Posts tagged with "Rudy Giuliani"

Above, Rudy Giuliani. (Photo illustration source: Alicia Tatone for GQ)

Giuliani loses defamation lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers

August 31, 2023

A federal judge has determined that Rudy Giuliani has forfeited the defamation lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers against him,—a decision that could lead to significant penalties for Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, reports CNN.

Giuliani lost the case because he struggled to maintain access to his electronic records—partly because of the cost—and couldn’t adequately respond to subpoenas from attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss as the case moved forward.

The mother and daughter are asking for unspecified damages after they say they suffered emotional and reputational harm, as well as personal endangerment, after Giuliani singled them out when he made false claims of ballot tampering in Georgia after the 2020 election.

A trial to determine the amount of damages for which Giuliani will be held liable will be set for later this year or early 2024, Judge Beryl Howell of the DC District Court said on Wednesday, August 30.

The damages could amount to thousands if not millions of dollars.

Giuliani already has been sanctioned almost $90,000 for Freeman’s and Moss’s attorneys’ fees in the case, and Howell says the former New York mayor may be saddled with additional similar sanctions.

Giuliani has been struggling financially, buried under 2020 election legal proceedings, a new criminal case against him in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the election, and other matters. He has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges in Georgia and has been released from jail on bond.

Late last month, Giuliani conceded that he made defamatory statements about Freeman and Moss and that he didn’t contest their accusations that he had smeared them after the 2020 election.

Giuliani’s statements about them, which Freeman and Moss say are false, included calling them ballot-stuffing criminal conspirators. Giuliani also drew attention to a video of them after the election, which was first posted by the Trump campaign and showed part of a security tape of ballot counting in Atlanta. On social media, his podcast, and other broadcasts, Giuliani said the video showed suitcases filled with ballots, when it did not capture anything but normal ballot processing, according to the defamation lawsuit and a state investigation.

Georgia election officials have debunked Giuliani’s accusations of fraud during the ballot counting.

The mother-daughter duo has been candid about how their lives were impacted by Trump and Giuliani’s claims that they were guilty of election fraud.

“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Freeman said last year in video testimony to the House select committee that investigated the events surrounding the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

Moss said her privacy was destroyed when she learned that Giuliani had accused her mother, Freeman, of passing some kind of USB drive to her like “vials of cocaine or heroin” as part of an elaborate vote-stealing scheme.

In reality, the object in question was a ginger mint.

In his controversial call when he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find votes to help him overturn his 2020 loss, Trump attacked Moss 18 times, and the former president called Freeman a “professional vote scammer” and a “hustler.”

“I felt horrible. I felt like it was all my fault,” Moss said during her testimony last year. “I just felt like it was, it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.”

She added that she and her mother were afraid to go outside or to the supermarket after getting threats “wishing death upon me, telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like—‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”

During Giuliani’s disinformation campaign about the vote in Georgia, the FBI recommended Freeman leave her home for her own safety, according to the lawsuit.

Research contact: @CNN

Above, the charges in the 41-count indictment involve Trump and 18 others. (Image source: The Hill)

Fani Willis’s grand-slam indictment against Donald Trump

August 16, 2023

Like a clean-up hitter in baseball, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis has hit a grand slam home run with her indictment of former President Donald Trump, reports The Hill.

It is by far the most comprehensive of the four criminal indictments now pending against the former president—in terms of the kinds of crimes it alleges, the places in which they occurred, and the number of people charged.

Georgia, which was ground zero for Trump’s lies about the election outcome and his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, now looks like it also will be ground zero for those seeking to hold the former president accountable.

The indictment filed by Willis draws on various state laws to name what Trump did in the wake of the 2020 election and rightly calls the Trump campaign a criminal enterprise for the coordinated efforts it made to overturn the election results.

While Special Counsel Jack Smith’s August 1 indictment seemed narrowly focused and tailored to avoid any unnecessary legal complexity, Willis appears to have chosen a different path.

The Georgia indictment lays out, in soup-to-nuts fashion, many crimes. Some are already well-know and, if proven, are quite serious. Others, although also serious, have received much less publicity.

The indictment does a service to American democracy by providing the broadest possible framework to describe the crimes that Trump and others allegedly committed in Georgia and elsewhere.

As the indictment states in its succinct introduction: “Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”

“That conspiracy,” the indictment continues, “contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states … including, but not limited to, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and in the District of Columbia.”

The charges contained in the 41-count indictment involve Trump and 18 others, a rogues’ gallery of collaborators in the ex-president’s alleged criminal enterprise, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and Jeffrey Clark. The named defendants are liable to severe criminal penalties, with the very real prospect that some, or all of them, will end up joining the 47,000 people already serving time in Georgia prisons.

At the heart of Willis’s grand slam indictment is the charge that Trump’s conduct violated Georgia’s laws against racketeering, a type of organized crime typically involving fraud or extortion. This charge conjures images of the kinds of things done by Al Capone or Jimmy Hoffa—and now of the four-time indicted former president.

Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), enacted in 1980, was written more broadly than its federal counterpart. Under Georgia’s law, it is easier to prove a pattern of racketeering than it would be with a federal RICO charge. As The Guardian notes, “It requires prosecutors to show the existence of an ‘enterprise’—and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two ‘qualifying’ crimes.”

Among those crimes the indictment lists: making false statements concerning fraud in the November 3, 2020 election; corruptly soliciting Georgia officials, “including the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to violate their oaths to the Georgia Constitution and to the United States Constitution by unlawfully changing the outcome of the November 3, 2020 presidential election”; and creating “false Electoral College documents and recruit[ing] individuals to convene and cast false Electoral College votes.”

The Georgia indictment also charges Trump and others with conspiracy to commit election fraud. Those efforts include what Trump calls his “perfect phone call” to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the then-president asked him to find 11,780 votes and warned he might face criminal prosecution if he failed to do so.

Using the racketeering charge for Trump’s election tampering efforts, seems, at first glance, to be going into what Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis calls “deeply uncharted territory.” Applying it in this context, he says, “is very new. That is something that we haven’t seen in Georgia before, and it hasn’t really happened elsewhere before.”

And because of its complexity—trying a racketeering case with 19 defendants, each with their own lawyer and legal strategy—it will not be easy to pull off. But, given Willis’s track record, Trump should take this racketeering charge very seriously.

If it is televised, America will see defendant Trump sitting quietly with his lawyers while he is prosecuted by a Black woman in a city which Joe Biden carried overwhelmingly. This is hardly the visual which our reality-TV-star-turned-president generally prefers, although it may play into his overarching narrative of victimization in a demographically changing America.

In the end, the filing of Willis’s indictment means that Georgia will be, as lyrics in the well-known song by Ray Charles say, very much on Trump’s mind—as well as on the minds of Americans seeking a forum to examine the damage he has done to our democracy.

Research contact: @thehill

Above, Noelle Dunphy and Rudy Giuliani. (Photo source: Noelle Dunphy/Daily Mail UK)

Bombshell lawsuit accuses Rudy Giuliani of sexual harassment, wage theft, and more

May 17, 2023

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani—who, more recently, served as personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump—has been named in a bombshell sexual harassment suit, charging him with demanding sexual favors, and engaging in alcohol-fueled rages, and wage theft, reports CBS News.

The suit is being brought by a woman Giuliani hired to handle business development for his firm. It is filled with multiple allegations about his sexual demands.

“He was constantly pressuring her, making sexual comments, sexual remarks, to her, about her, about himself. When they were supposed to be working he would, as our client alleges, then grope her and try to initiate sexual contact,” attorney Justin Kelton said.

Kelton was talking about his client, Noelle Dunphy, and the complaint she filed in Manhattan Supreme Court charging Giuliani with sexual abuse, harassment, and wage theft. He reportedly refused to pay her the $1 million salary he promised.

It is a complaint filled with shocking details, including that Giuliani allegedly:

Drank morning, noon, and night, and was frequently intoxicated—and, therefore, his behavior was always unpredictable;
Took Viagra constantly, would expose himself, and tell her that he could not do any work until “you take care of this;” and
Made clear that satisfying his sexual demands—which came virtually anytime, anywhere—was an absolute requirement of her employment.

The suit says Giuliani “often demanded that Dunphy work naked, or in short-shorts with an American flag on them that he bought for her.”

The suit also claims Giuliani “demanded oral sex while he took phone calls,” including with then-President Donald Trump, and told her he enjoyed it “because it made him feel like Bill Clinton.”

“She alleges that on several occasions she objected, clearly, that he did not respect those objections,” Kelton said.

When Dunphy asked him if his firm had a human resources department where she could file a complaint, he reportedly laughed it off. Giuliani said that he did not have a human resources department, the suit charges, and bragged that no one would ever sue him because he was connected to then-President Trump, and he had private investigators who would punish anyone who complained, according to the lawsuit.

There was also the matter of his reportedly inappropriate comments when he had been drinking—comments recorded by Dunphy.

“Making all kinds of extremely vulgar, sexual remarks, racist remarks. Comments about the genitalia of Jewish men, for example. Comments about different ethnic groups. Comments about the bodies of prominent women like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, imagining them in sexual scenarios,” Kelton said.

In published reports, Giuliani’s attorney had said he “categorically denies all of the allegations of this frivolous complaint.” However, the attorney did not comment on whether his client and Dunphy were romantically entangled.

Ted Goodman, a political and communications advisor to Giuliani, claimed “she’s taken part in ‘prior schemes to defraud high net-worth men,” according to a 2016 New York Post story. He also claimed she, “bragged about extorting $5 million” from the son of a successful Wall Street investor, with a fake rape claim in 2011.

“Mayor Giuliani’s lifetime of public service speaks for itself and he will pursue all available remedies and counterclaims,” Goodman said.

The suit also claims Giuliani gave Dunphy access to more than 23,000 of his emails—some allegedly containing classified and privileged exchanges with then-President Trump, his family, secretaries of state, and former attorneys general.

Dunphy is seeking $10 million.

Research contact: @CBSNews

Above, District Attorney for Fulton County Fani Willis. (Photo source: Dustin Chambers for USA Today)

Witnesses in Georgia Trump probe suspected of ‘testi-lying’

February 16, 2023

A Georgia grand jury is concerned witnesses lied to them during their investigation of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to interfere in the state’s 2020 election—raising the specter of potential charges, reports USA Today.

Descriptions of the alleged lies could be unveiled on Thursday, February 16, when parts of the grand jury’s long-awaited report on the Trump probe are made public. Indeed, although the witnesses won’t be identified and no one has been charged, prosecutors could pursue perjury charges as leverage to broaden the investigation, according to legal experts.

Charges for lying to investigators or perjury are rare because they can be difficult to prove and peripheral to the main case, according to legal experts. But federal prosecutors have convicted witnesses in recent years of lying to authorities during previous investigations of Trump.

“That expands the scope of potential defendants quite a bit,” said Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University. “It also opens up the possibility for the district attorney to proceed immediately with perjury indictments, which would be pretty straightforward.”

A perjury charge in Georgia, which carries a maximum ten-year prison term, could be used to leverage testimony for more serious conspiracy charges carrying a maximum 20-year term, according to legal experts. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis hired an expert in conspiracy cases against Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations and legal experts said she may pursue RICO charges in this case.

A RICO charge alleges the suspect participated in at least two crimes, as part of a pattern of criminal activity. State and federal prosecutor—including Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani—have wielded RICO laws in recent decades to combat organized crime and drug dealing. Dozens of charges qualify to build a RICO case, including perjury, bribery and tampering with witnesses or evidence.

Willis has brought RICO cases against Atlanta school officials and alleged gang members, which is why some legal experts expect her to use the statute in the Trump investigation.

Tom Morgan, a criminology professor at Western Carolina University and a former district attorney in DeKalb County, Georgia, said he probably wouldn’t pursue stand-alone perjury charges from a grand jury because those cases are difficult to prove. But he said perjury felonies could become part of a broader RICO case.

“It makes the other counts stronger in the RICO case because it shows a pattern of covering up,” Morgan said. “Juries don’t like that.”

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said that the part of the report to be released on Thursday “discusses the concern that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony to the grand jury.”

Defenses against perjury charges include witnesses thinking they were telling the truth or making a false statement without knowing it was a mistake.

An average of fewer than 30 people per year during the last decade have been charged with perjury in Georgia and fewer than ten per year have been convicted, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Yearly convictions twice peaked at 17 during the last decade and there were none last year, according to the agency.

“In my career, I’m not aware of a perjury indictment based on grand jury testimony,” said Morgan, a former 12-year prosecutor. “It’s very rare.”

Samuel Gross, a law professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, said perjury is common, but prosecution of it is rare. Anecdotally, in civil cases, witnesses sometimes lie in response to questions they consider unrelated to the point of the case, Gross said. In criminal cases, police might lie about the justification for a search or defendants might lie to avoid being found guilty, he said.

“Perjury is really, really, really common,” said Gross, referring to a phrase he doesn’t like: “testi-lying.”

Federal prosecutors have charged witnesses with lying to investigators, either as stand-alone charges or in combination with broader cases.

In Fulton County, Willis asked the special purpose grand jury to investigate attempts to interfere with the 2020 election. The inquiry covered Trump’s call January 2, 2021, to state Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” enough votes for Trump to win the state. Trump has denied wrongdoing and described the call as “perfect.”

Another aspect of the inquiry deals with the Trump campaign recruiting an alternate slate of presidential electors, in an attempt switch Georgia’s results from President Joe Biden to Trump.

The 75 witnesses who were summoned included Trump advisers such as Giuliani; Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina); and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia).

Giuliani, who has been told he is a target of the investigation, testified to state lawmakers about alleged voter fraud. Graham called Raffensperger and his staff in the weeks after the election. Gingrich advocated a strategy to have the House decide the election, which Trump would have won because a majority of state delegations were Republican.

Giuliani, Graham, and Gingrich each have each denied wrongdoing. No charges have been filed and their testimony hasn’t been revealed.

Clark Cunningham said that, if he were Willis, he wouldn’t charge Trump immediately—even if he could—because the former president has numerous defenses that could slow down the case. Instead, Cunningham said people charged with perjury could become cooperating witnesses against higher level conspirators.

“That puts the district attorney in a position to immediately start working with defendants who might become cooperating witnesses and could really open things up,” Cunningham said.

Research contact: @USATODAY

Above, Rudy Giuliani. (Image source: Alicia Tatone for GQ)

Special counsel Jack Smith slaps Rudy Giuliani with grand jury subpoena

January 11, 2023

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani—asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, reports CNN.

The subpoena, which was sent more than a month ago and has not been previously reported, requests documents from Giuliani about payments he received around the 2020 election, when Giuliani filed numerous lawsuits on Trump’s behalf contesting the election results, a person with knowledge of the situation told CNN.

Prosecutors also have subpoenaed other witnesses who are close to Trump, asking specifically for documents related to disbursements from the Save America PAC, Trump’s primary fundraising operation set up shortly after the 2020 election.

Taken together, the subpoenas demonstrate prosecutors’ growing interest in following the money after the 2020 election as part of their sweeping criminal probe around Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss of the presidency.

Save America was part of broader fundraising efforts by Trump and the Republican Party that raised more than $250 million after the election. Since then, the political action committee has compensated several lawyers who now represent Trump and his allies in January 6-related investigations.

The subpoenas to other witnesses in addition to Giuliani were sent in late December, according to other sources. The information that the prosecutors are seeking still is being collected, the sources said. With Giuliani, the investigators have prioritized getting financial information from him, one person said.

The inquiry to Giuliani came from David Rody, a former top prosecutor in New York who specializes in gang and conspiracy cases and is assisting Smith with examining a broader criminal conspiracy after the election, according to some of the sources.

In response to being informed of CNN’s reporting on Giuliani’s subpoena and asked for a statement, Ted Goodman, his adviser, said, “The mayor is unaware of the specific claims by this so-called ‘anonymous source,’ and therefore is not in position to respond.”

A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment and a representative for Trump has not responded to a request for comment.

CNN previously reported that the Justice Department in September subpoenaed witnesses for financial details about the Save America PAC, and that a portion of Smith’s office would dig into possible financial and campaign contribution crimes. The Giuliani subpoena and other December subpoenas represent a new round of inquiry, now from Smith’s office, which took shape over the holidays.

After the election, Trump and the Republican National Committee raked in millions of dollars as they told supporters the election was being stolen, marketing the fundraising effort as election defense. At the time, some officials working on the fundraising effort knew that Joe Biden’s electoral win was legitimate, despite Trump’s insistence it was fraudulent, the House Select Committee found in its own investigation.

Giuliani is likely to be a central figure in any probe of Trump’s close political circles after the election. After serving as Trump’s private attorney during the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former chief federal prosecutor and mayor of Manhattan dove into Trump’s attempts to claim electoral victory. He unsuccessfully argued a case before a federal judge in Pennsylvania—where Trump sought to throw out the popular vote—and connected with state lawmakers as he tried to convince them of election fraud.

In the weeks after the 2020 election, Giuliani also held freewheeling press conferences, repeating allegations that he never could prove.

In addition to the financial inquiry, Smith’s office is pursuing possible criminal cases around the Trump campaign’s use of fake electors in battleground states; and the pressure on Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election’s result. In all of those schemes, Giuliani was a central player.

In his House select committee testimony, Giuliani explained that his team working with Trump pivoted to focus on state legislatures that could block the election result after his attempts failed in the courts. The New York state bar suspended him from practicing law because of his 2020 election efforts, and he’s also facing an attorney discipline proceeding in Washington, DC.

He declined to answer some questions the House asked about his work for Trump after the election, citing attorney confidentiality. Giuliani could try to make similar claims in the federal investigation, although the Justice Department has legal mechanisms with which it can try to overcome witness refusals to answer questions.

Research contact: @CNN

Above, the report recommended that Congress consider whether to bar former President Donald Trump from ever holding office again. (Photo source: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times)

January 6 panel issues final report, placing blame for capitol riot on ‘one man’

December 26, 2022

Declaring that the central cause of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was “one man,” the House select committee investigating the insurrection delivered its final report on Thursday, December 22—describing in extensive detail how former President DonaldTrump had carried out what it called “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and offering recommendations for steps to assure nothing like it could happen again, reports The New York Times.

The report—released late on Thursday night—revealed new evidence about Trump’s conduct, and recommended that Congress consider whether to bar Trump and his allies from holding office in the future under the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists.

“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report said. “None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him.”

The release of the full report was the culmination of the panel’s 18-month inquiry and came three days after the committee—as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution—voted to formally accuse Trump of:

Inciting insurrection,
Conspiracy to defraud the United States,
Obstruction of an act of Congress, and
One other federal crime.

While the referrals do not compel federal prosecutors to take any action, they sent a powerful signal that a select committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.

“Our institutions are only strong when those who hold office are faithful to our Constitution,” Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, wrote in the report, adding: “Part of the tragedy of January 6 is the conduct of those who knew that what happened was profoundly wrong, but nevertheless tried to downplay it, minimize it or defend those responsible.”

The report contains the committee’s legislative recommendations, which are intended to prevent future presidents from attempting a similar plot. The panel already has endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump and his allies tried to exploit on January 6 in an attempt to cling to power. The House is scheduled to give final approval to that overhaul on Friday.

Among committee recommendations were a possible overhaul of the Insurrection Act and strengthening the enforcement of the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists holding office.

The panel also said Congress should consider legislation to bolster its subpoena power and increase penalties against those who threaten election workers. And it said bar associations should consider whether any of the lawyers who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the election should be punished.

In addition to its focus on Trump’s actions, the report went into great detail about a supporting cast of lieutenants who enabled him. Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro were named as potential “co-conspirators” in Trump’s various attempts to cling to power.

Trump bashed the report on his social media site, Truth Social, calling it “highly partisan.”

The committee already had released the report’s executive summary, a lawyerly, 154-page narrative of Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election by seven million votes.

The report that follows the summary was largely an expanded version of the panel’s widely watched set of hearings this summer—which routinely drew more than 10 million viewers—with its chapter topics mirroring the themes of those sessions.

Those included Trump’s spreading of lies about the election, the creation of fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by President Joe Biden; and the former president’s pressure campaign against state officials, the Justice Department and former Vice President Mike Pence. The committee’s report documents how Trump summoned a mob of his supporters to Washington and then did nothing to stop them as they attacked the Capitol for more than three hours.

The committee’s report is the result of an investigation that included more than 1,000 witness interviews and a review of more than one million pages of documents, obtained after the panel issued more than 100 subpoenas.

Research contact: @nytimes

Above, protesters outside the U.S. Capitol. (Photo source: AFP-JIJI0)

DOJ issues 40 subpoenas in a week—expanding its January 6 inquiry

September 14, 2022

Justice Department officials have seized the phones of two top advisers to former President Donald Trump and blanketed his aides with about 40 subpoenas in a substantial escalation of the investigation into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the inquiry, reports The New York Times.

The seizure of the phones—coupled with a widening effort to obtain information from those around Trump after the 2020 election—represent some of the most aggressive steps the department has taken thus far in its criminal investigation into the actions that led to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

The extent of the investigation has come into focus in recent days, even though it often has been overshadowed by the government’s legal clash with Trump and his lawyers over a separate inquiry into the handling of presidential records—including highly classified materials, the former president kept at his residence in Florida, the Mar-a-Lago Club.

Federal agents with court-authorized search warrants took phones last week from at least two people: Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Trump’s legal efforts; and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020, people familiar with the investigation said.

Epshteyn and Roman have been linked to a critical element of Trump’s bid to hold onto power—the effort to name slates of electors pledged Trump from swing states won by Joe Biden in 2020 as part of a plan to block or delay congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Epshteyn and Roman did not respond to requests for comment. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

The names of those receiving the latest round of subpoenas in the investigation related to January 6 have dribbled out gradually, with investigators casting a wide net on a range of issues, including Trump’s postelection fund-raising and the so-called fake electors scheme.

One of the recipients, people familiar with the case said, was Dan Scavino, Trump’s former social media director who rose from working at a Trump-owned golf course to become one of his most loyal West Wing aides, and has remained an adviser since Trump left office. Stanley Woodward, one of Scavino’s lawyers, declined to comment.

Another was Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner. Kerik, who promoted claims of voter fraud alongside his friend Rudy Giuliani, was issued a subpoena by prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., his lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said on Monday, September 12. Parlatore said his client had initially offered to grant an interview voluntarily.

The subpoenas seek information in connection with the fake electors plan.

For months, Trump associates have received subpoenas related to other aspects of the investigations into his efforts to cling to power. But in a new line of inquiry, some of the latest subpoenas focus on the activities of the Save America political action committee, the main political fund-raising conduit for Trump since he left office.

The fact that the Justice Department is now seeking information related to fund-raising comes as the House committee examining the January 6 attack has raised questions about money Trump solicited under the premise of fighting election fraud.

The new subpoenas encompass a wide variety of those in Mr. Trump’s orbit, from low-level aides to his most senior advisers.

The Justice Department has spent more than a year focused on investigating hundreds of rioters who were on the ground at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But this spring, it started issuing grand jury subpoenas to people like Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer with the pro-Trump Stop the Steal group, who helped plan the march to the Capitol after Mr. Trump gave a speech that day at the Ellipse near the White House.

While it remains unclear how many subpoenas had been issued in that early round, the information they sought was broad.

According to one subpoena obtained by The New York Times, they asked for any records or communications from people who organized, spoke at, or provided security for Trump’s rally at the Ellipse. They also requested information about any members of the executive and legislative branches who may have taken part in planning or executing the rally, or tried to “obstruct, influence, impede, or delay” the certification of the presidential election.

By early summer, the grand jury investigation had taken another turn, as several subpoenas were issued to state lawmakers and state Republican officials allied with Trump who took part in a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in several key swing states that Biden actually won.

At least 20 of these subpoenas were sent out and sought information about, and communications with, several lawyers who took part in the fake elector scheme, including Giuliani and John Eastman.

Around the same time, federal investigators seized Eastman’s cellphone and the phone of another lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump had sought at one point to install as the acting attorney general. Clark had his own role in the fake elector scheme: In December 2020, he helped draft a letter to Governor Brian Kemp (R) of Georgia, saying that the state’s election results had been marred by fraud and recommending that Kemp convene a special session of the Georgia Legislature to create a slate of pro-Trump electors.

At least some of the new subpoenas also requested all records that the recipients had turned over to the House January 6 committee, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Research contact: @nytimes

Above, AG Bill Barr testified to the committee that the former president might have been 'detached from reality,' but in late 2020, he praised Trump's 'unprecedented achievements.' (Photo source: Doug Mills for The New York Times)

Striking contrast: Trump officials then and now

June 16, 2022

Many officials have told the January 6 committee that they tried to dissuade the former president from his bid to overturn the election. But in public at the time, their words were far different, reports The New York Times.

For example, when Bill Barr stepped down as attorney general in December 2020, he showered then-President Donald Trump with praise for his “unprecedented achievements” in a flowery letter and vowed that the Justice Department would continue to pursue the president’s claims of voter fraud “to ensure the integrity of elections.”

However, 18 months later, Barr sounded more than slightly different. In videotaped testimony played at the first two public hearings held by the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Americans have now learned what Barr avoided saying publicly about Trump at the time.

“I was somewhat demoralized,” Barr said in testimony played on Monday , June 13—describing his reaction to a monologue from Trump in December 2020 that the voting machines were rigged.

Barr’s thinking, he said, was that the president had “become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff. On the other hand, when I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

Barr’s testimony, as well as that of several aides played at the hearing, represented candid, more brutal versions of what they were saying in public shortly after the election, the Times said.

Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, and Jason Miller, a top adviser, testified to the committee that they failed to keep Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, away from him on election night. Giuliani, whom Mr. Miller described as “definitely intoxicated,” told Trump that he should declare victory. “It was far too early to be making any calls like that,” Mr. Stepien testified.

Stepien also testified that it became clear after the election that Trump did not have any realistic avenue to overturn the election. But in the days immediately after the vote, he did not publicly challenge Trump or Giuliani. And two days after Election Day, Miller raised the idea on a call with reporters that mysterious bags of ballots were showing up in states where Trump was still contesting the results.

Both appeared to believe that there was an opportunity for challenges that passed in the middle of November. Both continued working with the campaign, but receded from the forefront as Trump put Giuliani in charge of the efforts to overturn the results.

The change for some of the aides reflects the legal consequences of lying to a congressional committee, and how much Trump’s grip on his former aides has loosened in the 17 months he has been out of office.

The testimony so far reflects only what has been released publicly, and it is unclear what else the committee may have. In books written about the election in the last year, Trump’s aides are portrayed as believing that the data showed a likely victory until the afternoon of November 5, when it changed.

Barr, who testified to the committee voluntarily, spoke on the record to Jonathan Karl of ABC News in 2021 about his exasperation with Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud. Barr also recounted tense private conversations with Trump in his memoir this year.

In other cases, people such as Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka began to look toward a life after the White House in Florida, while staying inside the Administration. They tried to solidify policy issues they had worked on and, according to their colleagues, said little to try to dissuade Trump from his bid to stay in power.

And yet they remained silent in public as the president, his advisers and political allies pushed the claims on Americans and used them for fund-raising for Trump.

“After the election, he’s advised by his own people not to go out and declare victory, that they needed time for the votes to come in,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, who led the questioning at the second committee hearing on Monday.

She added: “They directly told the president over and over again, they were false. These were his people. This is Trump World, telling the president that what he was saying was false. And he continued to say the same thing.”

Research contact: @nytimes

Photo source:@royalanimals/#foxnews/Instagram

Dominion Voting wins key decision in lawsuit against Fox News

December 20, 2021

A judge in Delaware has found that Fox News‘ coverage of election fraud after the 2020 election may have been inaccurate—and is allowing a major defamation case against the right-wing TV network to move forward, reports CNN.

Judge Eric Davis of the Delaware Superior Court declined to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems‘ lawsuit against Fox News in a significant ruling on Thursday, December 16.

The ruling will now allow Dominion to attempt to unearth extensive communications within Fox News as they gather evidence for the case, and the company may be able to interview the network’s top names under oath.

At this stage, CNN notes, the court must assume Dominion’s claims about Fox News are true. Still, Davis called out in the 52-page opinion that Fox News may have slanted its coverage to push election fraud, knowing the accusations were wrong.

Dominion alerted the network’s anchors and executives to information that disproved accusations of widespread vote-switching following Donald Trump’s re-election loss, the judge noted.

“Nevertheless, Fox and its news personnel continued to report Dominion purported connection to the election fraud claims without also reporting on Dominion’s emails … Given that Fox apparently refused to report contrary evidence, including evidence from the Department of Justice, the Complaint’s allegations support the reasonable inference that Fox intended to keep Dominion’s side of the story out of the narrative,” the judge wrote.

The court rejected Fox News’ claims that it was able to discuss Trump advisers’ election fraud conspiracies under principles of news reporting.

Fox News reacted to the ruling saying in a statement, “As we have maintained, FOX News, along with every single news organization across the country, vigorously covered the breaking news surrounding the unprecedented 2020 election, providing full context of every story with in-depth reporting and clear-cut analysis. We remain committed to defending against this baseless lawsuit and its all-out assault on the First Amendment.”

The lawsuit alleges Fox News personalities including Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity and their on-air guests Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell spread lies about fraud in the 2020 election that hurt Dominion’s business. It is one of several lawsuits Dominion has brought related to right-wing claims after the election, and is a major win for the company.

The case will continue to move forward toward a final judgment, as both sides gather evidence. The judge still is considering whether Dominion can be considered a well-known entity, which could give Fox News some protection under the law.

Research contact: @CNN

Above, the seriousness of Rudy Giuliani’s misconduct ‘can not be overstated’, the New York court said. (Photo source: Michael Reynold/EPA)