Number of Trump Allies Facing Election Interference Charges Keeps Growing
"Updated: Judge warns Trump of potential jail time for violating gag order"
Related:
You Trumpanzees have your election fraud conspiracy theories but the law has Trump's co-conspirators by the gonads. Three words the GOP would rather not see together in the same sentence? Fake electors scheme. P - Too bad, they own it along with the pathetic 2000 Mules, Cyber Ninjas nothing-burger in AZ and Fox News' 787.5 million settlement....capitulation for lying their asses off....with Dominion Voting Systems over defamation charges. P - Giuliani and Meadows Among Trump Pals Charged in Arizona’s 2020 Election Probe PILING ON Seven attorneys and aides were indicted in total Wednesday. [...]Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, and now Arizona have all charged at least some of those who participated in their respective fake elector schemes, while an investigation is ongoing in Wisconsin. Prosecutors in New Mexico and Pennsylvania announced they would not bring charges on the matter. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174300519
Prosecutors are sending a warning as Donald Trump and his supporters continue to spread conspiracy theories: that disrupting elections can bear a heavy legal cost.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald J. Trump’s former personal lawyer, faces charges in Georgia and Arizona. Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset report on state elections prosecutions.
April 26, 2024
Fifty-three people who tried to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election have now been criminally charged.
The indictments have been brought in four swing states that will be crucial to the upcoming election, most recently on Wednesday in Arizona, where Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general, said that she could “not allow American democracy to be undermined.” The message she and other prosecutors are sending represents a warning as Mr. Trump and his supporters continue to spread election conspiracy theories ahead of another presidential contest: that disrupting elections can bear a heavy legal cost.
Mr. Trump’s own legal complications are also growing. On Wednesday, he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in election interference investigations in both Arizona and Michigan. He has already been charged in Georgia while facing two federal prosecutions and a criminal trial in Manhattan related to hush money payments made to a porn star.
What’s more, Mr. Trump’s top legal strategist, Boris Epshteyn, was indicted in Arizona on Wednesday.
There remains a possibility that Mr. Trump’s aides and allies will be put on trial for manipulating an election on his behalf, while he is not. If he is re-elected president in November, the federal courts, or even Congress, could shield him from having to face trial in the Georgia election interference case, at least while he is in office, on the grounds that a president sitting in an Atlanta courtroom for weeks or months would be unable to carry out his constitutional duties.
He could also use his executive powers to halt the two federal cases against him.
“I assume, should these constitutional concerns about putting Trump on trial while president play out, there would be efforts to sever the other defendants, and no reason for the trials as to those defendants not to proceed,” said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Columbia University.
Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, charged all 11 fake Arizona electors and seven Trump advisers.Credit...Rebecca Noble/Reuters
Democrats are leading all of the state prosecutions, though they have moved slowly. None of the cases are likely to come to trial before the election, a reality that has frustrated many on the left. While Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has been investigating since early 2021, her racketeering case has been slowed by its scope and complexity, and by efforts to disqualify her.
Ms. Willis brought charges last August against Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies and advisers, laying out a number of ways she said they had conspired to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss in the state.
Cases in Michigan and Nevada have focused solely on the Republicans whom the Trump campaign deployed as fake electors in those states. Having slates of people claiming to be electors for Mr. Trump was an integral part of the effort to keep him in office after his loss at the polls in 2020.
Ms. Mayes charged all 11 people who served as fake Arizona electors, and seven Trump advisers. Four of those advisers now face charges in both Georgia and Arizona: Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff; Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign operative who played a leading role in the fake electors scheme; and John Eastman, a legal architect of the elector plan.
Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer who had been one of his staunchest defenders, was also charged in both states; she pleaded guilty to a felony last year in Georgia. During a tearful court appearance .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/jenna-ellis-guilty-trump-georgia.html .. in Atlanta, she said, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump.”
[Insert: Ouch. Where had you been all the time before, Jenna.]
Republican leaders, however, have been defiant in the face of the prosecutions. “We will not be deterred by this overreach,” the Arizona G.O.P. said in a statement Wednesday after a grand jury had handed up the charges, echoing the stances of leaders in other states.
[Overreach. What should law abiding Americans, including those working in the legal system do other than prosecute those who so obviously acted in breach of the laws of the land. Where is the overreach?]
Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, said in an interview that “I don’t think that this is going to discourage the base of the Republican Party from engaging in politics,” adding, “I think what it actually does is it heightens, to an entirely new level, the importance of winning the 2024 election.”
But a number of those who have been indicted are lawyers, which may give pause to lawyers advising the current Trump campaign.
“There will be more caution on the part of the lawyers,” said Manny Arora, who represents Kenneth Chesebro, another legal architect of the fake elector plot. Mr. Chesebro, who pleaded guilty to a felony in Georgia, has emerged as a key witness in all of the state inquiries, including one in Wisconsin, which has not yet led to charges.
Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, faces election interference charges in Georgia and Arizona. Al Drago for The New York Times
“While we all agree that there’s no chance in the world the cases will be resolved prior to the election,” Mr. Arora said, “it would be nice to have the cases resolved so we can have some clear guidance as to what does and what doesn’t cross the line.”
No evidence has emerged to support Mr. Trump’s stolen election claims.The defense teams in the state election cases are generally not challenging the evidence prosecutors have put forth, instead making arguments on First Amendment or procedural grounds.
If nothing else, the cases have created divisions among the many defendants.
Some have renounced what took place after the 2020 election; others, including state-level party leaders who acted as Trump electors, have dug in.
Some of the fake electors were local party activists, like James Renner, a Michigan state trooper; charges against him were dropped after he reached a cooperation agreement last year. He expressed regret .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/us/michigan-trump-fake-elector.html .. at what had taken place, telling state investigators that he “felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.”
Nick Somberg, a Republican congressional candidate in Michigan, is representing Meshawn Maddock, a former co-chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, who is among those charged. In a social media post that recently surfaced, Mr. Somberg referred to Mr. Renner as the state’s “star snitch.”
That led Kristen D. Simmons, the judge presiding over pretrial hearings in Michigan, to issue a warning this week, saying she did not want “to be taking time away from my judicial duties to address comments made on Facebook posts.”
She added, “It’s juvenile, and it’s ridiculous.”
Mr. Somberg defended his comments in an interview and said he worried about the chilling effects of the case. “Are people going to be so outspoken, seeing what happened to these Republicans?” he said.
But he added, “I don’t think the election was stolen.”
[Assholes like Somberg are struggling to have it both ways. Rather than condemn their fellow Republicans as lawbreakers they duck and weave. ]
Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics. More about Danny Hakim
Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. More about Richard Fausset
By Dana Milbank Columnist| May 10, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EDT
Donald Trump and defense attorney Todd Blanche at the New York Supreme Court on Thursday. (Jeenah Moon/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
NEW YORK — My friend and former colleague Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/ .. , has provided indispensable legal analysis during Donald Trump’s hush money trial. But his most important insight into the trial is the need for cushioning. Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics
When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”
He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.
The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.
Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much irritation to the defendant .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/03/trump-napping-gaza-protestors-hush-money-trial/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9 ). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.
Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.
Those wishing to attend the proceedings start to line up around 6 a.m. for the 9:30 a.m. trial, in the middle of a media bivouac of satellite trucks, stand-up platforms and acres of police barriers. Those admitted to the courtroom (one reporter per outlet) and the overflow room (where video and audio are piped in) can’t watch Trump’s rants in the hallway, just steps away, and those in the “pool” to watch Trump’s rants can’t watch the trial.
Still, there are small pleasures: On the TV screens in the overflow room, right under the video feed of Trump at the defense table, is a chyron displaying the words “New York County Supreme Criminal.”
Journalists on Thursday report from outside the Manhattan Criminal Court. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
I expected to spend much of my year covering Trump this way, watching his trials in New York, D.C., Georgia and Florida. But suddenly, this trial — the least important of the four — looks like it will be the only one to get underway before the election.
In Florida on Tuesday, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee and a thorough Trump partisan, postponed indefinitely his trial in the classified documents case. In Georgia on Wednesday, an appeals court agreed to hear an appeal from Trump that will almost certainly block the racketeering trial there from occurring this year. Last month, a Trump-friendly majority on the Supreme Court signaled that it would handle Trump’s sweeping immunity claims in such a way that will likely postpone his trial in the Jan. 6, 2021, case until after the election.
For a candidate who moans nonstop about a “rigged” justice system, it looks more as though the deck is stacked in his favor. Yet Trump may be sorry when his time in court comes to an end in a couple of weeks. He will no longer be able to claim that his obligations in court keep him from the campaign trail (he tends to play golf on his days away from the trial anyway), and he won’t be able to complain about how he’s being persecuted by prosecutors and judges.
In the hush money trial, he’s practically begging to be jailed for contempt of court. Justice Juan Merchan .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/31/trump-judge-merchan-indictment/?itid=lk_inline_manual_21 , finding Trump in contempt for a 10th time on Monday for violating a gag order preventing Trump from attacking witnesses, pleaded: “Mr. Trump, it’s important to understand that the last thing I want to do is to put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president, as well. There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me.”
Yet 48 hours later, before Stormy Daniels’s testimony, Trump toyed with the judge some more. He posted and then deleted a message on his Truth Social platform about the “CROOKED” judge “threatening me with JAIL,” while also claiming the judge left “no time for lawyers to prepare” for Daniels. (Her name had been on the witness list for months.)
People wait to enter the courtroom after the lunch break in former president Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York on Tuesday. (Mary Altaffer/AP)
Prosecutors don’t announce the order of witnesses, as a precaution to keep Trump from attacking them. So after waiting for three hours Monday morning to secure a seat, I learned that I was in for a day of accounting testimony — important to the case, but deadly tedious.
“Is this another MDS voucher?”
“What’s the voucher number?”
“What account is this coming from?”
“And the invoice amount?”
“Is there a check number on the stub?”
“What is it?”
Over, and over, and over again.
The only relief Monday was provided by Trump’s lawyers, who complained about everything, no matter how picayune, and without regard to whether their complaint had any truth. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche complained at length that the defense had not been provided with the name of one of the witnesses; her name was on the list of witnesses publicly disclosed during jury selection. Blanche argued that having the witness recalled to provide additional testimony would prejudice the jury against the defense. The testimony in question? The witness was going to read three of Trump’s tweets.
In the courtroom that morning, Trump’s lawyers tried to delay the day’s proceedings so they could raise more objections to the judge; outside the courtroom in the afternoon, Trump complained that the trial was taking too long.
But Tuesday brought blessed relief from the tedium. A witness from the publisher of “Trump: How to Get Rich” testified.
“What’s depicted in the cover photo?”
“Donald J. Trump.”
“And what’s the largest word on the cover?”
“Trump.”
“And what percentage of the cover is the word ‘Trump’?”
“It looks about roughly 30 percent to me.”
The prosecutor then had the witness read passages from the book, such as: “For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.”
In cross examination, Blanche tried to suggest Trump’s “ghostwriter” was behind such sentiments — and moments later denied to the judge that he had done any such thing.
Then came the storm.
The content of Daniels’s testimony wasn’t new — she had written or said most of it before — but hearing the prurient account in open court, with Trump at the defense table, was still stunning. It stunned Trump, for the judge had to admonish him, through his lawyers, for “cursing audibly.”
[LOL Chickens coming, Donald, m' lad. See the chickens comin...]
“Mr. Blanche, did you speak to your client?” Merchan asked after a break.
Trump lawyer Susan Necheles invoked Daniels’s 2018 “Make America Horny Again” tour, and she displayed the products Daniels has sold, including a “Stormy, Saint of Indictments” candle. “That was you selling your merchandise, right?” Necheles asked.
“That is me doing my job,” answered Daniels, who noted that her own crass commercializing was “not unlike Mr. Trump.”
Necheles, who asserted that Daniels has “a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real,” asked her: “And now you have a story you have been telling about having sex with President Trump; right?”
Replied Daniels: “And if that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”
Necheles was skeptical that Daniels, after acting in “over 200 porn movies,” would really become lightheaded, as Daniels claimed, after seeing Trump on a bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.
“Yes,” Daniels rejoined. “When you are not expecting a man twice your age to be in their underwear.”
The Trump lawyer asked Daniels if she knew what was in the indictment against Trump.
“There was a lot of indictments,” Daniels responded, to laughter.
Necheles mentioned a Daniels tweet saying she was “the best person to flush the orange turd down,” then asked: “You said you were going to ‘flush’ President Trump?”
“I didn’t say ‘President Trump,’” Daniels shot back. “It says ‘orange turd.’ So, if that’s what’s interpreted by you …”
There was more laughter in the courtroom. Or so I’m told. By this time, I was sitting at home in an ergonomic office chair with plenty of memory foam.
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday). Twitter
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
