ReportWire

Tag: 2020 election

  • That Sound You Hear Is Donald Trump Popping a Blood Vessel Over Mike Pence’s Jan. 6 Grand Jury Testimony

    That Sound You Hear Is Donald Trump Popping a Blood Vessel Over Mike Pence’s Jan. 6 Grand Jury Testimony

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    As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump is in a whole lot of legal peril. For starters, he’s currently on trial for rape, having been accused by writer E. Jean Carroll of attacking her in a New York department store in the mid-’90s. Then there are the 34 class E felonies he was charged with by the Manhattan district attorney’s office last month, stemming from various hush money payments he allegedly made in the lead up to the 2016 election. But of course, that’s not all. The ex-president is also under investigation by the Fulton County district attorney’s office for trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia; he’s been sued by the New York attorney general’s office on allegations of massive fraud; and a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department is running a pair of criminal probes into both his handling of classified documents (and possible obstruction) and plot to stay in power following his loss to Joe Biden (plus the insurrection that followed). And the former guy is unlikely to be thrilled about the latest development in the DOJ’s election investigation.

    CNN reports that special counsel Jack Smith “sat in on the federal grand jury proceeding while former vice president Mike Pence testified for more than five hours last week,” according to a trio of people familiar with the matter. As the outlet notes, the former VP’s testimony is “likely to elicit a strong negative reaction” from Trump—and not just because Trump is prone to massive outbursts over the smallest of perceived slights.

    As a reminder, the ex-president has expended significant time and energy trying to block Pence from testifying about January 6 and the weeks leading up to the attack on the US Capitol; last month, his attorneys reportedly tried (and failed) to reverse a judge’s order for Pence to appear before a federal grand jury. (For his part, Pence spent the two-plus years since January 6, 2021, refusing to tell investigators what he knew about the insurrection and the days that preceded it, and then, in April, his adviser announced that he would not appeal the latest ruling ordering him to comply with the special counsel subpoena for testimony.) Trump’s desire to block Pence from speaking likely has something to do with the former VP’s unique insights into his attempt to stay in power and the lengths he went to steal a second term. Those insights include but are not limited to: the fact that Trump reportedly spent weeks pressuring Pence to overturn the 2020 election, even after being told it was illegal; told Pence, “You can be a patriot or you can be a pussy”; told Pence, in the days before January 6, that hundreds of thousands of people were going to hate him for being “too honest” to overturn the results of the election; and inspired his supporters to go after Pence by telling them at the “Stop the Steal” rally that the then VP had the power to block Joe Biden’s win, which resulted in chants of “Hang Mike Pence” and a situation wherein the Secret Service had to move Pence and his family to a secure location, lest the rioters make good on their threats.

    After Pence said in March that his old boss was “wrong” to demand he overturn the results of the election and—in his most strongly worded remarks to do date—declared that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable,” Trump flew off the handle and blamed Pence for January 6, saying: “Had [Pence] sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways, you can blame him for Jan. 6. Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”

    It was a claim so divorced from reality that even the gang at Fox News couldn’t believe it.

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    So, yeah, Pence (and Smith) can probably expect that a “strong negative reaction” is forthcoming.

    Every single point here is true (and yet)

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    Bess Levin

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  • Sen. Ted Cruz’s Jan. 6 Scheming Exposed In Newly Unveiled Recording

    Sen. Ted Cruz’s Jan. 6 Scheming Exposed In Newly Unveiled Recording

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    In a recorded conversation with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) laid out a plan to create a “commission” to help him overturn the 2020 election to keep Donald Trump in the White House.

    “I think that the country deserves to have a credible assessment of these claims and what the evidence shows, and the mechanism to try to force that is denying certification on the 6th,” Cruz says in the Jan. 2, 2021, recording, obtained and aired Tuesday by MSNBC’s Ari Melber.

    Cruz played a starring role on Jan. 6, 2021, when he led a group of Republican senators in objecting to certain states’ Electoral College counts in the 2020 presidential election. He then continued to support Trump’s lies about widespread electoral fraud even after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to disrupt the certification of the electoral votes, which confirmed Joe Biden had won the presidency.

    According to Melber, the tape showed how Cruz planned to help Trump seize power and overthrow the election after all of the former president’s challenges had been thrown out in court.

    “He literally explains it that way,” Melber said. “Basically they would hijack the certification and use their own made-up, fake commission to declare that the Biden win was fraudulent and then that would decide who was inaugurated.”

    In the conversation with Bartiromo, Cruz said that if a majority of the House and Senate objected to the electoral certification on Jan. 6, then an electoral commission could be created, ultimately deciding who would be inaugurated.

    If the commission “found credible evidence of fraud that undermines confidence in the electoral results in any given state,” Cruz said, it would be able to recertify the results.

    Notably, in a November 2020 call with Bartiromo that MSNBC aired last week, Cruz suggested Trump’s team of lawyers lacked “actual evidence” of electoral fraud that would hold up in court.

    On the same day as his call with Bartiromo, Cruz and 10 other Senate Republicans unveiled a plan to reject the certification of results in states where Trump contested his defeat unless an “emergency 10-day [congressional] audit” of results was completed.

    Cruz lashed out at Melber’s reporting Tuesday, arguing that his plan to overthrow the election was not a secret:

    MSNBC obtained the recordings from Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer for Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson who is suing the network over workplace misconduct allegations. Listen to them below.

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  • Defamation Suit Produced Trove Of Tucker Carlson Messages

    Defamation Suit Produced Trove Of Tucker Carlson Messages

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — The $787.5 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems spared executives and on-air talent from taking the stand in a defamation lawsuit that centered on Fox airing false claims of a stolen election in the weeks after former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss.

    The lawsuit still revealed plenty of what Fox personalities had been saying about the bogus election claims, including Tucker Carlson, the network’s top-rated host who was let go Monday. His unexplained departure has turned a spotlight on what he said in depositions, emails and text messages among the thousands of pages Dominion released in the leadup to jury selection in the case.

    Carlson’s messages lambasted the news division and management, revealed how he felt about Donald Trump and demonstrated his skepticism of the election lies — so much so that Fox attorneys and company founder Rupert Murdoch held him up as part of their defense of the company. The judge who oversaw the case ruled that it was “ CRYSTAL clear ” none of the election claims related to Dominion was true.

    THOSE SPREADING ELECTION LIES

    “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson told a Fox News producer in a Nov. 16, 2020, exchange before using expletives to describe Powell, an attorney representing Trump.

    “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon,” Carlson wrote to Powell a day later. “You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.” There was no indication that Powell replied.

    Fox attorneys noted that Carlson repeatedly questioned Powell’s claims in his broadcasts: “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson told viewers on Nov. 19, 2020.

    Carlson told his audience that he had taken Powell seriously, but that she had never provided any evidence or demonstrated that the software Dominion used siphoned votes from Trump to Biden.

    Carlson continued to trash Powell and Trump’s legal team in a Nov. 23, 2020, text exchange with fellow Fox host Laura Ingraham and also bemoaned what he considered the president’s passivity in the face of the two Georgia runoffs.

    After saying it was “pretty disgusting” that more attorneys hadn’t pushed back on the claims of Trump’s attorneys who were trying to overturn the election results, Carlson wrote: “And now Trump, I learned this morning, is sitting back and letting them lose the senate. He doesn’t care. I care. I’ve got four kids and plan to live here.”

    FOX’S 2020 ELECTION COVERAGE

    Fox viewers were outraged when the network called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, a race call that was accurate. Fox executives and hosts began to worry about ratings as many of those viewers fled to other conservative outlets.

    “We worked really hard to build what we have. Those (expletive) are destroying our credibility. It enrages me,” Carlson said in a Nov. 6, 2020, exchange with an unidentified person.

    On Nov. 8, after Biden was declared the winner, Carlson texted a couple of other employees: “Do the executives understand how much trust and credibility we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.”

    Later in the chain, as others bring up Newsmax as an emerging competitor, Carlson said, “With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”

    In text messages to a producer on Nov 13, 2020, Carlson braced for a Trump press conference: “He’s only good at destroying,” Carlson said of the then-president.

    He later added, in regard to the fraud allegations being made by Trump and his allies, “He’s playing with fire.”

    In a text exchange with an unknown person on Jan. 4, 2021, Carlson expressed anger toward Trump. He said that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights” and that “I truly can’t wait.”

    Carlson said he had no doubt there was fraud in the 2020 election, but said Trump and his lawyers had so discredited their case — and media figures like himself — “that it’s infuriating. Absolutely enrages me.”

    Addressing Trump’s four years as president, Carlson said: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

    In texts early on the morning of Jan. 7, 2021, a day after the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, Carlson and his longtime producer, Alex Pfeiffer, bemoaned how the rioters had believed Trump’s election lies.

    “They take the president literally,” Pfeiffer said. “He is to blame for everything that happened today.”

    “The problem is a little deeper than that I’d say,” Carlson replied.

    “Obviously the problems are deep but at the core of it is Trump saying it was stolen,” Pfeiffer wrote.

    “Not the core,” Carlson wrote. “Awful but a symptom.”

    Later, Carlson writes of Trump: “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.”

    Some of the most heated vitriol was reserved for colleagues in the news division and included conversations with fellow on-air personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.

    On Nov. 13, the week after the 2020 election, Ingraham, Carlson and Hannity got into a text message exchange in which they lambasted the news division. It began with Ingraham pointing out a tweet by correspondent Bryan Llenas, saying he had seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

    Carlson replied that Llenas had contacted him to apologize, then added “when has he ever ‘reported’ on anything.”

    Ingraham then names another colleague who indicated there was no fraud, with Hannity responding: “Guys I’ve been telling them for 4 years. News depart that breaks no news ever.” In a subsequent Twitter message seconds later, Hannity says, “They hate hate hate all three of us.”

    Ingraham responds she doesn’t “want to be liked by them” and Carlson chimes in, “They’re pathetic.” The conversation continues with Hannity bemoaning the damage that has been done to the brand: “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

    Another text conversation by the trio three days later had Ingraham telling her colleagues that her anger at the news channel was “pronounced,” followed by an “lol.” In response, Carlson attacked two Fox anchors: “It should be. We devote our lives to building an audience and they let Chris Wallace and Leland (expletive) Vittert wreck it. Too much.” Wallace and Vittert have since left the network.

    The three hosts then started musing about a path forward after Ingraham says they have “enormous power,” and that they should think about how, together, they can force a change. Carlson’s response: “For sure. The first thing we need to do exactly what we want to do. That’s the key. Leland Vittert seems to have the authority to do whatever he wants. We should too.”

    Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta, Randall Chase in Dover, Del., and Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Report: Team Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the Election in Georgia Even More Comically Corrupt Than Previously Thought

    Report: Team Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the Election in Georgia Even More Comically Corrupt Than Previously Thought

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    Unless you’ve been living under a rock without cellular or Wi-Fi access for the last two and a half years, you likely know that Donald Trump and his allies tried their very hardest to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, a plot that is currently under criminal investigation by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, and could result in one or more indictments for the people involved. But according to a new report, while they were working on their scheme to illegally keep Trump in power, some members of the group also considered trying to overturn the results of Georgia’s Senate runoff, which had gone to Democrat Jon Ossoff. Real multitaskers!

    Per CNN:

    In mid-January 2021, two men hired by former President Donald Trump’s legal team discussed over text message what to do with data obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, including whether to use it as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff results. The texts, sent two weeks after operatives breached a voting machine in Coffee County, Georgia, reveal for the first time that Trump allies considered using voting data not only to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also in an effort to keep a Republican hold on the US Senate.

    “Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 text to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a firm that purports to run audits of voting systems. In the text, which was obtained by CNN and has not been previously reported, Penrose references the upcoming certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff’s win over Republican David Perdue. “We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose wrote, referring to a potential lawsuit.

    As CNN notes, the data in question was obtained on January 7, 2021, after “two people walked into an elections office in Coffee County, Georgia,” and, with the help of a local election official, gained access to sensitive voting information that they uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with a number of Trump operatives and allies, including Penrose, Logan, Powell, and then Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Last year, a former Trump official told the January 6 committee, under oath, that plans to breach voting systems in Georgia had been discussed during meetings in the Oval Office, including in at least one which Trump was present at. That official, Derek Lyons, told the House panel that Giuliani had suggested doing so could be an alternative to ordering the military to seize voting machines.

    “His point of view was that in some way the campaign, I believe, was going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” Lyons said during the deposition, adding that, according to Giuliani, the machines would “begin to show evidence of the allegations [of fraud] that were being made,” which could “then be leveraged to…gain access to additional machines.”

    According to CNN, “there is no evidence that the Coffee County voting data was [ultimately] used as part of a lawsuit to try to decertify the Senate runoff results. But the fact that the data has yet to be recovered has raised concerns among election security advocates about how it could be used potentially to disrupt future election results.” Meanwhile, a person familiar with the matter told the outlet that Fulton County investigators have evidence of Trump allies’ plan to use the breached data to try to decertify Georgia’s Senate runoff, including an upfront payment “to a cyber forensics firm that sent a team to Coffee County on January 7, 2021.”

    Powell, Penrose, and Logan did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. An attorney for Giuliani declined to comment.

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    Bess Levin

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  • Surprise! Fox News Mostly Avoids Airing How It Paid Out $787 Million For Spreading Election Lies

    Surprise! Fox News Mostly Avoids Airing How It Paid Out $787 Million For Spreading Election Lies

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    Late Tuesday afternoon, amid a swirl of confusion over why the Dominion v. Fox trial had been delayed for hours, Judge Eric Davis announced that the “parties had resolved the case,” thus marking an abrupt end to one of the most highly anticipated defamation trials in decades. Every major media outlet, many of which had correspondents in Wilmington, immediately jumped on news of the settlement and its $787.5 million price tag. But one outlet was noticeably loath to get in on the feeding frenzy.

    Fox News, the network at the heart of the story, covered the settlement only three times in about four hours after news of the settlement broke, “amounting to about six minutes of coverage,” according to The New York Times’ Stuart Thompson. One such instance occurred during the final moments of Fox anchor Neil Cavuto’s 4 PM hour. “Fox has agreed to pay $787 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit,” Cavuto said, a figure that he said came “officially from the Wall Street Journal”—an outlet that, like Fox News, is owned by Fox Corp. And yet, as The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona noted, Fox media analyst Howard Kurtz claimed in a broadcast about an hour and a half later that he was unable to “independently confirm” the dollar figure of the settlement that Dominion’s lawyer gave reporters. 

    Kurtz—who, back in February, publicly voiced his disagreement with Fox’s decision to prevent him from covering the trial—went on to mention Dominion CEO John Poulos’ statement to reporters that “Fox has admitted telling lies about Dominion.” To which Kurtz added, “Now, both sides had an incentive to avoid a costly six-week trial. Dominion might have lost and gotten zero. Some of Fox’s top executives and Opinion hosts would have had to testify. But there’s undoubtedly disappointment at other networks that were relishing this spectacle.”

    Meanwhile, during the Tuesday broadcasts of hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—both of whom were expected to take the stand in the Dominion trial—no reference to the settlement was made, according to Reuters. (Statements made on both hosts’ shows back in 2020 were among the 20 specific broadcasts and tweets in question that Dominion had alleged were defamatory.)

    As for atonement, Fox’s statement acknowledging that “certain claims” about Dominion were false is apparently as far as the network is going to go. Multiple outlets reported that Fox will not have to issue an on-air apology or correction for the erroneous statements its stars made about Dominion as part of the settlement agreement. “There’s no doubt that the $787.5 million settlement is an emphatic win for Dominion. I can’t help but think, though, about the significance to Fox of not having to acknowledge, on air, that the network spread falsehoods,” tweeted media law professor Jonathan Peters. “Fox gets to duck *full* responsibility and avoid a head-on reckoning with its viewers.” That might have something to do, as Peters noted, with the fact that Fox “wanted to avoid statements that could be used against it in the future,” as the network is still facing another defamation lawsuit, filed by another election technology company, Smartmatic, over its 2020 election coverage. 

    Listen to Vanity Fair’s Inside the Hive: Fox on Trial podcast now.

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • The GA Prosecutor Criminally Investigating Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the Election Says Witnesses Are Ratting Each Other Out

    The GA Prosecutor Criminally Investigating Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the Election Says Witnesses Are Ratting Each Other Out

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    There’s a shit-show subplot to the Fulton County probe.

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    Bess Levin

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  • Fox News and Dominion Settle Defamation Case for $787 Million

    Fox News and Dominion Settle Defamation Case for $787 Million

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    Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems settled their case on Tuesday for $787.5 million, abruptly ending one of the most highly anticipated defamation trials in decades before anyone took the stand. “The truth matters,” Dominion attorney Justin Nelson told reporters outside the courtroom. “Lies have consequences.” 

    Opening arguments were supposed to begin around 1:30 in the afternoon, after the court took a lunch break. But roughly an hour later, proceedings had yet to resume. “All lawyers appear to be in their seats, but the judge and jury are not seated. Still no updates on why we’re delayed,” tweeted The Guardian’s Kira Lerner, reporting from Wilmington, Delaware. “The scene in the courtroom: It is sweltering, everyone is up from their seats, going in and out of the room. Fox’s lead lawyer, Dan Webb, has taken several phone calls. Some people are standing, all are talking, others gesticulating,” the Times’ Jim Rutenberg reported. Then one hour became two, and just before 4:00, Judge Eric Davis, took the bench and brought the jurors back in the room. “The parties have resolved the case,” he said. 

    The end of the Fox-Dominion standoff comes as swaths of reporters had descended this week upon Wilmington, Delaware, and various outlets—including this one—prepared special coverage for what was expected to be a six-week-long trial. Top Fox figures like hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as well as Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch himself, were expected to take the stand, but no longer. 

    “Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees, and the customers that we serve,” CEO John Poulos said at the presser outside the courtroom. “Nothing can ever make up for that. Throughout this process, we have sought accountability, and believe the evidence brought to light through this case underscores the consequences of spreading lies. Truthful reporting in the media is essential to our democracy.”

    “We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” Fox said in a statement. “This settlement reflects FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

    Dominion has been steeped in a legal fight with Fox since 2021, when the election-technology company sued the network for $1.6 billion over its 2020 election coverage. Dominion claimed the network amplified election lies pushed by Donald Trump and his allies and knowingly promoted false claims about the company’s role in the election for the sake of juicing ratings and profit. Fox argued its coverage was protected by free speech and press freedom rights, and that it was neutrally reporting on newsworthy claims by a sitting president. (It should be noted that Judge Davis, the Delaware Superior Court judge who was presiding over the case, ruled last week that Fox News could not argue that it broadcast false information about Dominion on the basis of newsworthiness. “Just because someone is newsworthy doesn’t mean you can defame someone,” said Davis.)

    While the settlement means there will be no such spectacle, the discovery process leading up to this moment has already provided an unprecedented look inside Fox News. Through a deluge of internal communications and private text messages Dominion unveiled during the pretrial process, the public got to see top executives, producers, and stars mocking the unfounded claims and unreliable sources in Trumpworld. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson told host Laura Ingraham of the conspiracy-peddling Trump lawyer. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” In another filing released as part of the suit, Murdoch is seen admitting that hosts Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Lou Dobbs “endorsed” Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said at one point in his deposition. 

    Davis appeared to repeatedly clash with Fox during the pretrial hearings. At one point last week he told a Fox News attorney that his team had a “credibility problem” upon learning that Fox has delayed the disclosure of Murdoch’s full role at Fox News, a technicality that prevented Dominion from getting access to documents they otherwise would have during the discovery process. It was also during the pretrial hearings that Davis sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence. Dominion lawyers asserted they’d found out about other documents and material that they should have received during discovery but didn’t. The judge said he would likely start an investigation into the matter. 

    This is a breaking news story and will be updated with additional developments. 

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • The Dominion v. Fox News Trial Will Not Be Televised: “It’s a Gift to Fox News”

    The Dominion v. Fox News Trial Will Not Be Televised: “It’s a Gift to Fox News”

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    The trial for Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News, which legal experts are calling the most consequential defamation lawsuit in decades, is set to start Monday. The verdict will decide whether Fox News will be held accountable for spreading 2020 election lies—conspiracies that were fundamental to Donald Trump’s Big Lie. It could be the only time the likes of Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch will be forced to answer for the outlet’s democracy-damaging coverage in a public setting. Some of the network’s top stars, like Tucker Carlson, are also expected to take the stand. It’s worth watching live. Except, unless you’ve made the trip to Wilmington, Delaware, and managed to get a seat in the courtroom, you can’t. 

    The trial will not be televised. The only way Americans will be able to know what’s going on inside the courtroom—outside of getting one of the roughly 200 seats available in the courtroom—will be by calling into an audio line provided by the court. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s not much better,” says Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin. Grueskin recalls his experience listening to the audio line for Sarah Palin’s defamation case against The New York Times last year. “You can’t tell who’s talking half the time, especially when the lawyers start arguing a point, or you come into the testimony part way through,” he said. 

    Not only will the trial not be televised, the court has banned any recording or rebroadcasting of the audio feed—hampering outlets’ abilities to playback the proceedings on the radio or TV. A group of media outlets, including the Times, CBS, ABC, NBC, and ProPublica, wrote to Judge Eric Davis seeking to record the audio stream of the trial, and to use excerpts of those recordings in their news programming. But Davis denied that request Thursday during a pretrial hearing, as the Associated Press reported. He said he’d “gone as far as I can go with response to access,” and, signaling the Delaware Superior court’s traditionally restrictive rules over public access, that the outlets were “getting the most access of any media in a Superior Court case in Delaware.” Fox’s lawyers filed an opposition brief to the media outlets’ letter, which, in a statement to Vanity Fair, Fox called “an 11th hour request that risks compromising the integrity of the trial proceedings.” Dominion Voting Systems declined to comment.

    “It’s a gift to Fox News that this is not going to be broadcast live, because it spares them from the nightmarish scenario of the visual of some of their leading anchors being cross-examined and confronted with their own texts, which are contrary to what they’ve said on air,” former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig tells me. In the lead up to the trial, internal communications—obtained through the discovery process—have spilled out into the public, offering a damning look at Fox executives and stars dismissing unfounded claims and unreliable Trumpworld sources behind closed doors. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in one private message, of the conspiracy-peddling Trump lawyer whom Fox repeatedly booked during the post-election period. Fox News’s attorneys appear aware of the power and stakes of live testimonies; they have actively tried to keep Rupert Murdoch off the stand, citing hours of deposition he already gave.

    “All the in-room narrative reporting in the world can’t measure up to an actual audio-visual feed—the imagery—of a witness on the stand,” says Honig, who pointed to the way images from trials like that of Derek Chauvin over George Floyd’s murder have been cemented in the public consciousness. “There’s something lost” when the public can’t see the trial, Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, says. The visual aids can be particularly “critical when you’ve got two entirely different stories from both sides,” says Tobias. “Hopefully the press can fill in, but it just won’t be the same.”

    Reporters will do their best to try to translate this moment. Among them is the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, who was in the Wilmington courtroom this week covering the pretrial hearings. “The idea that you have to go to Wilmington just to see or get a visceral idea of what’s happening in a courtroom is not really very democratic,” Wemple tells me. The court has tried to accommodate members of the media in other ways, Wemple said, like letting them bring their computers into the courtroom to take notes (which “is better than many other courts,” he notes). But the restrictions on recording could really complicate the reporting process, especially if reporters aren’t in the room, Grueskin noted. “It’s much easier to get things wrong from a disembodied audio feed than from a good video feed,” he says. Wemple agrees. “Mistakes can be made, quotes can be mangled,” he tells me. “We’re basically, on some level, screwed.”

    Wemple tells me he’s planning on working from the overflow courtroom Monday, where a camera feed has been set up and reporters are allowed to live-tweet the proceedings. (Reporters in the courtroom, on the other hand, can’t use the internet.) “There’s a reason why cameras are in the overflow room for press, and that’s so people can get some feel for facial expressions and body language in the moment of testimony and questioning—which indicates that there is some value to a visual representation” and “letting people hear words in the voices of the witnesses and participants themselves,” says NPR media correspondent and Murdoch expert David Folkenflik, who is also covering the trial. There’s a “richer media experience that we’re just not going to get,” Wemple notes, adding the restrictions are “not exclusive to Delaware by any means; this is a problem all over the place.” 

    “These are the circumstances we labor under,” says Folkenflik. “It’s going to be an additional responsibility of the press corps covering this to render it accurately and fairly, but also to do what we can to capture a bit of the atmosphere of what it’s like to be there in this high stakes drama, and to convey the intent of what people say in a way that may not be fully captured simply by words on a page.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • Judge Sanctions Fox News for Withholding Evidence in Dominion Defamation Suit

    Judge Sanctions Fox News for Withholding Evidence in Dominion Defamation Suit

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    Eric Davis, the Delaware Superior Court judge, imposed a sanction on Fox News Wednesday for withholding evidence in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit. The judge added that he would likely start an investigation into the matter.

    Dominion will have the opportunity to conduct additional depositions or redo any deposition that’s already been done. “Fox will do everything they can to make the person available, and it will be at a cost to Fox,” Davis ruled during a pretrial hearing, per the New York Times. 

    The move came after Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer who worked with top Fox stars, said in an amended legal complaint that she had secret Fox audio recordings of Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies admitting that they could not prove some of the allegations they were making about Dominion, as The Daily Beast reported Tuesday. Grossberg has alleged that she was “coerced into giving incomplete and shaded testimony” in the Dominion suit. (“Like most organizations, FOX News Media’s attorneys engage in privileged communications with our employees as necessary to provide legal advice,” Fox said in a statement regarding Grossberg’s claims, which it said were “riddled with false allegations.”) Grossberg’s lawyers wrote that despite having access to Grossberg’s devices, “Fox News and the Fox News Attorneys either intentionally or recklessly failed to disclose these significant recordings and transcripts that went directly to the issue of whether Fox News acted with malice in publishing defamatory statements about Dominion to Dominion in the course of the Dominion Lawsuit.” In one of the recordings, from mid-November 2020, Giuliani admits to Fox host Maria Bartiromo that the Trump campaign could not prove some of the allegations it was making involving Dominion. “When further pushed by Ms. Bartiromo regarding whether Nancy Pelosi had an interest in Dominion, Mr. Giuliani responded, ‘I’ve read that. I can’t prove that,’” the filing states. 

    On Wednesday, Fox attorney Dan Webb said “nobody intentionally withheld information” from Dominion.

    During Wednesday’s pretrial hearing—the second this week, with jury selection set to begin Thursday—Dominion lawyers “gave a presentation asserting that the company had found out about documents and material that they should have received in discovery but did not get them,” according to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, reporting from Wilmington, Delaware. Grossberg’s recordings from 2020, “which Dominion said had been turned over only a week ago,” were part of the presentation, according to the Times. “We keep on learning about more relevant information from individuals other than Fox,” Dominion lawyer Davida Brook told the court. “And to be honest we don’t really know what to do about that, but that is the situation we find ourselves in.”

    Fox’s handling of information has already come up during this week’s pretrial hearings. Davis didn’t hide his frustration Tuesday, when he learned that Fox had delayed the full disclosure of Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s role at Fox News. A Dominion lawyer told Davis that Fox had disclosed only this week that Murdoch was an officer not only of Fox’s parent company Fox Corp, but for Fox News itself—a technicality that previously prevented them from obtaining certain communications during discovery that they would have otherwise been entitled to. Turning to a Fox News attorney, Davis said his team had “a credibility problem.” “I need to feel comfortable that when you represent something to me, it’s the truth. I’m not very happy right now. I don’t know why this is such a difficult thing,” Davis said.

    In an emailed statement on Tuesday, Fox said Murdoch “has been listed as executive chairman of FOX News in our SEC filings since 2019 and this filing was referenced by Dominion’s own attorney during his deposition.” 

    Davis’ decision to sanction Fox News is a stunning development just days before the massive defamation trial is set to begin. The judge also said Wednesday that he plans to appoint a special master to look into whether Fox made “untrue or negligent” assertions to the court when it said that Murdoch did not have any role in Fox News and was only an officer at Fox Corp, and when it said it had fulfilled all of its obligations in the discovery process, CNN reports. “I am very concerned… that there have been misrepresentations to the court. This is very serious,” Davis said. “I’m very uncomfortable right now.” Davis also ordered Fox’s lawyers to preserve “any and all communications” related to the Murdoch officer issue. 

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  • Report: Trump Could Be Indicted by the Fulton County District Attorney in the “Coming Weeks”

    Report: Trump Could Be Indicted by the Fulton County District Attorney in the “Coming Weeks”

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    Donald Trump made history on Tuesday when he became the first US president ever to be charged with a crime after leaving office. And thanks to a lifetime of bad behavior, he might soon break his own record for most indictments by a sitting or former POTUS, which currently stands at one.

    According to The Washington Post, Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis is “expected to announce in coming weeks whether she will file charges in connection to efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.” While it’s possible Willis will not file any charges at all, or will but they won’t be against Trump, there is obviously a chance she chooses to pull an Alvin Bragg and go after the ex-president. For one thing, the special grand jury impaneled by Willis last year reportedly heard at least two phone calls in which the then president pressured local officials to overturn the election results in Georgia, including the infamous one in which Trump demanded state secretary Brad Raffensperger “find” the exact number of votes he needed to turn his loss to Joe Biden into a win. For another, when asked about the recommendations the group made re: which individuals should be charged, jury forewoman Emily Kohrs told The 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 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, another juror said of the group’s report: “A lot’s gonna come out sooner or late. And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”

    In a court filing, attorneys for Trump demanded the final report from the special grand jury be quashed, claiming that the “results of the investigation cannot be relied upon and, therefore, must be suppressed given the constitutional violations.” His lawyers also claimed that Willis engaged in “instances of forensic misconduct and improper extrajudicial activity,” and should be removed from the case. In a speech at Mar-a-Lago last night, Trump called Willis, who is Black, a “racist,” and insisted his call to Raffensperger was “perfect” and “nothing was said wrong.”

    Of course, the Fulton County case isn’t the only one that could result in charges on top of the ones out of New York. The ex-president is also being investigated by the Justice Department for both his attempt to overturn the election and the insurrection that followed and his handling of classified documents. On Sunday, the Post reported that special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the probes, had uncovered “significant” evidence that Trump may have obstructed justice in the documents case. On Wednesday, an adviser to Mike Pence said the former VP would not appeal a ruling ordering him to comply with a subpoena from Smith to testify before a grand jury about his conversations with Trump leading up to the attack on the Capitol.

    If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

    Well, this sounds very cool and very legal

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  • Trump, Who Incited a Violent Riot After Losing the Election, Calls for “Death and Destruction” If He’s Indicted

    Trump, Who Incited a Violent Riot After Losing the Election, Calls for “Death and Destruction” If He’s Indicted

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    Days after instructing his supporters to “PROTEST” and “TAKE OUR NATION BACK,” Donald Trump warned in a series of extremely disturbing social media posts that “death and destruction” could come down upon the United States should he be criminally indicted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

    Early Friday morning, in a clear reference to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, the ex-president wrote, “What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely [sic] hates the USA!”

    Hours earlier, in an even more pointed post, he raged, “Isn’t it terrible that D.A. Bragg refuses to do the right thing and ‘call it a day?’ He would rather indict an innocent man and create years of hatred, chaos, and turmoil, than give him his well deserved ‘freedom.’ The whole Country sees what is going on, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They’ve had enough! There was no Error made, No Misdemeanor, No Crime and, above all, NO CASE. They spied on my campaign, Rigged the Election, falsely Impeached, cheated and lied. They are HUMAN SCUM!”

    Elsewhere, Trump posted a link to a story that included an image of him brandishing a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg’s face.

    Bragg is said to be weighing charges against Trump related to the 2016 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. The New York Times reported on Friday that “although there have been several signals that Mr. Bragg’s office is close to an indictment, the exact timing of any charges remains unknown.” Over the weekend, Bragg told employees, “Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment.”

    While Trump’s rants would be disturbing enough on their own, they’re obviously even more concerning in light of the events that took place on January 6, 2021, in which Trump told his followers, shortly before the deadly attack on the Capitol, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” As DC watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote on Twitter, “Trump got his supporters to attack the government once. He’s making it clear that if he’s arrested, he’s going to try to do it again.”

    Meanwhile, here’s how House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan responded to all that:

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  • Is Trump Going to Prison? And Answers to Every Other Burning Question About His Likely Indictment

    Is Trump Going to Prison? And Answers to Every Other Burning Question About His Likely Indictment

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    Later, Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance began investigating Trump, but ultimately chose to focus not on the Daniels payment, but the broader business practices of the Trump Organization, charging Trump’s family business with a cornucopia of crimes, 17 of which it was found guilty of in December. 

    Vance left office in December 2021. A short time after that, his successor, Alvin Bragg, reportedly indicated to prosecutors that he had doubts about taking a case against Trump, personally, to court.

    But then!

    Last November, The New York Times reported that Bragg had refocused the criminal investigation into Trump—but not over the crimes the Trump Organization would be found guilty of just a month later. Instead, prosecutors were returning to the matter that originally sparked their investigation into Trump a number of years back: the hush money payment. In January, the Times reported that the DA’s office had begun presenting evidence to a grand jury.

    Who spoke to the grand jury?

    A whole bunch of people, including but not limited to former AMI publisher Pecker, longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, and, crucially, Michael Cohen. Trump himself was invited to appear before the grand jury but declined. Stormy Daniels met with prosecutors in mid-March.

    And we’re assuming Trump has never actually admitted to the hush money deal, right?

    In fact, he has! Even more hilariously, he literally wrote, on Twitter, of the NDA they made Daniels sign after paying her off: “These agreements are very common among celebrities and people of wealth.”

    What has Trump more broadly said about all of this?

    Not surprisingly, Trump has, on numerous occasions, dubbed the investigation into the hush money payment a “witch hunt,” which is how he describes anything he doesn’t like, especially if it concerns the possibility that he will receive the same treatment as everyone else in the eyes of the law.

    He has also denied having an affair with Daniels (with McDougal as well), despite admitting to the hush money payment in Daniels’s case.

    When might the indictment happen?

    According to numerous reports, it could happen as early as this week. Steel barricades have been placed outside Manhattan criminal court, and law enforcement agencies have reportedly held meetings to discuss “security, staffing, and contingency plans in the event of any protests.” On Saturday, according to a copy of an email obtained by Politico, Bragg told his employees: “Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment.”

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    Are Republicans losing their minds?

    Of course. Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Here we go again—an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump. I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.” Ted Cruz wrote, “The Trump indictment is garbage.” Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted that “Every single Republican should go scorched earth.”

    Has Trump suggested his supporters should engage in violence on his behalf, à la January 6?

    In his typical Trumpian way, yes. Over the weekend, he wrote on Truth Social that people must “PROTEST” and “TAKE OUR NATION BACK,” in response to what he predicted would be a Tuesday arrest. While he did not literally call for violence, his language was deeply reminiscent of him telling his supporters to “fight like hell” on January 6, shortly before they stormed the US Capitol.

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  • Trump’s Lawyers Seem Pretty Panicked He’s Going to be Indicted in Georgia Too

    Trump’s Lawyers Seem Pretty Panicked He’s Going to be Indicted in Georgia Too

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    Donald Trump spent the weekend having a meltdown about the prospect of being indicted by Manhattan prosecutors over his 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Obviously, those potential charges are probably at the top of his mind, given the strong likelihood that (1) they are actually coming and (2) may be coming this week. But unfortunately for the ex-president, an indictment in New York isn’t the only very real legal issue he is grappling with at the moment, as his lawyers made clear on Monday.

    In a court filing, attorneys for Trump demanded the final report from the Fulton County special grand jury that investigated Trump and his allies’ attempt to overthrow the election be suppressed, claiming that the “results of the investigation cannot be relied upon and, therefore, must be suppressed given the constitutional violations.” In addition to arguing that Robert C.I. McBurney, the supervising judge in the case, “failed to protect the most basic procedural and substantive constitutional rights of all individuals discussed,” Trump’s lawyers also claimed that Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis engaged in “instances of forensic misconduct and improper extrajudicial activity,” and should be removed from the case.

    It’s not hard to see why Team Trump is going to the ends of the earth to destroy the report generated by the special grand jury. While only a small excerpt was released in February, the jury made clear in its findings that (1) despite Trump’s claims, there absolutely was not “widespread fraud” in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election; and (2) that one or more people appear to have lied to the jury, which is, yes, a crime. As for its recommendations re: which individuals should be charged, jury forewoman Emily Kohrs told The New York Times last month 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 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, another juror said of the group’s report: “A lot’s gonna come out sooner or late. And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”

    Trump’s legal team also claimed in its Monday filing that Kohrs had divulged the jury’s “deliberations” in her series of interviews, though Judge McBurney did not appear to see it that way. Legal experts told the Times they doubt her comments would have an impact on the case, noting that the special grand jury does not actually issue indictments, a job that would be left to a regular grand jury.

    As for Willis, it’s not really at all surprising that Trump’s lawyers want her booted from the case, given that she appears prepared to actually hold the ex-president and his pals accountable for their actions. Per CNN:

    Atlanta-area prosecutors are considering bringing racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. Investigators have a large volume of substantial evidence related to a possible conspiracy from inside and outside the state, including recordings of phone calls, emails, text messages, documents, and testimony before a special grand jury. Their work, the source said, underscores the belief that the push to help Trump was not just a grassroots effort that originated inside the state.

    Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis could make decisions on charges this spring, the source said. Willis will bring her charging recommendations to the regularly seated grand juries, who each serve two-month terms. Two regular Fulton County grand juries were seated in early March, and the next batch of two are scheduled to be sworn-in early May…. The Fulton County probe expanded beyond the Trump phone calls to include false claims of election fraud to state lawmakers, the fake elector scheme, efforts by unauthorized individuals to access voting machines in one Georgia county and threats and harassment against election workers.

    “The reason that I am a fan of RICO is, I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis said last year. “They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone’s life. And so RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.”

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  • Rupert Murdoch Colluded With Jared Kushner to Try to Throw the 2020 Election to Trump Because Of Course He Did

    Rupert Murdoch Colluded With Jared Kushner to Try to Throw the 2020 Election to Trump Because Of Course He Did

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    If keeping close tabs on the interpersonal relationships of billionaires whom society would objectively be better off without is one of your hobbies, you likely know that things between Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have been tense for some time now, thanks to Murdoch’s decisions to bury Trump’s 2020 election dreams in a shallow grave and subsequently dump the ex-president for a younger model. Before all that, though, the two enjoyed a robust alliance in which Fox News basically served as state TV during the Trump administration years. And, as we learned late last night, the Australian media mogul was willing to go to great, wildly unethical lengths to keep Trump in power until the very end.

    According to a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems—which is currently suing Fox News for $1.6 billion—in 2020, Murdoch gave Jared Kushner, then the first son-in-law and an adviser to the president, “confidential information about [President Joe] Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy…providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.” It’s not clear which ads Murdoch passed on (or what debate strategy he offered), but as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, the heads-up would have undoubtedly been much appreciated:

    Campaigns do opposition research on their own candidates to get a sense of what attacks are coming and to prepare for them. Now imagine if they knew with certainty what attacks were coming because the friendly chairman of a right-wing media organization was tipping you off.

    Given the way Fox treated Trump while he was in office—like he was the network’s lord and savior, and like its pundits had pledged a blood oath to him in the basement of its Sixth Avenue offices—the company’s owner having shared confidential information with Kushner probably seems neither shocking nor even that bad on the scale of all the bad things the network has done. As a reminder, though, the organization in question purports to be in the “news” business. In fact, once upon a time, it unironically made “Fair and Balanced” its motto (though that was dropped in 2017 because…c’mon). Which is quite rich given that, as Bump also notes, Fox pretty much stood on its own when it came to basically serving as a wing of both the Trump campaign and the Republican Party:

    In both the most recent and earlier filings from Dominion, Murdoch is quoted as advocating explicitly for his charges to help boost Republicans. “[W]e should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can,” Murdoch wrote to his team in the days before the runoff Senate races in that state—meaning, obviously, that they should help the Republicans win. In the new filing, he’s quoted as writing to the head of Fox News that “we must tell our viewers again and again what they will get” with tax legislation proposed by Trump. He was advocating for acting in service to Trump and Trump’s politics.

    Contrast this with other cable news channels. In 2010, MSNBC suspended host Joe Scarborough for having made small political contributions several years prior. “[I]t is critical that we enforce our standards and policies,” the network’s then president, Phil Griffin, said in a statement. Fox News hosts, on the other hand, host Republican fundraising dinners and speak at political rallies. The difference is stark.

    Murdoch obviously isn’t going to suspend himself, but unfortunately for Trump, he’s probably also unlikely to provide the same kind of support in 2024.* As we learned back in 2021, it was ole Rupert who gave the greenlight to call Arizona for Biden, reportedly telling his son, of Trump: “F–k him.” While Fox has denied this, the most recently released Dominion filing suggests Team Trump indeed received a chilly reception from the Aussie at the top. During his under-oath deposition, Murdoch said that Kushner called him on election night about the network’s coverage and, with Trump in the background “shouting,” told him, “This is terrible.” Murdoch’s response? “Well, the numbers are the numbers.”

    *Unless Trump wins the GOP nomination—then, yeah, Fox will undoubtedly do everything it can to get him elected.

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  • What the Hell Is the Trump Georgia Jury Forewoman Thinking?

    What the Hell Is the Trump Georgia Jury Forewoman Thinking?

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    The Fulton County DA’s investigation into the attempt by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia has long been seen as one of the biggest legal threats to the ex-president. As prosecutor Fani Willis told The Washington Post in September, “The allegations are very serious. If indicted and convicted, people are facing prison sentences.” In January, the special grand jury impaneled to examine the case wrapped up its work, and while its indictment recommendations remain under wraps, there is obviously a possibility that its members felt Trump (and/or some of his pals) should be prosecuted. One reason the former guy and his buddies might not end up being charged? The bizarre media tour that the jury’s forewoman has been on in the last 24 hours and counting, which some legal experts fear could jeopardize the DA’s ability to nail Trump to a wall.

    Speaking to The New York Times, forewoman Emily Kohrs revealed Tuesday that the special grand jury recommended multiple indictments, saying, “It is not a short list.” Asked if Donald Trump’s name was on that list, she told the outlet: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science…. It is not going to be some giant plot twist. You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.” In an interview with the Associated Press, Kohrs also indicated that the case involved immunity deals for witnesses as well as police escorts for her and her fellow jurors. Meanwhile, Kohrs told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the grand jury heard Trump phone calls that have not yet been disclosed to the public. “It is amazing how many hours of footage you can find of that man on the phone,” she said. When told that Trump had insisted he’d gotten “total exoneration” from the grand jury, she reportedly “burst out laughing” and asked, ”Did he really say that? Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s phenomenal. I love it.”

    Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there; Kohrs went on TV too. In an interview with CNN, she reiterated that the jury had recommended that numerous people be indicted, again saying, “It’s not a short list,” and also noting that it would be “good” to assume that the jury had recommended charging more than a dozen individuals. While refusing to say if Trump was on the list, she noted that the group “discussed [Trump] a lot in the room,” adding, “When this list comes out, there are no major plot twists waiting for you.”

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    Later in the interview, asked what her reaction would be “if the DA decides against bringing any charges, after what you’ve seen,” she said she would be “sad if nothing happens.”

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    In a separate interview with MSNBC, she was asked if she had wanted to hear from Trump, to which she responded: “I wanted to hear from the former president, but honestly, I kind of wanted to subpoena the former president because I got to swear everybody in, and so I thought it would be really cool to get 60 seconds with President Trump—of me looking at him and being like ‘Do you solemnly swear…?’ and me getting to swear him in. I kind of just thought that would be an awesome moment.”

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  • CNN Panel Cringes At Trump Grand Jury Foreperson’s ‘Painful’ Media Appearances

    CNN Panel Cringes At Trump Grand Jury Foreperson’s ‘Painful’ Media Appearances

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    CNN host Anderson Cooper and legal analyst Elie Honig raised concerns on Tuesday about a spate of media appearances by the foreperson of the grand jury that investigated former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

    The foreperson, Emily Kohrs, has been interviewed by several news outlets, including CNN, about the grand jury’s deliberations, offering coy and cryptic hints about who might be indicted.

    “It’s not a short list,” she said on CNN earlier Tuesday, giggling, of the list of recommended indictments. Asked if Trump was among them, she said: “I really don’t want to share something that the judge made a conscious decision not to share,” but “it was a process where we heard his name a lot.”

    “Why this person is talking on TV, I do not understand,” Cooper said, according to a clip recorded by Mediaite. “She’s clearly enjoying herself. Is this responsible? She was the foreperson of this grand jury.”

    Honig, a former state and federal prosecutor, said that the interviews were a “horrible idea” and that prosecutors were probably wincing watching them, adding that it was “painful” to see Kohrs dropping hints.

    “This is a very serious prospect here,” he said. “Indicting any person, you’re talking about potentially taking away that person’s liberty. We’re talking about potentially [indicting] a former president for the first time in this nation’s history. She does not seem to be taking that very seriously.”

    Honig, a former assistant U.S. attorney, suggested that Kohrs’ comments could pave the way for Trump’s team to make a motion, should he be indicted, to dismiss the indictment based on grand jury impropriety.

    “She’s not supposed to be talking about anything really, but she’s really not supposed to be talking about the deliberations,” he said, describing Kohrs as “a prosecutor’s nightmare.”

    Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney allowed certain sections of the grand jury’s report to be made public last week but withheld the names of any people it may have recommended for indictment, citing due process concerns. The panel of 23 jurors reviewed evidence for seven months starting last May. Now it’s up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to decide whether to prosecute.

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  • Tucker Carlson Hints AGAIN At Election Fraud And The Timing Is So, So Awkward

    Tucker Carlson Hints AGAIN At Election Fraud And The Timing Is So, So Awkward

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    On “Tucker Carlson Tonight” the Fox News host opened with musings on “what the hell is going on in our country.”

    “There are so many unanswered questions ― some of them lingering,” he said. “How, for example, did senile hermit Joe Biden get 15 million more votes than his former boss, rock star crowd-surfer Barack Obama? Results like that would seem to defy the laws of known physics and qualify instead as a miracle. Was the 2020 election a miracle? Honestly, we don’t know and we don’t expect to get an answer to it tonight.”

    Carlson’s questioning of the 2020 tally came hours after a legal filing showing that he and other Fox News hosts privately voiced strong doubts about the claims of Trump and his allies. He said that Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer who unsuccessfully litigated claims that the vote was stolen, was “lying” about having evidence, according to the court filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News.

    In addition, a Georgia grand jury found no evidence of “widespread fraud” in that state’s election favoring Biden, and believes some witnesses lied under oath, according to excerpts of the panel’s report released by a judge on Thursday.

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  • Firm Hired By Trump To Prove Election Fraud Came Up Empty: Report

    Firm Hired By Trump To Prove Election Fraud Came Up Empty: Report

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    A research firm investigated Donald Trump’s assertion that the presidential election was fraudulent, but its findings were suppressed because they found nothing to support his claims, The Washington Post reported citing four sources familiar with the matter.

    The Berkeley Research Group, hired by the former president’s 2020 campaign, gathered a team of around a dozen people to look into alleged voter fraud and irregularities in six states, according to the Post.

    The team reportedly briefed Trump, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on a conference call held in the last days of 2020 — before Trump held a rally urging his supporters to march on the Capitol preceding the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. The call reportedly became contentious.

    But the researchers had looked at “everything,” one source told the Post.

    “Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it,” the source said.

    As recently as Saturday morning, Trump has claimed that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen” from him, pushing various conspiracy theories about voting machines and election workers.

    He has made these claims even as dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump’s campaign or his allies were tossed out for lack of evidence in the weeks after President Joe Biden’s victory.

    Trump continued to make his claims throughout the House select committee’s monthslong investigation, which revealed that people close to Trump repeatedly tried to tell him there was no evidence of fraud.

    And apparently, he made them despite knowing that a team of professional researchers he paid to try and find evidence of fraud came up empty-handed.

    The Post’s source added: “Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities.” But the person stressed that they were not nearly enough to sway the election.

    “It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove,” the source said, “and it actually went in both directions.”

    For more, head to The Washington Post.

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  • “The Florida of Today Is the America of Tomorrow”: Ron DeSantis’s New College Takeover Is Just the Beginning of the Right’s Higher Ed Crusade

    “The Florida of Today Is the America of Tomorrow”: Ron DeSantis’s New College Takeover Is Just the Beginning of the Right’s Higher Ed Crusade

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    But that sort of lament has largely left the new trustees unmoved. When a current LGBTQ+ student told reporters about her grief, Rufo quoted her comments on Twitter, adding a laughing-crying emoji. 

    The invocation of Hillsdale College, a 1,500-student private Christian school in rural Michigan, might seem a surprising model for overhauling a public Florida institution, but it shouldn’t. The college, sometimes called “the citadel of conservatism,” has long had an outsized political influence in movement conservatism. Right-wing politicians and advocates vie for slots in its speaking program, the speeches of which are then distributed to a claimed audience of 6 million through a monthly Hillsdale publication. Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who sought to overturn the 2020 election, and who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, facilitated the launch of Hillsdale’s Capitol Hill campus in Washington. This magazine called Hillsdale a “feeder school” for the Trump administration. 

    Hillsdale has also spent the last 12 years proselytizing its Western civilization-focused model of “classical education” through a nationwide charter school-planting network, a bundle of freely-licensed right-wing K–12 curricula (including its ahistorical post-Trump “1776 Curriculum”), and its extensive connections with conservative state leaders. It’s largely thanks to Hillsdale that the idea of “classical education”—despite its varied forms and perspectives—has become right-wing shorthand for anti-“woke” American exceptionalism and an antidote to critical race theory. Last year, Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee announced plans to open 50 Hillsdale charters across the state; the year before, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, who is also the former president of the Claremont Institute, claimed that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem offered to build him an entire campus. (Noem’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) 

    But in Florida, Hillsdale’s footprint is uniquely large. The state boasts the highest number of Hillsdale-affiliated K–12 publicly-funded charter schools, several launched or directed by spouses of prominent state Republicans, including Corcoran and Republican congressman Byron Donalds. Hillsdale was instrumental in helping DeSantis overhaul the state’s K–12 civics standards along more “patriotic” lines. Last year the state hired a Hillsdale duo—one staffer, one undergraduate—to assess whether math textbooks Florida teachers submitted for approval contained prohibited concepts like critical race theory. And a number of prominent Florida officials, including Corcoran and DeSantis himself, have addressed gatherings hosted by the college, where Arnn praised both men as among the most important people in America today. 

    Rufo has addressed Hillsdale audiences too: once in early 2021, where he laid out what quickly became Republican talking points about critical race theory, and again last spring, in a speech entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” which he recently described as his “theory of action.” In the latter address, delivered while Rufo was teaching a journalism course for the college, he called on state legislators to use their budgetary power to reshape public institutions, including higher education. 

    “We have to get out of this idea that somehow a public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom—a total fraud, that’s just a false statement, fundamentally false—and that you can’t touch it or else you’re impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams,” he said. Instead, conservatives must have the guts to say, “‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.’ And so we get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.” 

    In terms of the former, he elaborated, states should defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and find creative ways to undermine university departments perceived as too liberal, like changing state teacher accreditation laws as a means of rendering teachers colleges irrelevant. Both suggestions have become common conservative talking points over the last year. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week, South Carolina legislators have requested information from its state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding training around race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, following similar moves in Florida and Oklahoma.

    In terms of what the right does like, Rufo advised state legislators to fund the creation of new, independently-governed “conservative centers” within flagship public universities to attract conservative professors, create new academic tracks, and serve as a “separate patronage system” for the right. 

    “Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo said. “But guess what? The public universities, the DEI departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people who are representing the public within them?” 

    In many ways, that’s an old idea. Big-money donors on the right like the Olin and Koch foundations have been establishing “beachhead” academic centers in universities across the country since the 1970s, as a means of shoring up academic arguments for right-wing policies, creating a pipeline of conservative talent, and endowing professorships for right-wing scholars—some of whom, more moderate academics suggest, are unemployable on their own merits. (Of possible note here: Corcoran’s appointment to New College follows his failed bid to become Florida State University’s president in 2021, when he was passed over, apparently, in part for lack of qualifications.) 

    But these days, the model has been adapted, so that funds for such programs and institutes are increasingly coming from state legislatures directly, as numerous red states have passed bills establishing new “classical” and “civics” institutes with barely-disguised agendas. In Arizona, the legislature effectively replaced private donations from the Koch foundations with taxpayer funds in order to create a new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, to address a claimed lack of ideological diversity. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has sought to establish a free-market think tank at University of Texas Austin, partly as a response to critical race theory. In Tennessee, Governor Lee paired his proposal to create dozens of Hillsdale charters with a call to build a $6 million, Hillsdale-inspired civics institute at University of Tennessee Knoxville to combat “anti-American thought.”

    Florida already has several, including a politics institute at Florida State; the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University; and the University of Florida’s freshly-approved Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education, dedicated to “the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization,” and tasked with helping create anti-communist content for Florida’s new K–12 civics curricula. 

    Last spring, this track record prompted another Florida school, St. Augustine’s private Flagler College, to worry that it was being, well, groomed to become “the Hillsdale of the South.” The legislature was considering a multimillion dollar grant for the school to establish its own “Institute for Classical Education”—money that was certainly needed and might also be used to shore up existing programs, but which faculty feared would come with intolerable strings. Professors there brought a resolution to the faculty council, declaring that, if the funding came through, faculty would retain control over how it was used for hiring and curriculum creation. In Flagler’s case, the administration readily agreed. 

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    Kathryn Joyce

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  • “He’s Running, There’s Almost No Doubt in My Mind”

    “He’s Running, There’s Almost No Doubt in My Mind”

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    On the eve of President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address, Inside the Hive’s Joe Hagan talks to Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, which takes us inside the last two years of his presidency—from January 6 to the pandemic, Afghanistan to Ukraine—and offers insight into his future. 

    Biden, Whipple says, is running for president again, age and document investigations be damned. For Biden’s new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, however, Whipple has some stern advice on managing Biden’s age: “He’s an octogenarian, he’s running for reelection. Zients has got to make sure that he’s rested enough to do it.”

    Biden was surprised, Whipple says, at the staying power of MAGA after the 2020 election and he is taking no chances, gearing up for the inevitable wave of Trumpism in 2024. “They believe that democracy is very much on the ballot in 2024,” Whipple says. 

    The following transcript excerpt has been edited for clarity and length.

    Vanity Fair: Biden has succeeded on so many levels, and yet his image remains somewhat muted, you know? 

    Chris Whipple: Joe Biden is not gonna electrify the populace. He’s not Ronald Reagan, he’s not JFK. But this guy has been underestimated time and time and time again in his political career, most recently during the midterms, as we all know.

    To bring the progressive wing of his party to the table, to keep them coherent, especially as we came into the midterms. How did that happen? He had Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the one hand, but he was also stuck with the other side, a very loud and very demanding progressive wing.

    I think the answer is a twist on the old expression. “Republicans don’t belong to any organized political party.” Those are the Democrats. They’re now an organized, disciplined party. And you have to give a lot of credit to Biden, but also to Ron Klain, who has all of the attributes of some of the great chiefs of staff, the Jim Bakers and the Leon Panettas.

    Biden has a new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, without that deep personal relationship that Klain had. I wonder what you think that might mean for the White House?

    He has a world-class temperament just like Klain, which is one of the attributes of the great chiefs like Baker and Panetta. He’s got all of that. What he lacks is political savvy and knowledge of Capitol Hill and those relationships, and this long relationship with the boss. He has a good relationship with Biden, but, you know, we’ll see whether he has the kind of relationship where he can sit down and second-guess Joe Biden’s political instincts. That’s a tough one, I think. There’s been much speculation that Biden will therefore now rely more heavily on Steve Ricchetti and Jen O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donlan and Anita Dunn for political advice. But I think it would be a real mistake to go that route because I think that yes, of course you can get their advice, but presidents learn, often the hard way, that you cannot govern effectively without empowering your chief of staff as first among equals.

    Regarding Jill Biden, what do you think the conversation is between her and the president right now?

    Well, she’s the only person who could talk him out of it. He’s running, there’s just almost no doubt in my mind. And I haven’t heard anybody suggest that Jill Biden is against it. If she is, then he may not go there, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that she is, and I think they’re talking about it. I suspect she’s saying that “if you feel you want to do it, you should go for it,” is my guess.

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    Emily Jane Fox, Joe Hagan

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