Freeman hired a lawyer, though it wasn’t clear what could actually be done. But, in 2021, the lawyer was approached by a nonprofit called Protect Democracy. The group had been founded a few years earlier by former lawyers in the office of the White House counsel during the Obama Administration. Protect Democracy, which now has more than a hundred employees and a budget of thirty million dollars, aims to defend America from authoritarianism; it has worked on a range of litigation, legislation, research, communications, and software projects—including VoteShield, a platform now monitoring the integrity of voter-registration data in two dozen states—and has successfully advocated for changes to election laws. One of its founders, Ian Bassin, was recently given a MacArthur “genius” grant. But P.D. has often pursued its goals in novel ways. It has recently begun to use defamation law—which was designed to protect against reputational damage rather than authoritarian takeover—to fight against the flood of disinformation. If the group sued the right liars, its members believed, they could stop dangerous lies from spreading. The strategy has concerned some free-speech advocates. But Bassin believes that targeted defamation suits can “produce a systemic rebalancing of incentives to advance truth.” In late 2021, Protect Democracy sued Giuliani, and a half dozen others, for defamation of Freeman and Moss. Freeman, who often quotes from the Bible, told me that she felt like an underdog in the fight. “I think about David and his slingshot,” she said. “He had five smooth stones.”…
As this was unfolding, P.D. was working on what it called its “Law for Truth” strategy. “We could see the dominoes,” Rachel Goodman, a former A.C.L.U. attorney, who heads the Law for Truth project, told me. A relatively small number of individuals and media outlets, she explained, account for most election-related disinformation online. According to one study, more than half the retweets of the forty-three most prominent false or misleading stories about voting, prior to the 2020 election, originated from three dozen users. Since 1964, the protective standard in libel law has been “actual malice”: if you could show that someone had willfully lied or recklessly spread mistruths, and damaged a reputation in the process, you might hold him legally responsible. “The idea of getting accountability for people defamed as part of the Big Lie was really interesting,” Goodman said….
If there’s a center-left consensus on the perils of democratic instability at the moment, it does not extend to P.D.’s use of defamation law. Some of the pushback concerns free speech. “This kind of litigation may make liars more cautious,” Eugene Volokh, who teaches First Amendment law at U.C.L.A., told me. “But the good chilling effect on lies and the bad chilling effect on truths walk hand in hand.” In an age of incipient authoritarianism, it’s especially important that speech protections be broad, critics say, so that news organizations are not afraid of reporting on what they believe to be true. Fox invoked free speech in a recent counterclaim against Smartmatic, saying that its lawsuit is “designed to serve as a warning to others to think twice before exercising their own free speech rights.” In January, a judge allowed Fox to advance its claim. Nora Benavidez, a free-speech attorney in Atlanta, explained, “Going after the purveyors of disinformation must be very carefully done so we don’t develop case law that ultimately undermines free speech—which, by its very nature, includes lies.”
Samantha Hamilton, an attorney at the University of Georgia Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, told me that defamation law was a deficient tool in the fight against disinformation because the biggest lies, such as “The election was stolen” or “Vaccines don’t work,” typically don’t cause reputational harm to a specific individual. “Defamation really doesn’t have a role to play,” she said. Bassin defends the project’s results so far. Ten days after OAN was served with the lawsuit, DirecTV informed OAN that it would not renew the network’s contract that spring. Bassin acknowledged that several factors were at play but told me, “Our complaint was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Soon after, Verizon also cut ties with OAN. “As a result of us filing, there’s a good case to be made that OAN lost access to a quarter of U.S. households with TVs,” Bassin said. (A spokesperson for DirecTV told me that its decision was primarily financial.) Still, as Benavidez pointed out, even millions in damages might have little long-term effect on behemoths like Fox. “It’s just the cost of doing business now,” she said.
Behavioral experts have also found that most people tend to discount or reframe new information, like legal verdicts, that don’t fit into their belief systems. This form of cognitive bias complicates the problem of disinformation and potentially undermines attempts to fix it with verdicts. “If we’re expecting defamation law to do much of the heavy lifting in solving a complex issue like disinformation, I think we’re expecting too much,” Hamilton said. During the Giuliani trial, I noticed an audience member in the courtroom, a lawyer named Fletcher Thompson, who seemed distressed. During a bathroom break, I approached him. After days of testimony, he was still convinced that Biden had stolen the election. “I can see what happened,” he told me. “I make my own inferences. I think there was a plan to do this.”
Law for Truth plans to file more suits in the coming months. Ultimately, though, Bassin and his colleagues understand that P.D.’s impact has limits. Democracy is neither a natural system nor an easy one to maintain…
Category Archives: chicanery
“A flyer in her name told migrants to vote for Biden. But she says she didn’t write it”
NPR deep dive into a story previously featured on ELB from the NYT:
Zavala said a “blanket of fear” fell over her in the days after the flyers went viral.
“I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t know if I should respond,” Zavala said. “If I say something, is it going to fuel the fire more? Will this cause more death threats?”
She shut down her social media accounts as the hateful messages kept coming.
She said it bothered her that no one publicizing the flyer on social media or in Congress had checked with her about whether she or anyone at RCM had written it.
“They never cared to call me and find out whether it was true or not,” Zavala said. “I mean, that really is, you know, an attack on my character as a person.”
Rubin told NPR that it “certainly occurred to me” to ask RCM to verify the flyer when he visited, but he didn’t want to bring attention to himself because he said he had previously been kidnapped by the Gulf Cartel near there. “I need to maintain a low profile here because I am in enemy territory. The cartel literally told me, ‘Never come back here again.'”
Howell, a former attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that the Oversight Project did not reach out to Zavala before publishing the X thread because “it was in the immediate public interest to know about the invasion in the United States.” He added, “Would the United States reach out to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] to verify intelligence about them flooding fentanyl into this country? Of course not.”
Howell noted that the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet, The Daily Signal, sought comment from Zavala after the thread was published. The first story that The Daily Signal published about the thread, on April 15, does not mention seeking comment from Zavala; only the second story, on April 16, does. The second story says Zavala didn’t respond to The Daily Signal.
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Zavala said there are a number of clues that suggest the flyer was not written by her or anyone at RCM.
It contains errors, such as “Bienvedinos” instead of “Bienvenidos” (Welcome). Zavala is not a native Spanish-speaker, but she said she checks the grammar and spelling of what she writes in Spanish.
Whoever made the flyer relied heavily on RCM’s English-language website, which has dated posts that stop after 2021. Zavala said she has not had the time or resources to update it.
The flyer lists a defunct phone number that Zavala said she hasn’t used in years but is still listed on the website.
The first two sentences of the flyer appear to be an old description of the organization copied directly from the website and run through Google Translate into Spanish. It mentions that HIAS shares the office, an arrangement that ended in 2022, according to both groups.
The next two sentences, which remind readers to vote for Biden when they get to the U.S., are written in a different style and are riddled with more errors than the previous ones. That section translates “United States” as “estados unidos,” without the usual capitalization, while the previous section uses the abbreviation “los EE. UU.”
There are also inaccuracies in the X thread. The thread says the site where the video shows the flyers is a “Resource Center Matamoras (RCM) location.”
But RCM has not staffed the site for years, which was also confirmed to NPR by people from other local nongovernmental organizations who work with migrants. Glady Cañas of Ayudándoles a Triunfar and Andrea Rudnik of Team Brownsville both told NPR that there is no longer a formal camp at that site.
NPR visited the site and saw an informal encampment with a small number of migrants staying there, but did not see any evidence of the flyers. Anyone can access the encampment, which is in a city park along the banks of the Rio Grande.
“Are R.F.K. Jr. Signature Gatherers Misleading New Yorkers for Ballot Access?”
Amy Bernstein, a traffic court judge in Brooklyn, was heading home from work one night in late April when, she said, a young man carrying a clipboard approached her on the subway platform, asking if she would sign a petition to help place independents on the ballot in New York.
The top of the petition was folded underneath itself, so that the names of the candidates were not visible, Ms. Bernstein said. She asked for more details and told the man she was a judge — at which point he yanked the clipboard away, she said, and asked: “Am I going to get in trouble?”
The petition was for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign, which is working to collect the signatures needed to secure a spot for him on the November ballot in New York State. The campaign needs 45,000 but is aiming for more than 100,000. Candidates often collect far more signatures than they need in case some end up being invalidated for various reasons.
“At a minimum, it’s misleading,” Ms. Bernstein said of the interaction. “I was just pretty much taken aback.”
More than a half-dozen New York City residents, including two who are journalists at The New York Times and were approached randomly, have described similar encounters with signature gatherers for Mr. Kennedy in Brooklyn over the past three weeks. In each case, the resident was approached by a clipboard-wielding petitioner and asked to support “independent” or “progressive” candidates, or, in one case, to help get Democrats and President Biden on the ballot.
In three cases, the petitioners said that they were being paid for the work, the people who were approached said; in four cases, the petitioners said they had been told by a supervisor not to show or mention Mr. Kennedy’s name. Descriptions and photographs of the petitioners suggest that they are at least four different people. The petitioners themselves could not be identified or reached for comment.
“Henry Cuellar Indicted Over Bribery Scheme”
Missed this story (and the Illinois one Derek flags) while traveling:
Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat in a crucial swing district, and his wife were charged with participating in a yearslong $600,000 bribery scheme involving Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Houston on Friday.
The accusations against Mr. Cuellar, 68, and his wife Imelda, 67, center on allegations of bribery and money laundering in connection with their efforts on behalf of an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan’s leaders as well as an unnamed bank based in Mexico City, according to the 54-page complaint.
Mr. Cuellar, a Laredo native first elected in 2004, is also accused of acting as an agent of a foreign entity while a U.S. government official — by delivering a speech favoring Azerbaijan in Congress and inserting provisions into aid bills to benefit those who were paying bribes to his family.
I wonder how a Speech or Debate Clause defense might figure into claims based on delivering a speech in Congress.
“Top RNC lawyer resigns after rift grows with Trump”
WaPo on the campaign losing the adult in the room:
The top lawyer at the Republican Party is resigning after he cited conflicts with his other work obligations and after Donald Trump grew angry about his criticism of the former president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, people familiar with the situation said Saturday night.
The lawyer, Charlie Spies, is a long-respected GOP election operative who was hired by Trump’s top lieutenants in March after the former president engineered a takeover of the Republican National Committee, which in recent years has been the party’s main operation in both fundraising and field operations.
Trump had approved of the hiring but later learned about additional comments the lawyer had made. Spies in the past had worked for, either directly or indirectly, former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). He was liked by Trump’s top advisers, who orchestrated his hiring even though they knew he was skeptical of Trump’s false claims of a stolen election….
Spies had been tasked with leading the party’s vast legal spending and election integrity program, and his hire was viewed as a sign Trump’s RNC could attract significant party talent.
Trump aides had worked to save Spies from being ousted after learning Trump was angry about his previous comments. They’re trying to convince Trump that Spies was a stronger election lawyer than others and to forgive the comments, said people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. He was viewed as close with LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Trump’s two top aides….
Spies has also repeatedly defended the presidential election system as being nearly impossible to rig, citing the broad distribution of authority in managing elections. During a 2021 appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he said correctly that allegations of widespread voting machine error in Michigan were false and that repeated recounts in Georgia had failed to show any voter fraud in the 2020 race there.
“Let’s win the elections, and not get worried about things that aren’t true,” he said at that event.
“Inside the far-right plan to use civil rights law to disrupt the 2024 election”
At a diner just off the freeway north of Sacramento, a mostly white crowd listened intently as it learned how to “save America” by leaning on the same laws that enshrined the rights of Black voters 60 years ago.
Over mugs of coffee and plates of pot roast smothered in gravy, attendees in MAGA and tea party gear took notes about the landmark Voting Rights Act and studied the U.S. Constitution. They peppered self-proclaimed “election integrity” activist Marly Hornik with questions about how to become skilled citizen observers monitoring California poll workers.
The nearly 90 people gathered in the diner in February were there to understand how they can do their part in a plan to sue California to block certification of the 2024 election results unless the state can prove that ballots were cast only by people eligible to vote.
If any votes are found to be ineligible, Hornik explained, then all voters are being disenfranchised — just like those decades ago who couldn’t vote because of their race.
“If we think our right of suffrage … has been denied or diluted, we have to stop that immediately. We have to stop it right in its tracks,” said Hornik, co-founder of a group called United Sovereign Americans, which is led by a man who helped push former President Trump’s baseless challenges to Joe Biden’s election in 2020.
The two-hour meeting at the Northern California diner — one of several similar presentations that have taken place across the country in recent months — is part of the group’s plan to file lawsuits in multiple states alleging voters’ civil rights are violated by errors on the voter rolls. The goal is to prevent states from certifying federal elections in 2024 until substantial changes are made to election processes.
What United Sovereign Americans has planned is a legal long shot. But election experts worry that if even one sympathetic judge rules in their favor, it could sow doubts about the integrity of a presidential rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump.
“Sometimes the whole point is to whip up enough smoke that it seems like a fire,” said Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general who specializes in voting rights.
The group’s legal arguments rely on faulty interpretations of federal election law and are likely to fail in court, according to Levitt and other experts who believe the group’s evidence ofvoter registration fraud is overstated and inaccurate.
United Sovereign Americans is part of a cottage industry of far-right election deniers that has sown disinformation since Trump lost his reelection bid. The group aims to scrutinize elections with a legal strategy that can “throw massive amounts of sand in their gears,” Hornik said during a February presentation in Orange County.
Top New York Election Lawyers Cannot Recall Anyone Ever Prosecuted for the NY Election Law Being Used to Try to Turn Trump’s Hush Money Payments into a Felony
Business Insider confirms what I suspected:
Now, Manhattan prosecutors now say an old, rarely used section of the state election law is their favorite on the menu of potential underlying crimes.
“As the court is aware, falsifying business records in the first degree requires an intent to commit or conceal another crime,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan on Tuesday.
“The primary crime that we have alleged is New York state election law section 17-152,” Steinglass told the judge, lifting into prominence an arcane measure that had previously played only a supporting role in the case.
“There is conspiracy language in the statute,” the prosecutor said, “The entire case is predicated on the idea that there was a conspiracy to influence the election in 2016.”
Business Insider asked two veteran New York election-law attorneys — one a Republican, the other a Democrat — about the law, also known as “Conspiracy to promote or prevent election.”
Neither one could recall a single time when it had been prosecuted.
“I’ve never heard of it actually being used, and I’ve practiced election law for 53 years,” Brooklyn attorney and former Democratic NY state Sen. Martin Connor said of section 17-152.
“I would be shocked — really shocked — if you could find anybody who can give you an example where this section was prosecuted,” agreed Joseph T. Burns, attorney for the Erie County Republican Committee in Buffalo, New York…
Falsifying business records requires proof of at least an attempt to commit an underlying crime to be a felony.
But what if that underlying crime is section 17-152 — conspiring to mess with an election through “unlawful means?”
Things will get “twisty,” Connor said, when prosecutors try to show that Trump’s falsified business records are felonies because of an underlying crime — 17-152 — that itself needs proof of a conspiracy to do something “unlawful.”
“You’re having an underlying crime within an underlying crime to get to that felony,” Connor told BI….
Proof of an intent to violate any of these three laws would be sufficient to satisfy Section 17-152. And once you prove 17-152, you have the underlying crime you need to raise misdemeanor falsifying business records to a felony.
It’s important to remember that Trump is only charged with 34 counts of this one crime: felony falsification of business records, said election-law scholar Jerry H. Goldfeder.
Trump is not charged with actually committing any of the underlying state and federal laws required to prove felony falsification.
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So prosecutors have no legal obligation to prove he’s guilty of any of these underlying laws, 17-152 included, said Goldfeder, senior counsel at Cozen O’Connor and author of Goldfeder’s Modern Election Law.
“They only have to prove he intended to commit these underlying crimes,” which is a far lower bar, said Goldfeder, who also directs the Fordham Law School Voting Rights and Democracy Project.
“I think it’s a very viable case,” he told BI.
“And the testimony so far demonstrates that Trump intended to pursue this catch-and-kill scheme and to falsify business records to cover it up — and did so to influence the election,” he said.
Why It Matters Legally Whether We Conceive of the Trump Case as One of “Election Interference”
Jed Handelsman Shugerman in NYT oped:
About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.
After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud….
In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan D.A. is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications. I see three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal.
First, I could find no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime. Whether state prosecutors have avoided doing so as a matter of law, norms or lack of expertise, this novel attempt is a sign of overreach.
Second, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The Manhattan D.A. responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, they could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute (a plea deal and a single jury instruction do not count).
Third, no New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public. Legal experts have noted that such a broad “election interference” theory is unprecedented, and a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.
AP:
Lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wasted little time during opening statements tying the case to Trump’s campaigning during his first run for the presidency. He said the payments made to Stormy Daniels amounted to “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”
Whether the jury accepts that connection will be pivotal for Trump’s fate. The presumptive GOP nominee faces charges related to falsifying business records that would typically be misdemeanors unless the alleged act could be tied to another crime. Prosecutors were able to charge them as felonies because they allege that the false records were part of an effort to cover up state and federal election law violations — though that’s still not the type of direct election interference that Trump is charged with elsewhere….
ome legal experts monitoring the cases against Trump said they were skeptical of connecting the payments to a form of “election interference.” Doing so also runs the risk of diminishing the gravity of the other charges in the public mind.
Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota Law School professor and former associate White House counsel during the George W. Bush administration, said he believed the facts of the case met the evidence needed to determine whether a felony had been committed that violated campaign law, but added, “The election interference part, I have a little bit of trouble on this.”
Richard Hasen, a UCLA law school professor, said the New York case does not compare to the other election-related charges Trump faces.
“We can draw a fairly bright line between attempting to change vote totals to flip a presidential election and failing to disclose embarrassing information on a government form,” he wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times column.
In an email, Hasen said New York prosecutors were calling the case election interference “because that boosts what may be the only case heard before the election.”
Some said prosecutors’ decision to characterize the New York case as election interference seemed to be a strategy designed to raise its visibility.
“When (Manhattan District Attorney) Alvin Bragg calls it an election interference case, that’s more of a public relations strategy,” said Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law and former federal prosecutor. “I think there was concern that people were looking at the other prosecutions and they weren’t discussing the Manhattan case.”…
That means prosecutors usually need evidence that the defendant was an expert in the law, was told what he or she was doing was illegal, or told someone else to ignore the law. Some lawyers believe that may explain why federal prosecutors never charged Trump with the campaign finance crime that Cohen admitted to working with Trump to commit.
“I assume that’s why SDNY didn’t indict Trump,” Eliason said, referring to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. “I think the willfulness would have been a big hurdle to charging Trump himself.”
Smith said the issue in this case, as in Edwards’, isn’t just whether the defendant had a general understanding of campaign finance law, but could really have known for sure that what he was doing was illegal. “The strongest argument for Trump is that in fact there is quite a bit of controversy over whether this is illegal. Look at the FEC’s own rulings,” Smith said.
It’s unclear how Bragg’s prosecutors would meet that burden or if the judge will require them to. Pretrial motions didn’t really tee up the issue. It is likely to arise as the lawyers debate jury instructions or in a motion the defense typically makes asking the judge to toss the case after the prosecution’s witnesses have testified.
Eisen said he thinks Justice Juan Merchan will apply a lower standard in the state prosecution. “It’s so much easier than in federal court,” Eisen said.
However, there’s a risk to allowing prosecutors to get a conviction without having to prove that Trump knew he was breaking the law: That issue could be strong fodder for an appeal and might lead to any guilty verdicts against Trump being overturned.
“I think the likelihood of a conviction is quite high, quite strong,” said Eliason. “On appeal, that’s where some of these issues come up.”
“My New One in the LA Times: “Why it’s hard to muster even a ‘meh’ over Trump’s New York criminal trial”
I have written this piece for the LA Times. It begins:
In watching some of the breathless coverage of Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial, I’m reminded of the 2004 quote from former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that, “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want.” People want the hush money case to be the big case that can take down Trump because it may be the onlyone that goes to trial before the election….
But the hush money case that opens Monday in New York? I have a hard time even mustering a “meh.” Trump may not be convicted of a felony in the case, and if he is, there’s a reasonable chance of an eventual reversal on appeal. Besides, the charges are so minor I don’t expect they will shake up the presidential race. They may actually make that situation worse…
Although the New York case gets packaged as election interference, failing to report a campaign payment is a small potatoes campaign-finance crime. Willfully not reporting expenses to cover up an affair isn’t “interfering” with an election along the lines of trying to get a secretary of state to falsify vote totals, or trying to get a state legislature to falsely declare there was fraud in the state and submit alternative slates of electors. We can draw a fairly bright line between attempting to change vote totals to flip a presidential election and failing to disclose embarrassing information on a government form. If every campaign finance disclosure violation is election interference, our system is rife with it.
I certainly understand the impulse of Trump opponents to label this case as one of election interference — that could resonate with voters and make them less likely to vote for Trump. But any voters who look beneath the surface are sure to be underwhelmed. Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases…
Trump also may have serious grounds for appeal in the New York case. It is far from clear that appellate courts would treat the hush money payments as legitimate campaign expenses that needed to be reported, as opposed to personal expenses. And it is uncertain that failing to report a campaign expenditure required by federal law can be a violation of New York state election law against promoting “the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” These issues may well have to be sorted out by higher courts.
“Supreme Court to weigh if Jan. 6 rioters can be charged with obstruction”
Ann Marimow for WaPo:
Defense lawyers say prosecutors overreachedby charging rioters with a crime that is limited to conduct that destroys or tampers with evidence sought by investigators. The government’s broad application of the statute, the lawyerswarned in court filings, would allow prosecutors to target protesters or lobbyists who disrupt congressional committees….
The Justice Department said there are no examples of prosecutors using the statute passed two decades ago to target such behavior, which is protected by the First Amendment. Government lawyers argue that the violent disruption of the peaceful transfer of power after a presidential election, including attacks on police officers, is no minor interference.
But the challengers’argument may be persuasive to some Supreme Court justices,several of whom have voted in past years to narrow the use of other laws they say were applied too broadly.One example is the high court’s unanimous 2016 decision to overturn the corruption conviction of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell,in which the court expressed concern about prosecutors’ “boundless interpretation” of the federal bribery statute….\
Much of the discussion on Tuesday is expected to center on how to properly interpret the text of a statute Congress amended in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which followed the Enron scandal. As the justices mull how narrowly or broadly prosecutors can apply the statute, the meaning of the word “otherwise” will play a central role.
The law includes a penalty of up to 20 years in prison for anyone who “corruptly — (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”…
All but one of the 15 judges overseeing Jan. 6-related cases in theD.C. federal courthousehave sided with the government on this question, ruling that the rioters who sought to keep Congress from certifying Biden’s victory were “otherwise” obstructing that proceeding. The outlier was U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump nominee, who said the word “otherwise” refers only to other efforts to tamper with or destroy records or documents.
A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed that ruling, which Judge Florence Pan — a Biden nominee — said was too narrow and at odds with the text of the statute. “We cannot assume, and think it unlikely, that Congress used expansive language to address such narrow concerns,” she wrote, joined in part by Judge Justin Walker, who was nominated by Trump….
“Voter fraud defamation case heard at NC Supreme Court could have implications for 2024 elections”
A timely constitutional question, as the 2024 elections ramp up: Should people who falsely accuse North Carolina voters of committing voter fraud be immune from being sued for defamation, if they go through the state’s formal process for making the accusations?
The North Carolina Supreme Court considered the issue Thursday in a case that focuses on just a few voters — but which could also have significant ramifications for how future allegations of voter fraud are handled in this closely watched swing state.
The lawsuit dates to 2016, when backers of then-Gov. Pat McCrory’s reelection campaign falsely accused dozens of North Carolinians of committing voter fraud. McCrory, a Republican, lost to now-Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, by a razor-thin margin of just a few thousand votes. The fraud allegations came just days after the election and were intended to potentially sway the results. But they were thrown out as baseless by elections officials who had been appointed by McCrory himself, and a recount confirmed Cooper’s victory.
The case heard Thursday doesn’t involve McCrory personally. It’s about whether his lawyers and other supporters behind the voter fraud claims can be sued for defamation by the wrongfully accused voters they named. The voters won at trial, and then won a partial victory in the state Court of Appeals, before the case went up to the Supreme Court.
Politically connected lawyers and operatives packed the high court Thursday as lawyers presented oral arguments.
Based on the questioning from justices, the Supreme Court appears primed to reverse those prior decisions and rule in favor of the GOP operatives. No matter how the justices rule, it could impact the 2024 elections and their aftermath in North Carolina.
“Scoop: DNC covered Biden legal bills in special counsel probe”
President Biden used campaign donations to help pay his legal bills last year during the special counsel’s probe into his handling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the matter and an Axios review of campaign finance records.
Why it matters: The payments, made through the Democratic National Committee, are at odds with the Biden campaign’s recent attacks on Donald Trump for spending his campaign funds on legal fees.
Driving the news: The DNC — which has been collecting the biggest donations to Biden’s re-election effort — paid more than $1.5 million to lawyers or firms representing Biden during the probe, according to the committee’s financial filings….
“2 Men Fined $1.25 Million for Robocall Scheme to Suppress Black Vote”
Two right-wing political operatives who used a robocall campaign to try to discourage Black New Yorkers from voting in the 2020 election will pay up to $1.25 million for their actions, the New York State attorney general’s office announced on Tuesday.
During the summer of 2020, around 5,500 New Yorkers received robocalls falsely claiming that if they voted by mail, their personal information would be sent to law enforcement agencies, debt collectors and the government. The calls were made at a time when many states were encouraging voters to cast their ballots by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic.
One New Yorker was so disturbed by one of the calls that he experienced “severe anxiety and distress and ultimately withdrew his voter registration,” according to the attorney general’s office.
The office said the calls came from a “sham” organization called Project 1599, which was created by the operatives, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman.
“A MAGA Troll’s Memes Were Blatant Disinformation. But Were They a Crime?”
The Intercept reports on the Mackey appeal; oral argument is Friday morning.
Here’s my earlier Slate piece on the case; and here’s my amicus brief with Protect Democracy and Yale’s MFIA Clinic.