And Anyone Who Gets Near Him Deserves What They Get
Things are going badly for the MAGA miscreants who involved themselves with plotting the Trump coup. Looks like Giuliani is preparing for a long stint in prison by selling his fancy digs on the Upper East Side. (He’s asking for $6.5 million.) John Eastman, who came up with the fake electors scheme is in even worse shape. He asked that a court delay his disbarment proceedings because he’s about to be criminally charged by Jack Smith. If that happens, he has to plead the Fifth Amendment during the disbarment proceedings… and that leads directly to disbarment. I suspect a long prison term does as well.
Poor Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s former Lt Governor, who resisted helping Trump, seems to have been caught up in the nightmare as well. Yesterday, Greg Bluestein and Tamar Hallerman, reported that Duncan was subpoenaed “to testify as a witness before a Fulton County grand jury.” Actually, he’s happy to testify and, in his own words, “share the facts as I know them around this investigation in hopes of figuring out what really happened.”
Duncan is at least the fourth figure to receive a subpoena as District Attorney Fani Willis nears a long-awaited decision about whether to bring criminal charges against Trump and others in his inner circle.
Former state Sen. Jen Jordan and former state Rep. Bee Nguyen were both asked to testify before the grand jury, the AJC reported last week. The two Democrats heard falsehood-filled testimony from Rudy Giuliani during state legislative hearings in late 2020.
And independent journalist George Chidi, who stumbled upon a meeting of fake electors at the state Capitol, confirmed that he had also been summoned to discuss his experience.
Duncan, whose subpoena was first reported by CNN, would bring a different perspective to grand jurors. A conservative Republican, Duncan was once allied with Trump before publicly breaking with the then-president during the 2020 campaign.
He is an outspoken opponent of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and has frequently criticized the “stop the steal” movement that spread through GOP circles after Joe Biden narrowly captured the state in the 2020 presidential race.
As president of the state Senate, Duncan also clashed with key legislators who were among Trump’s most vocal allies in the state. He stripped a trio of lawmakers who backed Trump’s push to overturn the election of leadership posts.
Duncan opted against seeking a second term as Georgia’s No. 2 official, instead promoting a vision of a post-Trump future in a book he wrote called “GOP 2.0.”
He refused to endorse his successor, former state Sen. Burt Jones, who served as a Trump alternate elector and is closely aligned with the former president. And he didn’t vote for Herschel Walker, the Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidate, in last year’s runoff.
The fake elector plot hatched by Eastman and Giuliani has been a problem from the get-go. Yesterday a team of Washington Post reporters wrote that of the 7 states participating, only the Pennsylvania Republicans were smart enough to protect themselves legally. But that was because Biden had already been declared the certified winner in the state. On a conference call, the some of the Pennsylvania fake electors said they were uncomfortable portraying themselves as legitimate electors. So they asserted in writing that “the votes they were about to take “were intended to count only if Trump prevailed in litigation in the state.”
Trump campaign officials urged them “to keep this new language under wraps so that other states would not copy it. ‘If it gets out we changed the language for PA it could snowball,’ one campaign official wrote, according to the indictment. The fake electors in New Mexico figured it out on their own and used similar language but it was tragic for the fake electors in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada who are now facing the possibility of prison time. The fake electors in those 5 states “signed paperwork claiming to be electors for the president and casting their votes for Trump, even though he had lost their states.” That’s illegal but “the Trump campaign then moved ahead with plans to use all the certificates to pressure Congress not to certify the electoral college count for Biden.”
Included in the evidence special counsel Jack Smith offers is the fact that several of those campaign officials fretted internally about the legitimacy of the scheme. The indictment also cites a memo from Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro outlining a plan to falsely present the Trump elector slates as an alternative to Biden electors on Jan. 6.
… What the indictment does not say is whether all the doubts it documented about the legality of the elector plan were conveyed to Trump or if Trump had ever acknowledged that possibility. It alleges that his false claims of election fraud were “integral to his criminal plans” to obstruct certification. And it emphasizes his deep interest in the elector scheme, describing his demands for updates and for a public statement the day before the electors convened.
The Smith investigation into the electors does not appear to be over. In recent days, federal prosecutors have issued a new raft of subpoenas about the elector scheme in multiple states, according to people with knowledge of their activities who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
So far, federal prosecutors have not named any electors as co-conspirators, though local prosecutors are investigating electors in at least four states and have charged all 16 of his electors in Michigan with felonies.
…Inside the campaign, former and current Trump advisers said most of his original 2020 team was in the dark about what Giuliani and other lawyers new to the team were doing, and believed it was a “stupid” if not illegal plan that was simply meant to pacify an angry president, in the words of a former senior campaign official. Those who were involved in the scheme kept the strategy closely held, according to three former campaign officials.
According to the indictment, Trump eagerly followed the progress of the plan. The day before the electors were set to meet, he asked an adviser “what was going on” with the scheme, and he directed the adviser to “put out a statement on the electors.” Documents released by the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol identify the aide as Jason Miller.
Internal text exchanges, meanwhile, show that no one wanted to sign such a statement. “How best [to] proceed tomorrow so we don’t look like a donkey show, particularly on the comms/media front?” Miller asked several other campaign officials in a group text. Deputy campaign manager Justin Clark wrote back: “Here’s the thing the way this has morphed it’s a crazy play so I don’t know who wants to put their name on it.”
…Laura Cox, the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party at the time, unsuccessfully sought to ensure the paperwork in that state was purely “ceremonial” because she was uncomfortable having people sign paperwork saying they were the state electors, she told House investigators. Cox described how some Michigan Republicans considered hiding Trump electors overnight in the state capitol to make sure they could gain access to the building when it came time to meet. She testified that she thought the idea was “insane and inappropriate” and helped make sure it did not happen.
In Wisconsin, the executive director of the state Republican Party alerted its chairman, Andrew Hitt, that Giuliani was telling states not to let the media know about plans for the Republican electors to meet. Hitt replied: “These guys are up to no good and it’s gonna fail miserably,” according to documents gathered by the House select committee.
…The indictment alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators “falsely” told Republican electors that they were convening purely to protect the campaign’s legal recourse and that their real purpose was to submit “fraudulent” elector slates for Congress to consider in lieu of Biden elector slates. For instance, the indictment notes, an Arizona attorney who consulted with Chesebro a week before the Republican electors met wrote in an email that they planned on “sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes” that “aren’t legal under federal law.”
But the details also show the challenge prosecutors face in trying to prove that the elector scheme amounted to a crime and raise the question of who else besides Trump and the unnamed co-conspirators cited in the indictment might be implicated down the road. Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and the director of its election law program, said the caveat in the Pennsylvania elector slate could make it difficult to criminalize their activity.
“The conditionality, I think, has got to protect you from criminality because you are basically putting everybody on notice that you are not claiming to be an elector unless this condition becomes favorable to you, which it clearly did not,” said Foley, who has studied the disputed national elections and the role of electors.
But the calculation is likely different for those who attempted to use those certificates to create uncertainty at the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame whose research includes federal election administration and the electoral college. “Other actors taking that certificate with that contingent language to try to gin up a controversy for the vice president, or for Congress to consider, have even less of a leg to stand on,” Muller said.
Giuliani, who is described in the indictment as Co-Conspirator 1, issued a strong rebuke of the indictment in television interviews last week. “This indictment is an outrage,” Giuliani said on Newsmax. “Whether you agree or disagree, whether this is true or false, every single thing here he had every right to say as an American citizen. When the hell does the government get to tell you that you can’t object to an election?”
John Eastman, a Trump lawyer described as Co-Conspirator 2 in the indictment and accused of devising and attempting to implement the elector strategy, released a similar statement through his lawyer. The indictment “relies on a misleading presentation of the record to contrive criminal charges,” the statement said. It also accuses the Biden administration of targeting his “leading political opponent” in the 2024 contest.
And who was surprised on Monday evening when Trump objected to not sharing evidence with his cronies, who he referred to as “volunteer attorneys.” In a filing regarding the disposition of mountains of discovery the prosecution is about to turn over to Trump’s defense team, John Lauro wrote that “The government cannot preclude the assistance of those individuals, nor should President Trump be required to seek permission from the Court before any such individual assists the defense. Such a limitation or requirement would unduly burden President Trump and impede the efficient preparation of his defense.”
The dispute is one of several between Trump’s legal team and the special counsel over the handling of evidence in the case and how significantly to restrict Trump’s ability to publicly disclose any of the evidence he receives. Prosecutors have proposed a so-called “protective order” that would prohibit Trump or his legal team from publicly sharing any evidence produced by prosecutors. They say that they can’t begin sharing evidence with Trump and his team until a protective order is in place.
…Lauro said the blanket restriction on disclosing any evidence prosecutors provide is draconian and should be narrowed to limit the treatment only of materials deemed “sensitive”— such as those containing personally identifying information, grand jury subpoena returns, sealed search warrant returns and recordings or transcripts of witness interviews.
Alan Feuer noted Monday evening that “The prosecutors did not ask Judge Chutkan to issue a gag order against Trump because of the [“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”] post. But they did use the message to suggest there should be clear rules in place to keep the former president from posting online any evidence that his legal team would get through the discovery process, an apparent acknowledgment that for Trump, few things are ever routine.” Tough law and order judge Tanya Chutkan (left) announced Monday that there will be a hearing on Trump's latest nonsense by the end of the week. Unless Trump is trying-- which is not something I would rule out-- to get slapped up so he can play the martyr to his base, he's probably shitting his pants right around now.