Inside the Hive host Brian Stelter talks to Rudy GiulianibiographerAndrew Kirtzman and Vanity Fair executive editor Claire Howorth about the epic fall of “America’s Mayor” and his yearslong, symbiotic relationship with Donald Trump. “There’s something about Rudy that makes Donald Trump swoon,” says Kirtzman.
A veteran political reporter, Kirtzman considers the Giuliani saga to be “one of the great rise and fall stories of our lifetime.” He recalls Giuliani being an “extraordinary prosecutor” and was alongside him on September 11, remarking that the former New York City mayor acted as a “calm, fatherly general.”
“The Giuliani that I watched from two feet away that whole morning was, if anything, more impressive than the Giuliani that people watched across the world on television,” Kirtzman says, adding that “there was a reason he became the most admired man in America for a short time.” But Kirtzman watched Giuliani spiral after his failed 2008 presidential bid, and sink even lower in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
When asked what happened to Giuliani, Kirtzman says that if “you had to boil it down to one word it would be ‘desperation.’ It would be desperation for power and money kind of on the way up, and then desperation to recapture his relevance, his fame after he lost the 2008 presidential race.” It’s after that letdown that Giuliani “went downhill into the clutches of Donald Trump’s arms, it was the flameout of his race for president.”
More recently, of course, Giuliani was central to Trump’s first impeachment, over pressuring Ukraine for dirt on the Bidens, and his second, in advising the president as he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Giuliani appears to be co-conspirator 1 in the DOJ’s latest indictment of Trump and may face charges himself in Washington, DC, as well as Georgia.
“I think that Giuliani will never admit any kind of fault,” says Kirtzman, adding: “He is never going to admit that he was wrong about anything. And right now, he’s throwing spaghetti against the wall, just like hoping something will stick, hoping he can muddy the waters, but he’s in terrible trouble.”
Over the last several months, Donald Trump has indicated that he won’t attend the first Republican debate, which will be hosted by Fox News on August 23. Trump has argued that there is no political upside given his double-digit lead over his nearest rival, Ron DeSantis. That argument has gotten stronger as DeSantis has stumbled, complete with a campaign manager shake-up this week. “I feel it’s sort of foolish to be doing [the debate],” Trump told Breitbart News as recently as August 2.
But according to two high-level Republican consultants, Trump’s calculus could be evolving, as his legal exposure has gotten worse. On August 1, in Washington, DC, Trump was indicted for a third time, on four federal charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. He may soon rack up a fourth indictment, this time in Georgia. Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has been investigating Trump’s efforts to pressure local officials to flip the state’s vote totals from a Biden victory to a Trump one. Trump has publicly downplayed the severity of these indictments, but in private, he has reportedly grown increasingly angryand rattled by the mounting criminal charges.
“He wants to be center stage,” one of the consultants told Vanity Fair. Trump’s walking onstage amid existential legal peril would create the sort of high drama that thrills his voters. The debate would also put Trump, a skilled verbal brawler, in an arena where he could rhetorically batter the other candidates. “No one there will handle him well at all. Each of the candidates [are] predictable,” the second consultant said.
Multiple sources close to Trump, however, cautioned that nothing has changed about his intention to skip the debate. “I don’t think he will participate,” a senior Trump adviser said. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
In the meantime, Fox News has continued to do a full-court press to get Trump to participate. On August 1, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and network president Jay Wallace dined with Trump at his Bedminster golf club just hours after Jack Smith unsealed the 2020-election indictment. According to two sources briefed on the dinner, the Fox executives made the case that the debate is important to the GOP base. The conversation was wide-ranging, the two sources said. Sources close to Trump said that Trump told Scott and Wallace that firing Tucker Carlson was “the worst business decision in history.” Trump asked why Carlson was ousted, but Scott and Wallace wouldn’t say.
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
One thing all the sources I spoke to agreed on is that Trump will stoke the will-he-or-won’t-he-appear speculation for as long as he can. “He’s the sort of person who makes up his mind in the last moments,” a source close to Trump said.
Donald Trump was arraigned on Thursday and pleaded not guilty to a whole bunch of crimes. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the third time he’s done it since April, on account of having engaged in all kinds of alleged criminal activity, including hush money payments to a porn star and willful retention of classified documents, with some possible conspiracy to obstruct justice on the side. In this case, today’s not guilty plea was in response to the Justice Department indicting him for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, and accusing him of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
The four charges alone, should Trump be convicted, could result in decades in prison; the sentence for obstructing an official proceeding carries a penalty of up to 20 years behind bars. The judge randomly assigned to the election case, Tanya Chutkan, has handed down some of the toughest sentences of all her colleagues when it comes to January 6 defendants. At one sentencing last year, she declared: “It is not patriotism, it is not standing up for America to stand up for one man—who knows full well that he lost—instead of the Constitution he was trying to subvert.” In 2021, she ruled that the January 6 committee could access documents from Trump’s time in the White House—a decision that was affirmed by an appeals court—saying, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”
Trump has naturally spent the days since he was indicted ranting on Truth Social about how he’s being unfairly persecuted and claiming “Election Interference.” He’s also baselessly suggested that Joe Bidendirected Attorney General Merrick Garland to charge him “with as many crimes as can be concocted” as retribution for doing well in the polls. (As an aside, he also appeared to suggest he’ll use the Justice Department to go after his enemies should he win a second term, writing “SOON, IN 2024, IT WILL BE OUR TURN.”) Prior to his arraignment, he wrote on Truth Social, the social media network he founded after being kicked off of Twitter following the insurrection: “I AM NOW GOING TO WASHINGTON, D.C., TO BE ARRESTED FOR HAVING CHALLENGED A CORRUPT, RIGGED, & STOLEN ELECTION. IT IS A GREAT HONOR, BECAUSE I AM BEING ARRESTED FOR YOU. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” (Throughout his indictments and the criminal investigations that preceded them, Trump has attempted to convince his followers that they are also at risk of being prosecuted for the various crimes he’s been accused of committing.)
It’s unclear at this time when Trump will actually go to trial for attempting to overturn the election. Special counsel Jack Smith has said it should be a “speedy trial,” while an attorney for Trump toldToday’s Savannah Guthrie on Wednesday that Trump should be given “years” to ready his defense. In the classified-documents case, the ex-president’s legal team had asked a judge to put the trial off until after the election, which she denied (the trial is scheduled for May 2024.) The hush money trial is scheduled for March of next year.
Of course, these are, somehow, not the only legal matters the former guy is facing. There’s also the strong possibility that he will soon be criminally charged by the Fulton County district attorney’s office for trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. On Tuesday, Fulton County sheriff Pat Labatsaid that should Trump be indicted, his arraignment will include one aspect that the three previous ones have not: a mug shot. “Unless somebody tells me differently, we are following our normal practices, and so it doesn’t matter your status, we’ll have a mug shot ready for you,” Labat said.
When Donald Trump faces off with the Justice Department over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, two of his key defenses are likely to be that (1) the claims he made in the weeks and months following his loss to Joe Biden were protected by the First Amendment and (2) not actually lies because he believed the words that were coming out of his mouth. On the first point, legal experts have said such a defense is unlikely to hold up in court, and prosecutors made clear in the indictment that they are not disputing that Trump had a right “to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” (It’s the conspiracy part that they say was illegal.) As for the idea that Trump somehow did not understand that he had, in fact, lost the election? Numerous people have said that he quite obviously knew he’d lost—including, most recently, his former attorney general.
Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Bill BarrtoldKaitlan Collins that Trump “knew well he lost the election,” and that it was likely that Special Counsel Jack Smith has even more evidence than we know of proving as much. “We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg on this,” Barr said. “I think there is a lot more to come, and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.” On the First Amendment issue, the former attorney general told Collins: “As the indictment says, they are not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants, he can even lie. He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.” He added that the allegations in the indictment were “nauseating” and “despicable,” and that “someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”
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In his memoir released last year, Barr wrote that Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him a second term and that “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.” In the lead-up to said riot, Barr wrote, Trump “stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails.” The former AG has also gone on record that he believes Trump was “responsible” for January 6.
Last month, in an interview with ABC News, former Trump ally turned 2024 GOP rival Chris Christie told George Stephanopoulos, “[Trump] doesn’t believe he won. He was concerned before the election that he was losing, and I know that because he said it to me directly. So, you know, he knows he didn’t win.”
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In his testimony before the January 6 committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley,said that during a meeting in the Oval Office in late November or early December 2020, Trump accepted that he had lost the election. “He says words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy,” Milley said, adding, “Meaning President Biden.” As Milley told the House panel: “The entire gist of the conversation was—and it lasted—that meeting lasted maybe an hour or something like that—very rational. He was calm. There wasn’t anything—the subject we were talking about was a very serious subject, but everything looked very normal to me. But I do remember him saying that.”
On Thursday, in what appeared to be a reference to the batshit crazy phenomenon in which his support among Republicans has grown with each passing criminal charge, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “I NEED ONE MORE INDICTMENT TO ENSURE MY ELECTION!”
Donald Trump was officially charged by the Department of Justice on Tuesday for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. On Thursday, he is expected to be arraigned in a DC court, at which time he will no doubt plead not guilty to the four counts against him: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. As for the actual legal-defense strategy he’s going to go with in an effort to stay out of prison? According to a report from Rolling Stone, it’s a regular Donald Trump special: blame the whole thing on everyone else.
Specifically, Trump’s current lawyers are planning to defend his actions by pinning them on the lawyers “who aided his attempt to overturn the 2020 election,” as reported by the outlet, which spoke to two sources familiar with the situation. Obviously, they’re not just going to yell “It was Rudy’s idea!”—but, really, when it comes down to it, that’s the essence of what they’re going to say.
Per Rolling Stone:
…if the case goes to trial, [Trump’s] current legal team is preparing an “advice of counsel” argument, attempting to pull blame away from the former president for any possible illegal activity. Plans for such a defense have been percolating since last year, the two sources say.
In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, Trump had an armada of lawyers—some officially representing him, and some simply aligned with him—spreading unhinged conspiracy theories and pushing states to reverse the results: Rudy Giuliani.Sidney Powell.John Eastman. The list goes on and on. The attorneys were acting on Trump’s behalf. But in this legal strategy, Team Trump would argue it was the lawyers leading Trump, rather than the other way around. “It is an argument the [former] president likes, and the team is on board with it,” one Trump adviser bluntly says, then somewhat ominously adding: “John [Eastman] and Rudy [Giuliani] gave a lot of counsel…Other people can decide how sound it was.”
As Rolling Stone notes, one potential problem with such a strategy is that Giuliani and Eastman “were merely doing what then president Trump wanted them to do, or had told them to do: to try to find a way to keep Trump in power despite his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential contest.” (Neither a spokesman for Trump nor Trump’s attorneys responded to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment.)
The ex-president, of course, is no stranger to blaming his actions on other people; earlier this year, he pinned the Stormy Daniels hush money payment that he’d ultimately be charged over on former attorney Michael Cohen,writing on Truth Social: “I had every reason to believe [Cohen] had a license to practice law, was competent, & was able to appropriately provide solid legal services. He came from a good law firm, represented other clients over the years, & there was NO reason not to rely on him, and I did.” Last week he similarly claimed, with regard to the s–t he pulled following the 2020 election, that he “did nothing wrong” and was “advised by many lawyers.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders assembles young Arkansans for exciting news
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Elsewhere!
After yearlong fight, a near-total abortion ban is going into effect in Indiana
Donald Trump made history in April when he became the first US president to be charged with a crime after leaving office, when the Manhattan district attorney’s office indicted him on charges related to hush money payments he made prior to the 2016 election. In June, he was indicted again, by the Department of Justice, for willfully retaining national defense information and conspiring to obstruct a federal investigation. Today? He was indicted for an astonishing, record-breaking third time, by the DOJ, as a result of the federal investigation into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump was charged on four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. The indictment also lists six unnamed co-conspirators, who have not been charged. The former president has been summoned to appear in court on Aug. 3.
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Shortly before the indictment was handed down, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I hear that Deranged Jack Smith, in order to interfere with the Presidential Election of 2024, will be putting out yet another Fake Indictment of your favorite President, me, at 5:00 P.M.”
According to The New York Times, convictions on conspiracy to violate rights and defraud the government “would carry a sentence of up to five years in prison each,” while the obstruction charges could result in up to 20 years behind bars.
Last month, The Washington Postreported the bombshell news that the DOJ delayed investigating Trump’s attempt to stay in power for more than a year, and “even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.” According to the outlet, “a wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace.” Garland and his deputy instead were “chart[ing] a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department,” even as “some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him.” Before Garland was confirmed as attorney general, the Post reported, senior DOJ officials and the top deputy to the director of the FBI killed “a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature,” instead insisting on “focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.” That strategy the outlet noted, “was embraced” by Garland and FBI director Christopher Wray, who “remained committed to it even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.” (Obviously, this undercuts Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a witch hunt and a weaponized Department of Justice.)
In November 2022, days after Trump announced that he was running for president for a third time, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to oversee the investigation into the ex-president’s attempts to steal a second term. Smith, who was also tasked with investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents, began issuing subpoenas just four days after taking the job.
In July, Smith sent Trump a letter officially informing him that he was a target of the government’s criminal investigation.
While it did not have prosecutorial power, the January 6 committee, which spent more than a year investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and the attack on the Capitol that followed, recommended the Justice Department charge the ex-president with federal offenses. In its final report, it the panel called Trump the “central cause” of the insurrection, wrote that “none of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” and warned: “Our country has come too far to allow a defeated President to turn himself into a successful tyrant by upending our democratic institutions, fomenting violence, and…opening the door to those in our country whose hatred and bigotry threaten equality and justice for all Americans. We can never surrender to democracy’s enemies.”
Fani Willis, the Fulton Country district attorney who opened a wide-ranging investigation into Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia, said she is on track to deliver a decision on charges by Sept. 1.
Willis initiated the probe in early 2021, following the disclosure of then-President Donald Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to “find 11,780 votes.”
“The work is accomplished,” Willis told Atlanta TV station 11Alive over the weekend. “We’ve been working for two-and-a-half years. We’re ready to go.”
Willis will seek an indictment before Aug. 18 by a grand jury empaneled this month in Atlanta, The Associated Press reported on Monday.
Willis’ investigation has also looked at the fake elector scheme as well as baseless claims of election fraud made by Trump allies, including his former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Willis told 11Alive she is prepared for her decisions to be unpopular with some Americans.
“Some people may not be happy with the decisions that I’m making,” she said. “And sometimes, when people are unhappy, they act in a way that could create harm.”
Last week, barricades were put up outside the Fulton County courthouse, raising anticipation that charging decisions are near.
Willis said she wrote to Sheriff Patrick “Pat” Labat requesting additional security measures.
“I think that the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” she said.
“The whole of the process is now incurably infected,” Trump’s motion says. “And nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.”
Trump has already been indicted twice, first in New York over his role in a hush money payment scheme involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels, followed by federal criminal charges over his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
The former president said he also expects to be indicted in Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia prosecutor is expected to seek a grand jury indictment in the coming weeks in her investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis began investigating more than two years ago, shortly after a recording was released of a January 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state.
The Justice Department is also investigating Trump’s role in trying to halt the certification of 2020 election results in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump said he’s been told he’s a target of that investigation, which likely has some overlap with the one in Georgia.
If Donald Trump is indicted by a Georgia grand jury, it would add to a growing list of legal troubles as he campaigns for president.
Details of the Georgia investigation that have become public have fed speculation that Willis is building a case under the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which would allow her to charge numerous people in a potentially wide-ranging scheme.
Here are six investigative threads Willis and her team have explored:
The Georgia investigation was prompted by the Jan. 2, 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump suggested the state’s top elections official could help “find” the votes needed to put him ahead of Democrat Joe Biden in the state.
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump is heard saying on a recording of the call, which was leaked to news outlets. “Because we won the state.”
Trump has insisted he did nothing wrong and has repeatedly said the call was “perfect.”
Trump also called other top state officials in his quest to overturn his 2020 election loss, including Gov. Brian Kemp, then-House Speaker David Ralston, Attorney General Chris Carr and the top investigator in the secretary of state’s office.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, also called Raffensperger shortly after the November election. Raffensperger said at the time that Graham asked whether he had the power to reject certain absentee ballots, which Raffensperger has said he interpreted as a suggestion to toss out legally cast votes.
Graham has denied wrongdoing, saying he just wanted to learn about the signature verification process.
Biden won Georgia by a margin of fewer than 12,000 votes. Just over a month after the election, on Dec. 14, 2020, a group 16 Georgia Democratic electors met in the Senate chamber at the state Capitol to cast the state’s Electoral College votes for him. They each marked paper ballots that were counted and confirmed by a voice roll call.
That same day, in a committee meeting room at the Capitol, 16 prominent Georgia Republicans — a lawmaker, activists and party officials — met to sign a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors. They sent that certificate to the National Archives and the U.S. Senate.
Georgia was one of seven battleground states that Trump lost where Republican fake electors signed and submitted similar certificates. Trump allies in the U.S. House and Senate used those certificates to argue for delaying or blocking the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress.
Prosecutors in Fulton County have said in court filings that they believe Trump associates worked with state Republicans to coordinate and execute the plan.
The multi-state effort was ultimately unsuccessful. Despite public pressure from Trump and his supporters, then-Vice President Mike Pence refused on Jan. 6, 2021, to introduce the unofficial pro-Trump electors. After the attack on the U.S. Capitol put a violent halt to the certification process, lawmakers certified Biden’s win in the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021.
At least eight of the fake electors have since reached immunity deals with Willis’ team. And a judge last summer barred Willis from prosecuting another one, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, because of a conflict of interest.
FALSE CLAIMS OF ELECTION FRAUD
Republican state lawmakers held several hearings at the Georgia Capitol in December 2020 to examine alleged problems with the November election. During those meetings, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies made unproven claims of widespread election fraud.
They alleged that election workers tallying absentee ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had told outside observers to leave and then pulled out “suitcases” of unlawful ballots and began scanning them. The Trump allies played clips of surveillance video from the arena to support their allegations. State and federal officials investigated and said there was no evidence of election fraud at the site.
Some Trump allies also said thousands of people who were ineligible — including people convicted of felonies, people under the age of 18, people who had voted in another state — had cast votes in Georgia. The secretary of state’s office has debunked those claims.
ALLEGED ATTEMPTS TO PRESSURE ELECTION WORKER
Two of the election workers seen in the State Farm Arena surveillance video, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, said they faced relentless harassment online and in person as a result of the allegations made by Trump and his allies.
Giuliani last week conceded that statements he made about the two election workers were false.
In a bizarre episode detailed by prosecutors in court filings, a woman traveled from Chicago to Georgia and met with Freeman on Jan. 4, 2021. The woman initially said she wanted to help Freeman but then warned that Freeman could go to prison and tried to pressure her into falsely confessing to committing election fraud, prosecutors wrote in court filings last year.
ELECTION EQUIPMENT ACCESSED
Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell and others hired a computer forensics team to copy data and software on election equipment in Coffee County, some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, according to invoices, emails, security video and deposition testimony produced in response to subpoenas in a long-running lawsuit.
The county Republican Party chair at the time — who also served as a fake elector — greeted them when they arrived at the local elections office on Jan. 7, 2021, and some county elections officials were also on hand during the daylong visit. The secretary of state’s office has said this amounted to “alleged unauthorized access” of election equipment and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into it at the secretary of state’s request.
Two other men who have been active in efforts to question the 2020 election results also visited Coffee County later that month and spent hours inside.
U.S. ATTORNEY RESIGNATION
U.S. Attorney BJay Pak, the top federal prosecutor in Atlanta, abruptly resigned two days after Trump called Raffensperger and a day after a recording of that call was made public. During that conversation, Trump called Pak a “never-Trumper,” implying that he didn’t support the president.
In December 2020, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr asked Pak to investigate allegations by Giuliani and other Trump allies of widespread election fraud. Pak, who had been appointed by Trump in 2017, reported back that he had found no evidence of such fraud.
In August 2021, Pak told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which was investigating Trump’s post-election actions, that he resigned on Jan. 4, 2021, after learning from Department of Justice officials that Trump did not believe enough was being done to investigate allegations of election fraud and wanted him gone as U.S. attorney.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Tuesday brought felony charges against 16 participants in a “fake electors” scheme to illegally deliver the state to Donald Trump in 2020 rather than “the candidate that Michigan voters actually chose”: Joe Biden. “They weren’t duly elected and qualified electors,” Nessel said in announcing the charges against the 16 state Republicans, including a close ally of Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. “And each of the defendants knew it.”
Nevertheless, “they carried out these actions,” Nessel said, “with the hope and belief that the electoral votes of Michigan’s 2020 election would be awarded to the candidate of their choosing.”
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The defendants — each of whom have been charged with forgery and conspiracy charges — include former Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock and Kathy Berden, a member of the RNC representing Michigan and McDaniel ally. According to Nessel, the 16 Republicans allegedly held a secret meeting at Michigan’s GOP headquarters December 14, 2020, and “signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the ‘duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America for the State of Michigan.’” They allegedly sent the falsified documents to the Senate and National Archives to “interfere with and overturn our free and fair election process, and along with it, the will of millions of Michigan voters,” Nessel said.
“That the effort failed and democracy prevailed does not erase the crimes of those who enacted the false electors plot,” Nessel said, noting that the investigation is still active and her department “has not ruled out potential charges against additional defendants.”
Two of the alleged participants in the fake electors plot — Michele Lundgren and John Haggard — denied wrongdoing to the Detroit News, and some Republicans claimed the charges were “politically motivated witch hunts.” “This is an egregious abuse of power by a radical progressive,” Oakland County Republican Party Chair Vance Patrick said in a statement, per the Detroit News. But Democrats — including Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who has faced threats from 2020 election deniers — hailed the charges as a step toward “accountability” for those who sought to subvert democracy on behalf of Trump. “We are still in the midst of a nationally coordinated effort to weaken democracy,” Benson wrote on Twitter. “And as we prepare for the 2024 election, these charges are the first in an ongoing effort to not just seek justice for the wrongs of the past but ensure they do not happen again.”
The “fake electors” plot, which was also attempted in other swing states that helped capture the presidency for Biden, including Wisconsin and Arizona, was one of several desperate efforts by Trump and his allies to cling to power following his 2020 election loss. When those gambits failed, Trump sicced a mob of armed supporters on the Capitol, in a last-ditch effort to disrupt the certification of Biden’s win. Trump was impeached a second time following that insurrection and said Tuesday that he received a target letter from the special counsel investigating the January 6 attack, a strong indication Jack Smith may soon bring another indictment against him.
More than a thousand participants have already been charged in that riot. Just as those indictments may have served as a deterrent to getting involved with subsequent attempts by Trump to stir chaos, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariottisuggested Tuesday, the Michigan charges could help discourage future attempts to undermine the elections process. “A lot of Trump’s followers stayed home when he urged them to turn out after he was indicted,” as Mariotti pointed out. “The indictments of January 6th insurrectionists had something to do with that. Charges against fake electors could have a similar effect.”
As you’ve probably heard by now, things between Donald Trump and his eldest daughter and his son-in-law have been extremely awkward since they all left Washington in 2021. For one thing, there was that New York Times article, in which sources familiar with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s pillow talk claimed the couple knew as early as November 5, 2020, that the then president was a loser who had lost the election to Joe Biden, and that Ivanka had only accompanied her dad to the Ellipse on January 6 because she was concerned he would do something insane. That was followed by the former first daughter very publicly declaring that she would not work on her father’s reelection campaign, and the couple seemingly wanting nothing to do with the guy. Presumably, deep down, that’s got to hurt Trump—insurrection-inciting sociopaths who should not be allowed within 1,000 feet of the White House ever again have feelings too!—but it appears that ole Jared may have made it up to him.
The New York Timesreports that, when testifying last month before a grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, Kushner “is said to have maintained that it was his impression that Mr. Trump truly believed the election was stolen, according to a person briefed on the matter.” That is significant because prosecutors appear to be trying to determine if Trump knew his efforts to stay in power were based on a lie, which “could substantially bolster any case they might decide to bring against him.” (A spokesperson for Kushner did not respond to the Times’ request for comment.)
As the Times notes:
Prosecutors do not need hard evidence of a defendant saying: I know that I am breaking the law. But their cases are made stronger when they can produce evidence that the defendant knows there is no legal or factual basis for a claim but goes ahead with making it anyway. Daniel Zelenko, a partner at the firm Crowell & Moring and a former federal prosecutor, said that being able to cite a defendant’s own words can go a long way in helping prosecutors convince a jury that the defendant should be convicted.
In other words, it actually helps Trump if his allies essentially call him a raving conspiracy theorist who’d fully broken with reality circa late 2020/early 2021. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former United Nation’s ambassador who is now running for president and calls Trump a “friend,” also once said she understood “that genuinely, to his core,” Trump believed his election lies. Of course, none of this mean it’s actually true, and, in fact, others have suggested that the then president knew full well that he had lost. Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, for one, reportedly told prosecutors this spring that Trump, in the the days following the election, asked her, “Can you believe I lost to Joe Biden?” When recounting the same story to the January 6 committee, the Times noted, Griffin opined: “In that moment I think he knew he lost.” And in his own testimony before the panel, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley, said that during a meeting in the Oval Office in late November or December 2020, Trump conceded that he had lost the election. “He says words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy,” Milley said, adding: “Meaning President Biden.” As Milley told the committee: “The entire gist of the conversation was—and it lasted—that meeting lasted maybe an hour or something like that—very rational. He was calm. There wasn’t anything—the subject we were talking about was a very serious subject, but everything looked very normal to me. But I do remember him saying that.”
And that’s not the only seemingly incriminating evidence that Jack Smith’s team may have on Trump:
In the last two years, reported accounts of Mr. Trump’s final months in office included his former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, describing to a friend how Mr. Trump had acted out a script the month before the election that he planned to deliver on election night, saying he had won if he was ahead in the early returns.
On election night, [Rudy] Giuliani—who, witnesses testified to the House committee, appeared inebriated—wanted Mr. Trump to follow through with the plan to simply declare victory.
That is, of course, exactly what Trump did, despite the fact that, as the Times put it, “Giuliani was the sole adviser encouraging Mr. Trump to pursue that course, the committee found,” and “Among those telling Mr. Trump on election night that it was too early to know if he had won or lost were his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and [Jason] Miller, the communications adviser. In the weeks that followed, several other aides and advisers told Mr. Trump there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the results of the election, including William P. Barr, his former attorney general.”
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Remember, back in 2020, when Donald Trump held a truly off-the-rails meeting in the Oval Office in which seizing voting machines and invoking martial law were discussed as part of a desperate, unhinged attempt to stay in power? Special counsel Jack Smith apparently does. And he’s asking lots of pointed questions about it as part of his criminal investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed—which, like Smith’s documents investigation, could result in another federal indictment for the ex-president.
CNN reports that Smith’s team “has signaled a continued interest in a chaotic Oval Office meeting that took place in the final days of the Trump administration, during which the former president considered some of the most desperate proposals to keep him in power over objections from his White House counsel.” According to multiple sources, federal investigators have asked a number of witnesses—both during interviews and in front of a grand jury—about the meeting at the White House, which took place on December 18, 2020. Some were quizzed about the sit-down “months ago…others have faced questions about it more recently, including Rudy Giuliani.”
Last month, for two consecutive days, Giuliani sat down with investigators for a voluntary interview about a range of topics, including the tumultuous December 2020 meeting that he attended, sources said. Prosecutors have specifically inquired about three outside Trump advisers who participated in the meeting: former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, sources said. Byrne responded to CNN’s reporting on Twitter early Friday morning, tweeting, “Hi Jack Smith, I take all responsibility. Best of all, with my eidetic memory I can tell you amazing detail about it. ‘Parrot-like,’ say some. Call collect. I’m here to help.”
Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, declined to comment. A lawyer for Powell declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Byrne. CNN has also reached out to an attorney for Flynn for comment.
As we know from contemporaneous reporting, topics discussed during the Oval Office meeting included not just using the military to seize voting machines and invoking martial law*—the latter of which Flynn had pushed for on TV, saying they should “rerun” the election—but making Powell a special counsel to investigate voter fraud. As The New York Timesreported, “White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed, which went beyond the special counsel idea, those briefed on the meeting said. Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump there was no constitutional authority for what was being discussed, one of the people briefed on the meeting said. Other advisers from the White House and the Trump campaign delivered the same message throughout the meeting, which stretched on for a long period of time.” As CNN notes, “shouting and insults ensued” and “the night ended with Trump tweeting that a coming gathering in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, to protest the election results ‘will be wild.’”
In addition to Giuliani, Smith’s team has reportedly also questioned former national security adviser Robert O’Brien. Also said to be of interest to investigators is December 14, 2020, the day a slate of fake GOP electors signed certificates falsely claiming Trump had won the election; investigators have reportedly focused on “efforts to recruit the illegitimate electors, have them sign certificates falsely asserting Trump had won, and then use them as a pretense to pressure then vice president Mike Pence to delay certification of Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6.”
According to CNN, while Smith’s team is still gathering evidence and scheduling interviews with witnesses, the special counsel “appears to be nearing charging decisions in the investigation.” Should he ultimately charge Trump, it would be the second federal indictment against the ex-president—and the third overall, following an April indictment from the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Trump is also facing the possibility of an indictment from the Fulton County district attorney’s office for his attempt to overturn the election in Georgia.
Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) confirmed Wednesday that he has spoken with the FBI as part of an ongoing investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Bowers told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins he was interviewed for about four hours a few months ago as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump and his allies’ efforts after he lost the 2020 race to Joe Biden. The revelation adds new context to the Justice Department’s probe and suggests a broad scope for any potential charges that could encompass misbehavior conducted across multiple states.
In a separate case, Trump was indicted last month on 37 federal criminal counts related to his handling of classified documents.
“I am hesitant to talk about any subpoenas, et cetera. But I have been interviewed by the FBI,” Bowers said Wednesday. He noted the interviewers’ questions made him think their investigation was broad, although he said he had offered “nothing new.”
“There is a lot of information about attorneys that work with them. About Mr. Giuliani that made the calls and visited us. And other members of [Trump’s] team, who they were, when the meetings were, what was discussed in those meetings or in that meeting,” he added. “And so I presume that all of them are involved. How that shakes out as the threshold evidence? I don’t know. I just dabble with a paintbrush.”
Bowers testified before lawmakers last year that he rejected the president’s efforts, led at the time by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal attorney, to change Arizona’s presidential election results despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
“I said, ‘Look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it, and I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona,’” Bowers said he told Giuliani, according to his testimony before the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “This is totally foreign as an idea or a theory, to me, and I would never do anything of such magnitude without deep consultation with qualified attorneys.”
The CNN interview comes just a week after The Washington Post detailed Trump’s attempts to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the 2020 results in the state. Trump reportedly called Ducey in hopes the governor would help substantiate his false claims of election fraud. Ducey did not do so, and he certified the state’s election results on Nov. 30, 2020.
The effort bears striking similarities to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The then-president called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in the waning days of his administration, urging the official to help him “find” additional votes that would see him defeat Biden.
Smith has reportedly been nearing charging decisions in the investigation over the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Investigators have interviewed or subpoenaed a host of people in the Trump orbit in recent months, including Giuliani, Raffensperger and other election officials in Arizona.
When it comes to the legal affairs of one Donald Trump, the most pressing issues, at the moment, are (1) the 34 class E felonies he was charged with in April in New York and (2) a potential federal indictment over his handling of classified documents, which appears more and more likely by the day. But, of course, those cases do not represent the entirety of the legal peril the former guy is in and, in fact, they don’t even represent all of the legal peril he is in when it comes to special counsel Jack Smith. As a reminder, the war crimes prosecutor is not just investigating Trump re: classified documents, but the ex-president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. And the latter is apparently in the “make people close to Trump testify” phase.
NBC News reports that a federal grand jury has subpoenaed former White House adviser Steve Bannon in connection with Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempt to “stay in office” despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. (In addition to summoning Bannon for testimony, the subpoena also reportedly orders him to hand over documents.) Last year, Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison (and a fine of $6,500) for defying a subpoena from the House panel investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, with a judge saying he had not “taken responsibility for his actions” and that “others must be deterred from committing similar crimes.” (Bannon’s sentence was suspended while he pursues appeals.)
As for why Smith (and the House panel before him) would want to hear from Bannon, that likely has to do with the former White House official being one of many Trump allies who spread lies about the 2020 election being stolen, and saying on his podcast the day before the attack on the US Capitol that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” And as CNN notes, “Bannon also urged Trump in December 2020 to focus his attention on January 6, the date of the Electoral College certification vote in Congress, according to the book Peril, by authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The authors also reported that Trump called Bannon after a contentious January 5 meeting with then vice president Mike Pence, where Pence told Trump he did not have the authority to block the certification of the 2020 election results.”
Bannon’s attorney declined NBC News’ request for comment.
Incidentally, like Trump, Bannon has numerous legal issues on his plate. In addition to the prison sentence for his actions concerning the January 6 panel that he’s appealing, he was charged last year in New York—and pleaded not guilty—with money laundering, conspiracy, and scheming to defraud, for allegedly scamming people to fork over a collective $25 million-plus of their own money as part of a crowd-funding initiative to finish building the southern border wall Trump famously claimed Mexico was going to pay for. (In August 2020, Bannon was charged at the federal level for the same scheme, but Trump pardoned him in one of his last acts as president.)
Mike Pence: Trump should be given a pass for any crimes he’s committed
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Area GOP lawmaker blames Canadian wildfires on people’s failure to follow God’s explicit directions, laid out in a PowerPoint, for forest oversight
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YouTube announced Friday that it would no longer remove election lies from its platform as former President Donald Trump and the MAGA-faithful continue to deny the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In a statement released on an official company blog, one of the world’s largest video platforms cited the “ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions,” as the reason for the change. A 2020 Pew Research study found that a quarter of American adults get their news from the platform.
“Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today’s changed landscape,” Google-owned YouTube said.
“With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
In its statement, the company clarified that it would continue to remove content that misleads voters about the voting process.
YouTube announced the policy in December 2020, just under a month before the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. A study from the independent research group Transparency.tube found that videos peddling election lies garnered more than 137 million views during the election week. Those videos frequently spread to other social media platforms, comprising about one-third of all election-related videos posted to Twitter in November 2020. But after YouTube introduced the policy, the amount of election fraud videos shared on social media declined, The New York Timesreported.
In a statement responding to the change, Julie Millican, vice president of liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, noted that Youtube was “one of the last major social media platforms to keep in place a policy attempting to curb 2020 election misinformation.” Twitter stopped suspending, banning, or fact-checking users spreading election lies in March 2021, while Facebook reduced its efforts to quell the spread of misinformation in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms. This March, YouTube reinstated Trump’s account, following Meta and Twitter’s lead.
YouTube “is now allowing people to say whatever they wish about the 2020 election,” far-right Republican congresswoman Lauren Boeberttweeted on Saturday, responding to the news. “Looks like even YouTube is ready for people to start talking TRUTH again.”
YouTube will stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other past U.S. presidential elections were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches,” the platform announced Friday.
The change is a reversal for the Google-owned video service, which said a month after the 2020 election that it would start removing new posts that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud or errors changed the outcome.
YouTube said in a blog post that the updated policy was an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”
“In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the blog post said.
The updated policy, which goes into effect immediately, won’t stop YouTube from taking down content that tries to deceive voters in the upcoming 2024 election, or other future races in the U.S. and abroad. The company said its other existing rules against election misinformation remain unchanged.
This could prove difficult to enforce, said John Wihbey, an associate professor at Northeastern University who studies social media and misinformation.
“It doesn’t take a genius if you’re on the disinformation ‘we were wronged in 2020’ side to say, ‘wait a minute, let’s just claim that voting just generally is not worth it. And 2020 is our example,” he said. “I don’t know how you disentangle rhetoric that both refers to past wrongs and to forward possibilities. The content moderation team, which is going to try to do this, is going to tie themselves in knots trying to figure out exactly where that line is.”
The announcement comes after YouTube and other major social media companies, including Twitter and the Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, have come under fire in recent years for not doing more to combat the firehose of election misinformation and disinformation that spreads on their platforms.
The left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters said the policy change is not a surprise, as it was one of the “last major social media platforms” to keep the policy in place.
“YouTube and the other platforms that preceded it in weakening their election misinformation policies, like Facebook, have made it clear that one attempted insurrection wasn’t enough. They’re setting the stage for an encore,” said its vice president Julie Millican in a statement.
Last month, Fani Willis—the Fulton County district attorney investigatingDonald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia—said she would announce any possible indictments for the ex-president and the allies who tried to help him steal a second term between July 11 and September 1. Now, she appears to have signaled even more specific timing: the first three weeks of August. Hopefully the former guy hasn’t booked any nonrefundable summer travel!
The New York Timesreports that, in a letter sent yesterday to 21 Fulton County officials, Willis announced that, due to security concerns surrounding her investigation and the potential criminal charges that could come from it, she will scale back staffing in her office by about 70% and have the majority of people work remotely between July 31 and August 18, when grand juries will be in session. (While a special grand jury spent months hearing evidence in the Trump investigation, Willis must now get approval from a regular grand jury for any possible indictments.) The district attorney noted in the Thursday letter that exceptions to the remote work plan would include “my leadership team” and “all armed investigators.” She added that she “respectfully request(s) that judges not schedule trials and in-person hearings during the weeks beginning Monday, Aug. 7, and Monday, Aug. 14.” As the Times notes, “the moves suggest that…Willis…is expecting a grand jury to unseal indictments during that time period.” The outlet also noted that Willis’s timetable was already pushed back at least once as she negotiated cooperation deals, so, obviously, that could happen again; however, the dates laid out in her most recent letter seem pretty specific.
For his part, Trump’s attorneys are still trying to quash the special grand jury’s final report, and get both Willis and the judge presiding over the inquiry thrown off the case. In response to that attempt, Willis wrote in a filing this week that Trump and Co. “are not content to follow the ordinary course of the law. They seek to ‘restrain’ a criminal investigation before any charges are filed or even sought.” In February, when asked about the recommendations the special grand jury made re: which individuals should be charged, jury forewoman Emily Kohrstold the Times it was “not a short list.” Asked whether the ex-president was on it, she added: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” Speaking to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March, another juror said of the group’s report: “A lot’s gonna come out sooner or later. And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”
Last year, Willis sent a letter to the Atlanta field office of the FBI, requesting a risk assessment of the courthouse in downtown Atlanta and for the bureau to “provide protective resources to include intelligence and federal agents,” noting that Trump had described her and other prosecutors investigating him as “vicious, horrible people” during a rally and demanded protests in their cities. Shortly before his indictment by the Manhattan district attorney for a series of hush money payments he made before the 2016 election, Trump called for “death and destruction.” In another letter, sent to the local sheriff last month, Willis laid out “the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.”
Trump typically spends the summer at his New Jersey golf course, which would be less than a three-hour flight, should he need to show up at the courthouse to be arraigned (again).
There were crises big and small in “America Decides,” Succession’s election night episode that aired Sunday. Tom Wambsgans lost his shit over a touchscreen Magic Wall breakdown inside the ATN newsroom—and over bodega sushi. Meanwhile, Roman and Kendall Roy’s business interests overshadowed actual vote totals as the outlet they own made key projections and eventually called the election for the conservative nominee. Both felt, after election night 2020, like scenarios that could actually happen. “There’s certainly dramatic and even outrageous storylines, but they’re taking place in a context that feels credible and legitimate,” says Eric Schultz, a consultant on the episode.
It was around this time in 2011 when Schultz joined Barack Obama’s White House. Republicans had just taken control of the House of Representatives, and Schultz, a political adviser, was hired to lead the Obama administration’s response to their countless investigations. A couple years later, he became Obama’s deputy White House press secretary, a role that led Jen Psaki to once describe him as Obama’s Olivia Pope, the fictional political-crisis fixer on ABC’s Scandal.
This past fall, Schultz found himself advising the writers of Succession to ensure their fictional presidential election cycle was as realistic as it could be, from election night vote tallies to the security footprint a candidate would have. Schultz has yet to leave Obamaworld: He continues to advise the former president out of Obama’s personal office, but he’s also been dipping his toes into entertainment, consulting on Designated Survivor and now Succession. He says working in the entertainment industry is not a far cry from life on campaigns, Capitol Hill, or even in the White House. Though, “fortunately, I’ve not encountered anyone who resembles the Roys in real life,” he says. Below, he speaks about bringing his political chops to Hollywood—and what it was like to recreate an election after the Donald Trump presidency.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair:What was your role in this season ofSuccession?
Eric Schultz: They asked me to come up in the beginning of the season to help them sketch out the political storylines for the season, and then [I] stayed engaged for the episode scripts. But the bulk of my work was focused on this episode.
And so they asked me to be on set for the filming of election night. I think there’s just pieces and sort of texture that they wanted to make sure they got right. The writers are brilliant. I think what makes the show pop is this attention to detail about which they’re writing. That’s why they bring in subject matter experts. There’s certainly dramatic and even outrageous storylines, but they’re taking place in a context that feels credible and legitimate. And I think that’s why the show is so successful.
There was no detail too small to flag for them or that they didn’t wanna talk through. In episode four, when they talk of the presidential candidate [Jeryd] Mencken coming to Logan’s home, they asked what the security footprint would be for a stop like that—for Secret Service for a presidential candidate. I sort of walked them through what that would look like, and you would call this an OTR stop—one that’s not previously announced. And so we talked about it, and then they said, “Okay, fine, but what kind of vests would the dogs wear?” And I was like, “I will have to get back to you on that.”
What aspects of this election night episode did you specifically advise on?
If you watched the timeline of the evening, as states report and their Electoral College votes are counted, that was all very thoroughly researched to make sure it tracks a plausible election night. We spent a lot of time with the writers breaking down how states would likely vote and what the electoral count looks like under various scenarios and at various times of the night. It was important to them to make sure that everything was against a plausible backdrop. Obviously, the fire being located in Wisconsin was not an accident. We had looked at other states but wanted to find a place that fit into the timing of the evening, and that would also be a venue that had a sufficient number of votes to be determinative. We also worked with other consultants, [filmmaker] Justin Geldzahler and [GOP lawyer] Ben Ginsberg, to do due diligence on the contingency plannings for what would happen in these scenarios. The banter that Shiv talks about—in terms of proposing a revote and the Milwaukee County Board of Elections—all of that stuff is not shooting from the hip. It was material that we looked into.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz speaks during a briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on July 29, 2015.
No one knows if Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s 2020 election investigation will ultimately end in indictments for Donald Trump and/or the allies who helped him attempt to stay in power after losing to Joe Biden. One thing that is clear, though, is that the people Willis is investigating seem to be extremely worried they’ll be on the receiving end of criminal charges, and we know this because at least one of them has written a desperate letter blaming everything he did on attorneys representing him and Trump.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreports that in a letter sent to Willis’s office, lawyers for David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, swore their client was simply following legal advice when he organized a slate of fake electors—and served as one himself—in effort to steal a second term for Trump. Noting that they don’t think Shafer actually did anything wrong—“We believe that the legal advice Mr. Shafer received was correct and that his reliance upon that advice was justified,” Holly Pierson and Craig Gillen say—the attorneys write that should prosecutors nevertheless decide he broke the law, they’d like everyone to know he was only doing as told and therefore cannot be convicted of a crime. “Every action by Mr. Shafer as a presidential elector nominee or contingent elector in 2020 was specifically undertaken in conformity with and reliance upon the repeated and detailed advice of legal counsel, eliminating any possibility of criminal intent or liability,” they insist. This, is, of course, an amazing argument: Our client has committed no crime…but if he did it was only because someone else told him to, so he’s in the clear.
Willis previously informed all 16 of the fake electors in Georgia that they were targets of her investigation and could be indicted; so far, at least half of them have taken immunity deals.
The DA, who is reportedly considering charging people with racketeering and conspiracy charges, said last month that she will announce a decision on indictments between July 11 and September 1. The announcement was revealed in a letter to local law enforcement, who Willis asked to be ready for “heightened security and preparedness,” because the situation “may provoke a significant public reaction.” (Also: Not sure if anyone knows this, but Donald Trump has a bit of a history re: attacking prosecutors and inciting violence on his behalf.)
As CNN notes, Willis’s team has “at least three recordings of Trump pressuring Georgia officials [to help him overturn the election], including a phone call that he made to the Georgia House speaker to push for a special session to overturn…Biden’s 2020 victory in the state,” and the one in which he demanded state secretary Brad Raffensperger “find” the exact number of votes he needed to turn his loss to Biden into a win. While the DA’s probe initially centered around the Raffensperger call, it subsequently expanded to include the fake-elector scheme, false claims of fraud to state lawmakers, efforts to access voting machines, and harassment of election workers. When asked about the recommendations a special grand jury impaneled by Willis made re: which individuals should be charged, jury forewoman Emily KohrstoldThe New York Times it was “not a short list,” adding, of whether or not Trump was on it: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” Speaking to the AJC, another juror said: “A lot’s gonna come out sooner or late. And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”
“It’s so sad,” Carlson texted Fox News colleague Jesse Watters in 2020 about Trump. “He’s going to break some shit. He already is. Wish I knew where to run. But I’ll die here.”
Carlson was fired last month by Fox News shortly after the conservative channel agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems related to Fox claims that voting machines were rigged against Trump in the 2020 presidential election. In texts that were part of Dominion’s lawsuit against his employer, Carlson was revealed to have privately disliked Trump and opposed his election lies while publicly promoting them. He also was found to have sent offensive messages about colleagues and executives that alarmed the Fox News brass.
While his dialogue with Watters suggested Carlson was in a professional panic as Trump railed that the presidency was stolen from him after the election, Carlson also tried to protect Fox News’ standing with its audience.
In another text reported by Confider on Monday, Carlson ripped Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich for contradicting the company line.
“This girl apparently works for us in the ‘news’ division, though I’d be stunned if she’s ever broken a story,” he texted. “She was on Twitter last night calling out Hannity, and accusing Trump of planning to ‘steal’ the election. Can’t continue.”
In their exchanges, Watters appeared to call for the dismissals of the more moderate Fox News personalities Chris Wallace and Neil Cavuto, Confider reports. “Wallace Cavuto and other [sic] have got to go. Need some fresh blood. Should hire some trump people,” Watters wrote to Carlson on Nov. 13, 2020.
Of the 16 fake electors under investigation in Georgia for taking part in a scheme to keep President Donald Trump in office in 2020, eight have accepted immunity deals from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, according to a brief filed on Friday by the electors’ lawyer, Kimberly Debrow.
In early April, Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor advising the Georgia grand jury appointed to investigate Trump’s election meddling efforts, gave Debrow immunity offers for eight of the ten electors she represented (in total, 16 Republicans took part in the scheme). The two who did not receive offers decided to obtain individual counsel. The filing does not name which of the 16 electors were offered immunity deals.
Friday’s filing comes in response to a motion Willis submitted in April seeking to have Debrow disqualified from the case. Prosecutors say that Debrow didn’t inform her clients of an immunity offer last summer, and that some of the electors she represents have incriminated each other in interviews with prosecutors. Willis called Debrow’s continued representation of the group of electors an “impracticable and ethical mess.”
Debrow shot back in Friday’s filing, calling the DA’s motion “reckless, frivolous, offensive, and completely without merit.” She claimed that the DA only floated “highly generalized, non-individualized ‘offers to offer’ potential immunity” last summer and that her clients were informed of this possibility. Debrow alleged that the DA’s office “knew” their representation of that summer’s immunity conversations was “false” when they filed the April motion. She also maintained that all ten of her current and former clients “remain united in their innocence.”
Willis’s office opened an inquiry into Trump and his allies’ election meddling in February 2021, and in May 2022 convened a special grand jury with the power to subpoena witnesses. In addition to investigating the fake elector scheme, the grand jury also looked into Trump’s demand that George Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger “find 11,780 votes.” Over seven months of work, the grand jury interviewed 75 people, including former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
In February, portions of the grand jury report were made public. The report recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, though it declined to name any names. However, in an interview with The New York Times, the grand jury’s forewoman strongly hinted that Trump was among them. We won’t know for sure until Willis comes out with the charges, after which the full report will be made public. In late April, Willis said her office is planning on announcing charging decisions “in the near future,” potentially as soon as July.
The Fulton County DA’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
