former guerrilla fighter in Zimbabwe’s battle for independence from British colonial rule, would represent a clean break from the suffering under Mr. Mugabe.Under Mr. Mnangagwa’s watch, obscenely high, triple-digit inflation returned. An estimated 90 percent of the work force holds informal odd jobs, like selling vegetables by the roadside, while more educated Zimbabweans are leaving the country in growing numbers in search of economic opportunity.Nearly six in 10 Zimbabweans believe that corruption has grown worse since Mr. Mnangagwa took office, and more than 70 percent say the country is going in the wrong direction, according to Afrobarometer, a nonpartisan research firm that conducts surveys across Africa.Supporters of the president and of ZANU-PF argued that he had set up the country for economic success by luring investors despite barriers they believe have been erected by the West. Zimbabwe sits on Africa’s largest reserves of lithium, a mineral critical for electric car batteries and other clean technologies. Chinese companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in lithium production in the country.“President E.D. Mnangagwa is loved by many people because of his drive for development,” said Nyasha Musavengana, wearing a green T-shirt with the president’s picture as she participated in a rally before the election. “Brick by brick, step by step, he is fixing things in Zimbabwe.”Although Mr. Mnangagwa has talked about deeper engagement with the United States and Europe, he has also gleefully embraced rivals of Western nations, notably China and Russia. Just weeks after attending a business conference in Botswana hosted by the United States, Mr. Mnangagwa was a darling of a Russia-Africa summit in July, where he gave a speech proclaiming his support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also cheerfully accepted Mr. Putin’s gift of a helicopter.Mr. Chamisa, 45, presented a starkly different vision. A member of Parliament for the past 20 years as well as a lawyer and preacher, he has expressed an eagerness to re-engage with the United States and Europe. He leads a new party, Citizens Coalition for Change, and told Zimbabweans that he offered a break from the corruption of years past.“I voted for C.C.C. because I’m tired of suffering,” said Maggie Sibanda, 70, after casting her vote near Bulawayo. “My children are in South Africa and they want to come home, but how can they when things are so bad?”Tendai Marima contributed reporting from Bulawayo and Harare, and Jeffrey Moyo from Harare. More

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      in Elections

      The Georgia Indictment Speaks to History

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      Decades from now, when high school students want to learn about the great conspiracy against democracy that began in 2020, they could very well start with the 98-page indictment filed Monday night in Georgia, in which former president Donald Trump is accused of leading a “criminal enterprise” to stay in power.No one knows whether these charges will lead to convicting Mr. Trump and the other conspirators or to keeping him from power. But even if it doesn’t, the indictment and the evidence supporting it and the trial that, ideally, will follow it will have a lasting value.Unlike the other three cases against Mr. Trump, this one is an indictment for history, for the generations to come who will want to know precisely how the men and women in Mr. Trump’s orbit tried to subvert the Constitution and undermine American democracy and why they failed. And it is a statement for the future that this kind of conduct is regarded as intolerable and that the criminal justice system, at least in the year 2023, remained sturdy enough to try to counter it.History needs a story line to be fully understood. The federal special counsel Jack Smith told only a few pieces of the story in an indictment limited to Mr. Trump, focusing mainly on the groups of fake state electors that Mr. Trump and his circle tried to pass off as real and the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to certify them. But in Georgia, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, was unencumbered by the narrower confines of federal law and was able to use the more expansive state RICO statute to draw the clearest, most detailed picture yet of Mr. Trump’s plot.As a result, her story is a much broader and more detailed arc of treachery and deceit, naming 19 conspirators and told in 161 increments, each one an “overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy,” forming the predicate necessary to prove a violation of the RICO act. (Neither of the indictments, unfortunately, holds Mr. Trump directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot — a tale best told in the archives of the House Jan. 6 committee.)Not each of the acts is a crime, but together they add up to the most daring and highest-ranking criminal plot in U.S. history to overturn an election and steal the presidency — and a plot that appears to have violated Georgia law, leaving no question about the importance of prosecuting Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators. Ms. Willis has risen to the occasion by documenting a lucid timeline, starting with Mr. Trump’s brazenly false declaration of victory on Nov. 4, 2020, and continuing with scores of conversations between the president and his lawyers and aides as they try to persuade a number of states to decertify the vote.The narrative contains tweets that might be just eye-rolling on their own — such as Mr. Trump’s utterly false claim that Georgia Democrats had fed phony ballots into voting machines — but that in context demonstrate a relentless daily effort to perpetrate a fraud well past his forced exit from the White House on Inauguration Day.The world knows about people like Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, who was asked by Mr. Trump to “find” him enough votes to overturn the state election and who refused. It knows about how Mr. Pence rebuffed his boss’s demands to decertify the vote on Jan. 6 and of officials in other states and in the Justice Department who collectively helped save democracy by resisting pressure from the conspirators.But Ms. Willis, in trying to tell the full story, made sure the high cost paid by lesser-known figures was also recorded for the books. Specifically, the indictment focuses on the outrageous accusations made against Ruby Freeman, the Atlanta election worker who was singled out by Mr. Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani for what they insisted was ballot stuffing and turned out to be nothing of the kind.Mr. Giuliani told a Georgia House committee on Dec. 10, 2020, that Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” in order to alter votes on “crooked Dominion voting machines.” For this, Mr. Giuliani — who admitted last month that he had made false statements about the two women and is facing a defamation suit they filed — was charged in the indictment with the felony offense of making false statements.Ms. Freeman was also targeted by other conspirators charged in the case, and she may well have been chosen for that role because she is Black and was thus a more believable villain to the kinds of people who have most ardently swallowed Mr. Trump’s lies for many years. As the indictment painstakingly lays out, Stephen C. Lee, a Lutheran pastor from Illinois, went to Ms. Freeman’s home and tried to get her to admit to election fraud; he was charged with five felonies. He enlisted the help of Willie Lewis Floyd III, a former head of Black Voices for Trump, to join in intimidating Ms. Freeman; Mr. Floyd was charged with three felonies. Trevian Kutti, a publicist in the worlds of cannabis and hip-hop, was also recruited to help pressure Ms. Freeman, who said Ms. Kutti tried to get her to confess to voter fraud. Ms. Kutti now faces three felony charges.In the “vast carelessness” of their scheme, to use F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, the plotters smashed up institutions and rules without regard to the resulting damage, willfully destroying individual reputations if it might help their cause. Ms. Freeman was one of those who was smashed, exposed by Mr. Trump to ridicule and abuse, though he never paid a price. Now, thanks to Ms. Willis, Ms. Freeman’s story will reach a jury and the judgment of history, and the record will show precisely who inflicted the damage to her and to the country.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. More