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      in US Politics

      The Camp David summit signals a new cold war – this time with China | Observer editorial

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      If it sounds like a new cold war and looks like a new cold war, then it probably is a new cold war. For what other interpretation is to be placed on US president Joe Biden’s latest ramping up of diplomatic, economic and military pressure on China?Western officials tend to avoid the term, recalling as it does decades of hair-trigger confrontation with the former Soviet Union. They talk instead about enhanced security and defence cooperation and the importance of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. But such bland generalisations belie the fact that Biden is now pushing back hard at a repressive, authoritarian regime in Beijing that he and many Americans believe is determined to overthrow the international democratic, geopolitical and legal order safeguarded by the US. Last week’s groundbreaking Camp David summit hosted by Biden for Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, and South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, perfectly fitted this agenda. It produced a series of measures aimed squarely at China and its “dangerous and aggressive behaviour”.They include a trilateral mechanism to deal with perceived security threats; expanded military exercises; and increased ballistic missile cooperation – despite the risk that China could retaliate in like fashion or use economic sanctions, as in the past, to punish export-dependent Tokyo and Seoul.For Japan, the Camp David agreement marks another significant stage in its journey away from postwar pacifism towards becoming a fully fledged, fully armed member of the US-led western democratic alliance. It will add to Tokyo’s sense of growing confrontation with China.For South Korea, the trilateral pact may come to be seen as the moment it finally moved on from the bitter feud with Japan over the latter’s 20th-century colonisation of the peninsula. Credit is due to Yoon, who has taken to describing Tokyo as a “partner” with shared values and interests.Biden’s success in bringing old enemies together is a notable achievement, too. He is hoping to pull off a similar feat with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The contrast with Donald Trump’s fatuous attempts to woo Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s nuclear-armed dictator, is striking.Improved three-way cooperation in facing down the threat posed by Pyongyang may be another benefit of Camp David. Defying UN sanctions, Kim has stepped up his intimidatory missile “tests” this year. China, disappointingly, has done little to stop him. Beijing’s ally, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is positively encouraging him.While US officials are careful how they frame the new agreement, China is in no doubt it is aimed directly at itself. It follows Biden’s upgrading of the so-called Quad, which groups the US, India, Japan and Australia; the creation of Aukus, a security pact with Australia and the UK; and a raised US naval and air force profile in the Philippines, South China Sea and around Taiwan. In another message to Beijing, Biden will visit India next month.The numerous, ill-judged actions of President Xi Jinping’s regime have brought much of this down on its own head. Nevertheless, Beijing blames the west whose nefarious aim, it says, is containment designed to stifle China’s development. State media described Camp David as the launch of a “mini Nato” that will threaten regional security and exacerbate tensions.US officials reject the analogy. But the claim brings us back to the question of a new cold war. China evidently believes one has already begun. Is this really what Biden, the UK and regional allies want? If that is the case, they should have the courage to say so in terms – and explain what they plan to do if it turns “hot”. More

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      in Elections

      US hails ‘new era’ of Asia Pacific relations as Biden hosts historic summit with Japan and South Korea – live

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      From 40m agoJoe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.US officials are confident that its two main allies in the region, Japan and South Korea, share Washington’s view on most global issues, although a joint statement is expected to stop short of directly referring to China to reflect South Korean reservations about openly criticising Beijing.“Japan and South Korea are core allies – not just in the region, but around the world,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said this week, adding that Biden’s summit would “mark what we believe is a new era in trilateral cooperation”.Blinken said he expected a continued focus on North Korea “given the endless provocation it’s taken” but added that the meeting would address a “much more expansive agenda”.China has denounced the summit, saying it “opposes relevant countries forming various cliques and their practices of exacerbating confrontation and jeopardising other countries’ strategic security.”Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said this week:
      We hope the countries concerned will go with the trend of the times and do something conducive to regional peace, stability and prosperity.
      A standalone summit bringing together the leaders of Japan and South Korea would have been almost unthinkable just over a year ago, when the north-east Asian neighbours were embroiled in disputes over their bitter wartime legacy.Bilateral ties were at a low point before the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, took office in May 2022, due to compensation claims by Koreans over Japan’s use of forced labour during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, and the longstanding controversy over Korean women who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels.Yoon, a conservative, and the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appear to have resolved the forced labour dispute and established a warm relationship that has included a joint visit to a memorial to Korean victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing when the city hosted the G7 summit in May.This week, Yoon described Japan as a “partner” with shared values and interests, as his county marked the 78th anniversary of its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule.The thaw in ties has been greeted with relief in Washington as it attempts to present a united regional front against Chinese military activity near Taiwan and North Korea’s development of more powerful weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN-led sanctions.“Suffice it to say, this is a big deal,” National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday shortly before the formal start of the daylong summit.
      It is a historic event, and it sets the conditions for a more peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and a stronger and more secure United States of America.
      Friday’s summit will be the first time Joe Biden has used Camp David to host international leaders.Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.The US justice department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the attack on the US Capitol to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election, according to court documents.The sentence, if imposed, would be by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on 6 January 2021. The Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, has received the longest sentence to date – 18 years.Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest justice department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group – known for street fights with leftwing activists – when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first election debate with Democrat Joe Biden.During the months-long trial, prosecutors argued that the Proud Boys viewed themselves as foot soldiers fighting for Trump as the Republican spread lies that Democrats stole the election from him, and were prepared to go to war to keep their preferred leader in power.“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election,” prosecutors wrote in their filing on Thursday.
      The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.
      A judge declared Donald Trump had filed a “frivolous” appeal from his decision not to dismiss the first of writer E Jean Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits against him.US district judge Lewis Kaplan criticized the former president’s “delay” tactics, writing in a 17-page ruling:
      This case was largely stalled for years due in large part to Mr Trump’s repeated efforts to delay, which are chronicled in the Court’s prior decisions.
      Donald Trump said he had canceled a press conference scheduled for next week in which he claimed he would release a report containing new “evidence” of fraud in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.The former president, who was charged in Georgia last week with conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, said on Thursday that his lawyers would prefer putting his allegations in court filings instead.Trump, posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, wrote:
      Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings.
      Trump had claimed on Tuesday that he would publish a 100-page report at the event, which was due to be held on Monday in Bedminister, New Jersey, that would exonerate him.No compelling evidence of wide-scale fraud has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims.Twice impeached and now indicted in four cases: Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida, Washington and Georgia over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is also confronting a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the judge overseeing his federal election interference trial to push back the start date to April 2026, nearly 18 months after the next presidential election.The lawyers filed the request to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, after Trump was indicted earlier this month on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructed an official proceeding and engaged in a conspiracy against rights.Federal prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith had proposed to schedule the trial for the start of January 2024, saying there was a significant public interest in expediting the prosecution.“A January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial,” prosecutors wrote.
      It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case in which the defendant – the former president of the United States – is charged with three criminal conspiracies.
      In their court filing on Thursday, Trump’s attorneys argued a years-long delay was necessary due to the “massive” amount of information they will have to review and because of scheduling conflicts with the other criminal cases Trump is facing.
      If we were to print and stack 11.5 million pages of documents, with no gap between pages, at 200 pages per inch, the result would be a tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky. That is taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.
      Good morning, US politics blog readers. Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked the judge presiding over his federal 2020 election interference case to schedule his trial for April 2026 – more than two and a half years from now.In a 16-page filing on Thursday, the lawyers argued that putting Trump on trial this coming January – as federal prosecutors have requested – would mark a “rush to trial” that would violate his constitutional rights and be “flatly impossible” given the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through. Trump’s lawyers wrote:
      The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.
      Special counsel Jack Smith is expected to oppose the April 2026 start date, which would put the trial long after the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination. US district court judge Tanya Chutkan has said she wants to set a trial date at her next scheduled hearing on 28 August.Meanwhile, Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David today for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries, as the US hopes to cement ties with its two most important allies in Asia amid an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      11am: Joe Biden will welcome the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for a trilateral summit.
      3pm: Biden, Yoon and Kishida will hold a joint press conference.
      6pm: Biden will leave Camp David for Andrews, where he will fly to Reno
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia takes on Trump and his allies | podcast

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      Until five months ago, no former US president had ever faced criminal charges. As of Monday evening, Donald Trump is facing 91 felony counts. The 97-page indictment handed down by a Fulton county grand jury in Georgia includes 41 criminal counts, 13 of them against Trump. This case may represent the biggest legal peril for Trump to date and it could see him behind bars, no matter who wins the presidential election next year.
      Joan E Greve and Sam Levine discuss every possible outcome

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s indictment can’t solve the real threat: our undemocratic electoral system | Lawrence Douglas

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      Read the indictment handed down by a Fulton county, Georgia, grand jury: weighing in at 98 pages, it is a breathtaking document, granular in its description of a coordinated criminal enterprise that brazenly broke numerous Georgia state laws.The 19 persons named in the racketeering charges are not, however, members of some sleazy organized crime syndicate; rather, they include the former president of the United States, his chief of staff, a former mayor of New York, a former law school dean and a former official in the US Department of Justice. Together they stand accused of knowingly and willfully joining a conspiracy to subvert the outcome of a fair, democratic election.Placed alongside Trump’s other three indictments, the Georgia case bears the greatest similarity to the federal charges, filed earlier this month, accusing Trump of criminal acts that culminated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Still, the Georgia matter carries different risks and rewards.Georgia’s racketeering statute is a more flexible instrument than its federal counterpart, and so empowers the prosecution to craft a broad narrative linking Trump’s lying to the state’s officials, his intimidating and defaming its election officers, and his sanctioning a slate of false Georgian electors for his nationwide efforts to overturn Biden’s victory. And as the constitution’s pardon power only extends to federal matters, a state conviction would deny Trump the opportunity to pardon himself (itself an act of dubious constitutionality).In declaring that she intends to try all 19 co-conspirators in a single trial, however, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis risks turning the proceeding into a long and unfocused affair, marred by the grandstanding of multiple lawyers for the defense. Add to this the fact that while federal trials cannot be televised, this case arguably could be, raising the concern that a solemn proceeding could turn into a media circus.There is, of course, another deeper source of alarm. Much as we might hope that the criminal justice system will put an end to the clear and present danger that Trump poses to our constitutional democracy, the prospect remains that the ultimate judgment on Trump will be passed by the voters in November 2024. And this reminds us why Trump trained his lies on the result in Georgia in 2020.Biden defeated Trump by nearly 8m votes in 2020, a substantial if not overwhelming margin of victory. Matters were very different in the electoral college. A combined total of 44,000 votes handed Biden victory in the swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.Had Trump succeeded in “finding” 45,000 more votes in these three states, the 2020 election would have resulted in an electoral college tie, an unseemly result that, by the terms of the constitution, hands the task of electing the president to the House of Representatives. In a travesty of democratic rule, when the House elects the president, each state delegation, and not each representative, gets a single vote, and while Democrats still controlled the House after the 2020 election, Republicans actually enjoyed a majority of state delegations. Trump would have won.While it is hard to imagine Trump defeating Biden in the popular vote in 2024, the electoral college remains another matter. Polls already predict another tight electoral race. Maga zealots and election deniers continue to target and attack independent election officials in the key swing states. Add to the mix the possibility of a third-party candidate, who, like Ralph Nader in 2000, would have no prospect of winning but could peel away votes in these crucial states, and the perils magnify.Generations of Americans have recognized the defects in the way we elect our president. The first serious effort to eliminate the system came in 1816 and hundreds have followed, all failing given the extreme difficulty of amending our constitution. It is a grotesque fact that a candidate who has made clear his hostility to democratic governance could only be returned to office through an antiquated, dysfunctional and anti-democratic electoral system.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College More

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      in US Politics

      US senator warns top Saudi over refusal to testify on PGA golf deal

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      A senior US lawmaker has challenged a Saudi Arabian official’s refusal to voluntarily testify before a Senate committee investigating the kingdom’s controversial golf deal with the PGA Tour, saying officials should be prepared to be subject to American laws and oversight if they invest in the US.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator from Connecticut who serves as chairman of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, also said he would consider “other legal methods” to force Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), to testify if he continued to refuse.Al-Rumayyan, who also serves as the chairman of Saudi Aramco and the Premier League club Newcastle United, was given until 18 August to comply with the committee’s documents request.Any move to testify before the Senate could have significant implications for al-Rumayyan, including being subjected to questions about the controversial so-called “anti-corruption” drive headed by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. That effort saw assets transferred to the PIF, and the alleged use by the kingdom of PIF-owned jets to transport Saudi agents who killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.There is no suggestion that al-Rumayyan had any knowledge or personal involvement in the matter.While the increasingly fractious exchanges between the Senate committee and the PIF appear to be centered on the Saudi-backed merger between the PGA Tour and the LIV Tour, Blumenthal’s comments strike at larger concerns in Washington over Saudi Arabia’s investment ambitions.Blumenthal said the PIF, which is worth about $780bn, already has “extensive business dealings” in the US and was much more than a “passive investor”. The sovereign wealth fund holds a $3.5bn stake in Uber, has recently established a US subsidiary, and holds investments in prominent US venture capital firms.“In short, PIF cannot have it both ways: if it wants to engage with the United States commercially, it must be subject to United States law and oversight,” Blumenthal said.The Senate committee investigating the PGA deal sent its first request to al-Rumayyan on 21 June, inviting him to testify at a 11 July hearing. The PIF declined, citing scheduling conflicts.In a letter released on Wednesday, Blumenthal said the committee’s second request – for al-Rumayyan to testify at an acceptable date in September – was met with a letter from PIF’s legal counsel, saying that al-Rumayyan would be “an inappropriate witness” because he was a minister “bound by the kingdom’s laws regarding the confidentiality of certain information”.The senator rejected the claim, pointing to a US district court decision in California, which ruled that al-Rumayyan was not exempt from testifying in legal matters connected to the PIF’s commercial activities. The court added that Saudi Arabia’s “sovereign considerations” were diminished by the PIF’s intent to benefit from its investments in the US.The PIF’s position – that al-Rumayyan deserves sovereign immunity because of his position as a Saudi official, and his obligations to the Saudi state – appears to directly contradict the kingdom’s public stance on other deals.In the UK, the PIF’s takeover of a controlling stake in Newcastle in October 2021 was given the green light after the club was given “legally binding assurances” that the kingdom would not have any control over the club.The PIF has declined in the past to address the apparent contradiction. The fund did not immediately comment on the Blumenthal letter. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump prosecutor Fani Willis faces racist abuse after indicting ex-US president

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote. “They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.“I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe,” she said.As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool. More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia indictment lays out Trump election plot in all its shocking detail

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      There’s no other way to say it: the 98-page indictment handed down by a Fulton county grand jury on Monday represents the most aggressive effort to hold Donald Trump and allies accountable for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The document is staggering in its breadth and the ambition of its charges. The 41 counts of crimes in it, including 13 against Trump, detail the lies the former president and his co-defendants told the public about fraud to try and keep him in power. It doesn’t back away from charging Trump’s attorneys and inner circle with crimes for coordinating a plan to create slates of fake electors and to stop Congress from counting votes. Some of the state’s 16 fake electors themselves also face charges. And it also casts a wide net, not letting those who breached voting equipment and intimidated poll workers off the hook.Instead, the indictment tells perhaps the most comprehensive story to date of one of the most brazen efforts to date to subvert American democracy.Legally, the Georgia case may represent the biggest legal peril for Trump to date. If he wins the presidential election next year, Trump cannot pardon himself, something he could theoretically do if he is convicted on similar charges pending in federal court. In Georgia, a defendant must serve five years in prison before a pardon is even considered by the state board of pardon and paroles. Unlike many other states, the governor of Georgia does not have the ability to unilaterally pardon people.The focus of the indictment – Trump’s efforts to stay in power – is the same as the federal charges Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel, filed earlier this month. But the two cases are significantly different. Smith’s case focuses squarely on Trump and his specific efforts to overturn the election, leaving other co-conspirators unnamed and uncharged (for now). The Fulton county case, brought by Fani Willis, the district attorney, uses precise detail to place Trump at the center of a large criminal enterprise that includes nearly 50 people (19 of them are named, 30 are not).Of course, there is more of a risk to bringing a sprawling criminal indictment. The case is likely to be tied up in extensive procedural battles before even moving forward to a trial. Willis said Monday she intends to try all 19 defendants together, setting up a potential blockbuster, but complicated trial. Willis has not shied away from such challenges in the past, relying on the same Georgia racketeering statute at the heart of the Trump case to successfully get convictions against Atlanta teachers and is currently using them in a Rico case against the rapper Young Thug and the YSL gang.“Jack Smith seems to be on a mission to get this done and to focus on Donald Trump,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University. The Georgia case, he said, was “very different”.“All of these actors are being held to account,” he said. “What might lack in efficiency and expediency in Georgia is made up for in the fact that I think Fani Willis is really trying to tell a narrative here about what these individuals did in her view to undermine and destroy American democracy.”That story, according to the indictment, began the morning after election day in 2020. Speaking at the White House, Trump lied about the election results. As votes were still being counted, Trump claimed there was “a fraud” on the American public and said “frankly, we did win this election”, he said. The speech is “Act 1” in the indictment – the start of the conspiracy to keep Trump in power.The indictment goes on to do something extraordinary – it translates lies that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell told about the election into criminal acts. When Giuliani and Powell falsely claimed fraud at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters, they were furthering a criminal conspiracy. When Giuliani appeared at a Georgia legislative hearing and lied about fraudulent ballots being cast, he made false statements, a crime in Georgia, the indictment says.In one of its most significant sections, the indictment also brings criminal charges against two people who sought to intimidate and harass Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Fulton county election workers who were at the center of false claims of fraud amplified by Giuliani. Both women faced vicious harassment after the 2020 election that upended their lives. The indictment details how Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Kanye West and R Kelly, worked with two other men, Harrison Floyd and Stephen Lee, to try and pressure Freeman into confessing to voter fraud. Kutti showed up at Freeman’s doorstep, eventually met with her, and told her to confess to voter fraud or else people would come for her within 48 hours and she would go to jail.Willis’s decision to translate the episode into criminal charges is significant. It underscores the breadth with which Willis is framing the conspiracy – no episode is too tangential, or harebrained, to escape her scrutiny. It also amounts to the first time that anyone has faced criminal charges related to the harassment of Freeman and Moss, two Black women who have come to symbolize the human toll of Trump’s lies about the election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWillis also doesn’t shy away from charging the cadre of lawyers who sought to provide legal cover for Trump with fringe ideas. Ken Chesebro, a little-known lawyer who authored a key memorandum laying out a strategy for fake electors, was charged with multiple crimes, including conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer, and conspiracy to commit false statements and writings. Jeffrey Clark, a justice department official who tried to pressure superiors to send a letter claiming fraud in Georgia, was charged with multiple crimes. As does John Eastman, the lawyer who tried to provide a legal pretext for Congress to overturn the election.For the first time, a high-level White House aide, Mark Meadows, also faces criminal charges. The indictment cites multiple meetings Meadows had with state lawmakers across the country to get them to try and overturn the election results. It also cites a December meeting Meadows and Trump held with John McEntee, another White House aide, in which he and Trump requested McEntee prepare a memo outlining how to delay the counting and certification of electoral college votes. The document outlines Meadows presence on the telephone call in which Trump infamously pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the election. In doing so, Trump and Meadows committed a felony by soliciting Raffensperger to violate his oath as a public officer.Lastly, Willis makes it clear the story of Trump’s subversion includes efforts by his allies to breach voting equipment. Similar to charges filed in Michigan earlier this month, this marks a significant attempt to hold Trump accountable for efforts to sow doubt about the actual machinery of elections. As Trump claimed fraud, an election official in Coffee county helped his allies gain unauthorized access to voting equipment. The information extracted was passed on to other election deniers who were trying to prove the outlandish idea that the equipment was rigged.While Willis’s indictment is complex and contains 161 overt acts, she boils down the heart of it before even listing the charges.“Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on 3 November 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other defendants charged in this indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” she says.While she goes on to list all of the complex crimes Trump and allies committed, many of the paragraphs in the indictment end the same way, reminding the public that each action was “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy”. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s latest charges: the case for the cases against an ex-president | Editorial

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      Even close followers of the news could be forgiven for losing track of the criminal proceedings against Donald Trump. His indictment in Georgia is his second in a fortnight, and his fourth in total. The 13 new counts added to the scorecard bring the total – so far – to 91. What was once the precedent-shattering prospect of a former president facing trial on serious charges now seems oddly commonplace. That’s without mentioning the two impeachments he survived in office, or the multiple civil cases against him.Like the federal charges brought by the special counsel Jack Smith earlier this month, these are vastly graver matters than those relating to the payment of hush money to a pornography star, or even to the retention of classified national security documents. The federal case also addresses his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. But Mr Trump would have less ability to interfere with a state-level case if re-elected, and would not be able to pardon himself. The use of Georgia’s racketeering legislation, broader than the federal equivalent, is also striking, and not only because it is usually associated with the pursuit of mobsters. It does not require prosecutors to prove that defendants directly broke the law, but that they knowingly coordinated with others who did so. The charging of 18 alleged co-conspirators may increase the likelihood of former associates flipping and assisting the prosecution.Nonetheless, the pattern is well established. Prosecutors present detailed evidence against Mr Trump, enlarging on what was already in the public domain. He dismisses the charges as a “witch-hunt”. Republicans who briefly shunned him after the storming of the Capitol now rally to his cause once more. The danger of overestimating the difference that these cases could make on next year’s election is similarly well rehearsed. Most voters made up their minds on Mr Trump long ago. He claims each charge as further evidence of the grand conspiracy he falsely claims denied him victory in 2020 and, therefore, as mandating more support, including financial. The former president himself told voters recently that “we need one more indictment to close out the election”. Previous charges appeared to boost his lead over his Republican rival Ron DeSantis, who is trailing far behind him.His favourability ratings fell among Republicans following his June indictment over illegally holding classified documents, and last year’s midterms were a reminder of the differences between primary and general election voters. In purely practical terms, the need to fight – and even testify in – criminal cases will be a time-consuming distraction while trying to campaign for the presidency.Still, the next election is more likely to be swayed by Joe Biden’s ability to convince voters that the economy is thriving – something they are unwilling to believe as yet – and by campaigning on issues such as abortion. This month, citizens in Ohio overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional amendment that Republicans were trying to rush through to fend off abortion rights protections, demonstrating the continued commitment of voters to safeguarding access – and their growing awareness of Republican efforts to tilt elections. Many grow more determined as they see more such efforts.In contrast, the impact of each set of criminal charges, even if they are more serious than the last, is inevitably reduced somewhat as they accumulate. Democracy is not only about contests of popularity: it cannot survive without procedures of accountability.
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