Tag: 2020 election
The Tangled Fates of Fani Willis and Her Biggest Case
This past August, Manny Arora, a lawyer in Atlanta, considered an unusual challenge to the charges brought against his client Kenneth Chesebro. Arora, who is in his fifties, is an unflappable retired Air Force prosecutor. He has argued cases on behalf of the former N.F.L. star Adam (Pacman) Jones and Gucci Mane, the Atlanta rapper. Chesebro was a big client, too: a Harvard-trained lawyer and one of the alleged architects of Donald Trump’s scheme to have several states, including Georgia,
The Mind-Bending World of Trump, His Indictments, and the 2024 Election
It has been six days since the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump on felony charges related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and it’s already getting hard to keep up with the latest developments. On Monday morning, Trump, in a post on his social-media site, accused the special counsel Jack Smith of trying to deny his First Amendment rights by asking that the court order the former President not to disclose evidence prosecutors have gathered.
“This Is The Big One”: The Third Trump Indictment
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This week, in a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the January 6th insurrection. Those include counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official proceeding, and to oppress
Trump’s Subdued Courtroom Appearance | The New Yorker
On Thursday afternoon, the third arraignment of former President Donald Trump took place in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, in Washington, D.C. This is the same courthouse in which the former Trump 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was arraigned in 2017, the former Trump associate Roger Stone was arraigned in 2019, and the former Trump aide Steve Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress in 2022. It’s also the same courthouse in which dozens of people have
A Former Federal Prosecutor Explains the Latest Trump Indictment
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump was indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The charges, brought by Jack Smith, a special counsel for the Department of Justice, specifically accuse Trump of conspiring to obstruct a government proceeding, defraud the United States, and deprive people of their right to have their votes counted. (A fourth count also pertains to the obstruction of a government proceeding.) To talk about the indictment, I spoke by phone with Mary McCord,
Many Senior Republicans Are Still Reluctant to Break With Trump
As Donald Trump arrives in Washington, D.C., to be arraigned on criminal charges arising from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he has already scored a significant political victory. The indictment—Trump’s third—was handed down on Tuesday, charging the former President with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, as well as conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the right to vote. Since then, much of the Republican leadership, some of Trump’s rivals in the G.O.P. primary, and
Trump’s Offense Against Democracy Itself
The events that culminated in the rollout of the Justice Department’s most recent indictment of Donald Trump, on Tuesday, had a familiar ring: a barrage of social-media broadsides and gratuitous insults from the putative defendant, and hours of breathless cable-TV vamping about news that had not yet happened. (“A micro-development, but that’s all we have right now, Jake,” the CNN senior legal correspondent, Paula Reid, told the anchor Jake Tapper at one point.) In the early afternoon, reporters who had
The New Trump Indictment and the Reckoning Ahead
To read the stark criminal indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday, charging Donald Trump with conspiring to steal the 2020 Presidential election is to realize more deeply than before that the country is headed for a great reckoning—in the courts and at the ballot box. It suggests a question that cannot be escaped: Will the American electorate show itself capable of overlooking a conspiracy to undermine democratic rule and return the chief conspirator to power?
The third
Georgia’s Broad Racketeering Law May Now Ensnare Donald Trump
In 2013, Fani Willis served as the lead prosecutor in what is still the longest criminal trial ever held in Georgia. Teachers and administrators in Atlanta public schools had been accused, a few years before, of cheating on standardized tests. A special report commissioned by Georgia’s governor concluded that a hundred and seventy-eight educators—including more than three dozen principals and a superintendent—had participated in “organized and systemic misconduct” since at least 2001. Teachers were giving children answers and altering incorrect
How Prosecutors Might Charge Trump for January 6th
Last week, former President Trump received a “target letter” from Jack Smith, a special counsel for the Justice Department, indicating that Trump will likely be criminally charged in connection with at least some aspects of his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. On Thursday, the Times reported that the letter mentioned three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. The last of these is a Reconstruction-era