by tyler | Sep 5, 2023 | CNN, politics
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and five other defendants charged in the election interference case in Fulton County pleaded not guilty Tuesday and waived their arraignments in new court filings.
Eighteen of the 19 defendants charged in the case have entered not guilty pleas. The remaining holdout – former Coffee County election official Misty Hampton – will have to enter a plea or appear in person for arraignment on Wednesday.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, charged Meadows with two state crimes: violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering RICO law and soliciting a public official to violate their oath. The charges mostly revolve around the infamous January 2021 phone call where Trump and Meadows pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the election results in Trump’s favor.
Meadows is trying to move his case out of state court and into federal court, where he could possibly get the indictment dismissed by invoking immunity that shields many federal workers from litigation.
At a high-stakes hearing in August, Meadows testified under oath for more than three hours and claimed that the alleged actions described in the Georgia indictment were connected to his formal government duties as Trump’s chief of staff. The federal judge who will decide whether to move the case still hasn’t issued a ruling.
Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who is similarly seeking to move his case to federal court, also pleaded not guilty in a court filing. Georgia law allows criminal defendants to waive their in-person appearance and formally enter a not-guilty plea through paperwork filed with the court.
Clark was charged with two counts in the Georgia case. He served as a senior Trump appointee at the Justice Department and tried to use his powers as a federal official to overturn the 2020 election. He drafted a letter, which was ultimately never sent, promoting false claims of voting irregularities and urged Georgia lawmakers to consider throwing out Biden’s legitimate electors.
Clark lobbied Trump to make him the acting attorney general so he could send the letter and have the Justice Department intervene in the Georgia election. Trump decided not to put Clark in charge after other senior Justice Department officials threatened to resign.
Pro-Trump attorney John Eastman, Georgia state Sen. Shawn Still, former Coffee County GOP Chair Cathy Latham and former Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer also entered not guilty pleas and waived their formal arraignments in court filings Tuesday.
Eastman was indicted on nine counts, including a racketeering charge. He devised and promoted a six-step plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn Joe Biden’s victory while presiding over the Electoral College certification on January 6, 2021. He also urged Georgia state lawmakers to appoint fake GOP electors to replace the legitimate slate of Democratic electors.
Still was charged with seven state crimes and is one of the 16 Republicans who served as “fake electors” in Georgia and signed paperwork falsely claiming that Trump won the Peach State. This was part of the Trump campaign’s plan to subvert the Electoral College process and nullify Joe Biden’s victory.
Latham was charged with 11 counts related to an alleged plot to unlawfully access voter data and ballot counting equipment in Coffee County, in addition to the racketeering charge that is central to Willis’ case. Latham also signed on to be an alternative elector for Trump in Georgia.
Shafer was charged with eight state crimes. Fulton County prosecutors accused him of playing a key role in organizing the Trump campaign’s slate of fake electors in Georgia, as part of the effort to subvert the Electoral College. He served as a fake elector and convened the other 15 fake electors in the Georgia State Capitol in December 2020, where they signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump won the state over Biden.
Shafer has previously claimed that the fake electors scheme came at the direction of Trump and the Trump campaign.
Shafer and Latham are also seeking to move their cases from state court to federal court.
This story has been updated with additional developments and background information.
by tyler | Sep 5, 2023 | CNN, politics
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s office released an update Tuesday about the 81-year-old Kentuckian’s health after he froze in front of cameras last week for the second time in as many months.
The note from Brian Monahan, the Capitol Hill attending physician, says there is no evidence of a stroke, seizure disorder or movement disorder like Parkinson’s disease. Read Monahan’s note below:
by tyler | Sep 5, 2023 | CNN, politics
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s office released an update about the 81-year-old Kentuckian’s health after he froze in front of cameras last week for the second time in as many months.
The note from Brian Monahan, the Capitol Hill attending physician, says there is no evidence of a stroke, seizure disorder or movement disorder like Parkinson’s disease.
The Republican leader’s office had attributed the two frozen moments to “lightheadedness,” and Monahan indicated that it’s “not uncommon” for victims of concussion to feel lightheaded. McConnell suffered a concussion and broken ribs after falling at a Washington hotel and his hitting his head in March, sidelining him from the Senate for nearly six weeks.
The note comes as the Senate returns to session Tuesday after a five-week recess and as GOP senators are expected to face questions about whether they believe the Republican leader can continue leading his conference as he has for the past 16 years – longer than any party leader in Senate history.
McConnell is expected to make floor remarks about Senate business after the chamber opens at 3 p.m. ET and meet with his leadership team at 5 p.m. for the first time since before the summer break.
by tyler | Sep 5, 2023 | CNN, politics
A federal court blocked a newly-drawn Alabama congressional map on Tuesday because it didn’t create a second majority-Black district, as the Supreme Court had ordered earlier this year.
In a unanimous decision from a three-judge panel, which had overseen the case before it reached the Supreme Court, the judges wrote that they were “disturbed” by Alabama’s actions in the case.
“We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires,” the judges, two of whom were appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote.
White voters are currently the majority in six of the state’s seven congressional districts, although 27% of the state’s population is Black.
This redistricting battle – and separate, pending litigation over congressional maps in states like Georgia and Florida – could determine which party controls the US House of Representatives after next year’s elections. Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority in the chamber.
The judges ordered a special master to submit three proposed maps that would create a second Black-majority district by September 25.
The panel wrote that they were “not aware of any other case,” where a state legislature had responded to being ordered to a draw map with a second majority-minority district, by creating which the state itself admitted didn’t create the required district.
“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” and that Alabama’s new map, they wrote, “plainly fails to do so.”
JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, which has been fighting the case, praised the ruling: “Elected officials ignored their responsibilities and chose to violate our democracy. We hope the court’s special master helps steward a process that ensures a fair map that Black Alabamians and our state deserve.”
This summer, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, had affirmed an earlier decision by the three-judge panel and ordered the state to redraw congressional maps to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”
The Supreme Court’s surprise decision in Alabama – coming after the right-leaning high court has chipped away at other parts of the Voting Rights Act in recent years – has given fresh hope to voting rights activists and Democrats that they could prevail in challenges to other maps they view as discriminating against minorities.
But the map approved by Alabama’s Republican-dominated legislature – and signed into law by GOP Gov. Kay Ivey – in July created only one majority-Black district and boosted the share of Black voters in a second district from roughly 30% to nearly 40%.
The pending cases center on whether GOP state legislators drew congressional maps after the 2020 Census that weaken the power of Black voters in violation of Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act.
Republicans control all statewide offices in Alabama and all but one congressional seat. The single Black-majority congressional district is represented by Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, the state’s first Black woman elected to Congress.
Alabama officials have argued that the map as redrawn by state lawmakers was aimed at maintaining traditional guidelines for congressional redistricting, such as keeping together communities of interest. And they have signaled interest in again appealing the issue to the high court, with the apparent hope of potentially swaying one of the justices that sided with the majority.
The state’s briefs before the three-judge panel referenced a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh – one of the two conservatives who sided with the liberal justices on the high court to vote against the Alabama map – that questioned whether “race-based redistricting” can “extend indefinitely into the future.”
The judges weren’t convinced by the state’s arguments..
They wrote that after reviewing the concurrence, as well as a part of the Supreme Court’s ruling which Kavanaugh didn’t join, “We do not understand either of those writings as undermining any aspect of the Supreme Court’s affirmance; if they did, the Court would not have affirmed the injunction.”
The judges also rejected Alabama’s argument that drawing a second Black-majority district would unconstitutionally constitute “affirmative action in redistricting.”
“Unlike affirmative action in the admissions programs the Supreme Court analyzed in [this year’s affirmative action case], which was expressly aimed at achieving balanced racial outcomes in the makeup of the universities’ student bodies, the Voting Rights Act guarantees only ‘equality of opportunity, not a guarantee of electoral success for minority-preferred candidates of whatever race,’” the panel wrote.
“The Voting Rights Act does not provide a leg up for Black voters — it merely prevents them from being kept down with regard to what is arguably the most ‘fundamental political right,’ in that it is ‘preservative of all rights’ — the right to vote.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had argued that a separate Supreme Court ruling in June – after the Alabama decision came down – that ended affirmative action in college admissions means that using a map in which “race predominates” would open up the state to claims that it is violating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
by tyler | Aug 26, 2023 | CNN, politics
The exhausting view of this bizarre week – with the first GOP presidential primary debate one day, followed by the fourth arrest this year of the former president the next – is that everyone should prepare for so much more of this uniquely American and continuously unbelievable political spectacle.
It will be impossible to look away.
Former President Donald Trump’s stone-faced mug shot and the televised motorcade of his trip to court painted his arrest Thursday at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta with a reality TV theatricality. They also drove home that Trump, like every other American, must ultimately submit to the law – in this case, in relation to charges against him for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
His return to the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in order to defiantly share the mug shot suggests he is reclaiming the weapons of misinformation he utilized during his last failed campaign, which ended in loss and inspired an insurrection.
Questions about whether his weight was misrepresented on booking documents – 215 pounds for his 6-foot-3-inches frame – is a reminder that disputed small details take on the feeling of importance when Trump is involved.
Trump’s control of the party he remade around himself continues to hold.
If there’s any doubt that 2024 could ultimately rematch Trump with President Joe Biden, note that the Republican debate that could have anointed a legitimate GOP challenger to Trump may instead have elevated Vivek Ramaswamy, the outsider and upstart who is modeling himself as Trump’s political heir.
The other acknowledged standout at the debate, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, has not yet broken double digits in polling. Stay tuned to see if an anti-Trump sentiment coalesces around her or anyone else.
Related: CNN’s John King is following GOP voters in Iowa. Read his report on how the debate affected which candidate they support.
The mug shot is a cover image for the four trials, played out in courtrooms up and down the East Coast, which will see Trump tried for:
If the world is indeed locked in a struggle between democracies and autocracies, as Biden often asserts, then it is hard not to compare Trump’s coming trials and the coming American election with the other most sensational worldwide story of the week:
Unlike in Russia, where the political rivals of President Vladimir Putin are routinely stripped of their rights and shipped off to prison camps, in the US we can expect juries to stand in judgment of Trump and his alleged co-conspirators.
There will be numerous subplots and mini-dramas in the months to come.
How to find impartial juries, whether Trump’s Georgia case should be moved to federal court or separated from his alleged co-conspirators, and just how speedy any of these trials should occur are guaranteed storylines.
But ultimately, just as he was forced to submit to a mug shot, Trump will have to submit to the fact that juries of his peers, American citizens, will decide these trials of the century.
He is also perfectly within his rights to repeat his yearslong mantra that this is all part of a “witch hunt.”
Assuming he can continue to motivate Republican voters with his campaign of retribution and hang on to his top spot in the GOP to become the party’s presidential nominee for the third straight time, then a much larger jury pool of sorts – every American voter – will get their say about that claim.
And that brings up another, perhaps more inspiring view of this very weird week, which is that a democratic system that has lasted and evolved over 200-plus years is going to stand up for itself.
“Do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen,” former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax.
It’s far from a mainstream view, and Trump’s multiple arrests have so far yielded little in the way of mass protest. But there is clearly a new openness on the right to using the language of war in terms of “taking the country back.”
Trump remains innocent until proven guilty. He could win acquittal in any or all four of the trials in which he’s a defendant.
Republican voters could well choose someone else. Primaries won’t get underway until early next year, at which time the majority of Republicans who would rather see someone other than Trump as their nominee may have found an alternative.
He’s competitive against Biden. Many Republicans fear Trump would be easier for Biden to beat than a candidate without Trump’s baggage, but the current polling suggests the next presidential election will be as close as the last one.
by tyler | Aug 26, 2023 | CNN, politics
During this week’s Republican primary debate on Fox News, a young voter notably asked about the climate crisis: How would these presidential candidates assuage concerns that the Republican Party “doesn’t care” about the issue?
The question was all but unavoidable after weeks of extreme, deadly weather. Global temperature records have been shattered, extreme heat has soared off-the-charts in the US and the Maui wildfire death toll continues to climb.
What followed the question was one of the night’s most chaotic exchanges, demonstrating the challenge some conservatives face in getting climate policy on the 2024 GOP agenda, even as extreme weather takes its toll on millions of people across the country.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the leader of a state that has been thrashed by deadly extreme weather in recent years, refused the moderators’ show-of-hands question on whether climate change is caused by humans. He used the moment to deride the media and President Joe Biden’s response in Maui.
Then 38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy – notably the youngest candidate on stage – called the “climate change agenda” a “hoax,” an answer that elicited intense boos from the audience.
A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – 55% – say human activity is causing changes to the world’s climate, according to a recent Washington Post/University of Maryland poll. It also found a majority of Americans and Republicans say their area has been impacted by extreme heat in the past five years.
But connecting the dots between climate and extreme weather is proving a more partisan issue. The poll found there are deep divides between Republicans and Democrats on the question of whether human-caused climate change is contributing to extreme weather: just 35% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they think climate change is a major factor in extremely hot days, compared with 85% of those who lean Democrat.
After the debate, a prominent conservative climate group said Ramaswamy tried to clarify his position.
“He came to our after-party and he blatantly told us that he believes climate change is real,” Benji Backer, founder of the American Conservation Coalition, told CNN. “So, he changed his position again.”
Asked by CNN on Friday whether he believes climate change is real, Ramaswamy responded, “Climate change has existed as long as the Earth has existed. Manmade climate change has existed as long as man has existed on the earth.” In an email, Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN the candidate does believe climate change is real, but policies to address it “have little to do with climate change and more to do with penalizing the West as a way to achieve global ‘equity.’”
Yet for Republicans working to make climate policy more mainstream in the GOP, Ramaswamy’s language at the debate echoed a climate crisis-denying candidate who wasn’t onstage, former President Donald Trump. Trump has called climate change itself a “hoax” and falsely claimed wind turbines cause cancer.
“The fact that he chose the word hoax, to me, he’s emulating what President Trump had said before,” Heather Reams, president of conservative nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, told CNN. Reams, who was sitting in the audience in Milwaukee, noted that Ramaswamy calling the “climate change agenda” a hoax didn’t go over well in a room full of Republicans.
“The whole place booed him, so it wasn’t well received,” Reams said. “Hearing booing was actually heartening to hear that the party is really moving on, they’re seeing the economic opportunities that can be had for the United States being a leader in lowering emissions.”
Ramaswamy’s response was an attempt to go after the older GOP voting base in the primary, Backer said. It’s the kind of audience that Fox News has historically played to when it hosts climate deniers on some of its shows or casts doubt on the connection between extreme weather and the climate crisis – but Backer said the fact the network even asked this question “just shows that the pendulum is shifting.”
Backer warned Ramasway’s response to the question risks alienating younger conservative voters who are increasingly concerned about climate impacts.
“I’ve in two presidential elections and I’ve never voted for a Republican president in my life, because I don’t vote for climate deniers,” Backer said, adding that climate denial “is the way of the past.”
Several Republican presidential candidates have said they believe climate change is real and caused by human activity – a shift from previous elections.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley acknowledged its reality but said foreign nations, including India and China, bear larger responsibility for addressing it. Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum have all engaged frequently with conservative groups, Reams and Backer said.
“I think that Nikki Haley provided a very clear, very positive response,” Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO of the American Conservation Coalition, told CNN. “We need to see more responses like that in the Republican Party. I think it’s important that we show the conservative environmental movement is here to stay.”
Backer warned that Ramaswamy and other candidates risk losing young voters if they continue to engage in climate denial – or anything that sounds remotely like it.
“There’s a lot of Republicans leading on this, but the narrative is that we don’t care,” Backer said. “And if we nominate another person who doesn’t care, young people are not going to forget that. There’s not going to be a lot of baby boomers in 20 years, so you better start thinking about the next generation.”
