Erica Hashimoto, who directs the Georgetown Law Appellate Litigation Program, said Trump’s appellate lawyers could challenge the three “unlawful means” that the jury was told to consider. These three are violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which limits corporations’ direct contributions to candidates; the falsification of other business records; and violation of tax laws.
The jury did not have to agree on which of the three Trump employed to convict the former president.
“And so if [Trump’s attorneys] can knock out even one of those [on appeal], then I think the whole thing has to go back for a new trial,” Hashimoto said.She added that the New York Election Law has been “very rarely used” and courts have not had many opportunities to interpret it.
“There’s not a lot of case law out there on this election interference New York state law,” Hashimoto said. “And so I think that there are legal arguments surrounding that.”…
Eric Gibson, principal and chair at Post & Schell, said the prosecution’s theory is strong on that front.
The government would likely argue on appeal that the New York Legislature intended for the law against falsifying business records to be read broadly, allowing FECA violations to be considered “another crime,” he said.
“Why would the legislature limit themselves unnecessarily?” Gibson said.
“Why would it be okay for a defendant to falsify records he’s required to maintain for his New York businesses in New York [in order] to cover up criminal activity if the crime is a federal offense?,” Gibson said. “But if the same defendant does the exact same thing to cover up a New York crime, he’s held accountable? That can’t be what they intended.”
Any appeal would almost certainly not be resolved until after the November presidential election.
Richard Schoenstein, vice chair of Tarter, Krinsky & Drogin’s litigation practice, said the prosecution’s merger of state and federal statutes to turn the misdemeanor into a felony is “the most interesting legal point.” But Schoenstein does not necessarily see success in challenging it on appeal.
“I think the odds are against getting the conviction reversed,” he said. “But there are genuine issues.”
Category Archives: chicanery
“Trump supporters try to doxx jurors and post violent threats after his conviction”
Ryan Reilly for NBC News:
The 34 felony guilty verdicts returned Thursday against former President Donald Trump spurred a wave of violent rhetoric aimed at the prosecutors who secured his conviction, the judge who oversaw the case and the ordinary jurors who unanimously agreed there was no reasonable doubt that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsified business records related to hush money payments to a porn star to benefit his 2016 campaign.
Advance Democracy, a non-profit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, including a post with Bragg’s purported home address. The group also found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe internet message board known for pro-Trump content and harassing and violent posts, although it is unclear if any actual jurors had been correctly identified.
The posts, which have been reviewed by NBC News, appear on many of the same websites used by Trump supporters to organize for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. These forums were hotbeds of threats inspired by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he lost, and that the voting system was “rigged” against him. They now feature new threats echoing Trump’s rhetoric and false claims about the hush money trial, including that the judicial system is now “rigged” against him.
“Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote after Trump’s conviction on a website formerly known as “The Donald,” which was popular among participants in the Capitol attack. (That post appears to have been quickly removed by moderators.)
“We need to identify each juror. Then make them miserable. Maybe even suicidal,” wrote another user on the same forum. “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” wrote another user. “This s— is out of control.”
“I hope every juror is doxxed and they pay for what they have done,” another user wrote on Trump’s Truth Social platform Thursday. “May God strike them dead. We will on November 5th and they will pay!”
“War,” read a Telegram post from one chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right group whose former chair and three other members were convicted of seditious conspiracy because of their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, just a few months after Trump infamously told the group to “stand back and stand by“ during a 2020 debate….
Breaking: Donald Trump Becomes First Convicted Felon to Run as a Major Party Presumptive Nominee for President; What’s Next?
Donald Trump has been convicted on all 34 counts of the charges against him. He is the first former President convicted of any felony and the first major party candidate to run for office as a convicted felon. Trump will almost certainly appeal, and he may have some good grounds for appeal. But unless things are expedited, he will likely remain out of jail and awaiting a ruling on his appeal until after the election. (It would be unusual for things to be so expedited that we would get a ruling on any appeal before the November election, and almost certainly not from New York’s highest court or the Supreme Court.)
Legally, nothing changes with Trump’s status as a candidate. The Constitution contains only limited qualifications for running for office (being at least 35 years old, a natural born citizen, and at least 14 years a resident of the U.S.) States cannot disqualify him from running for his prior actions after the 2020 election thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson, and they cannot add qualifications such as removing convicted felons off the ballot.
Politically, who knows if anything changes? Donald Trump has managed to inoculate his supporters against bad news, even criminal convictions. Anyone who knows how this will play out politically knows more than I do.
The more important trial would be for election interference. And that trial is very unlikely to make it to trial before the election as the Supreme Court sits on his immunity appeal that has put the trial on hold.
I said in a recent LA Times oped, quoting Donald Rumsfeld, that you go to war with the army that you have, not the army that you want to have had. That’s what happened here. Trump should have faced trial for trying to subvert the 2020 election. That hasn’t happened and likely won’t. This was a relatively minor case, but still there was ample evidence of crimes of falsifying business records. (Whether they are felony crimes raises difficult election law issues that will likely be considered on appeal.) But unless things change on appeal, Trump is properly referred to as a “convicted felon” (at least once we get past sentencing), and that is extraordinary for American politics.
“Experts Question Alito’s Failure to Recuse Himself in Flag Controversy”
Adam Liptak for the NYT:
Supreme Court justices seldom give reasons for their decisions to recuse themselves. Even rarer are explanations for deciding to participate in a case when they have been accused of conflicts of interest.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. is an exception. He seems positively eager to explain himself. But whether his explanation has helped or hurt his cause is open to question.
On Wednesday, Justice Alito wrote letters to Democratic lawmakers saying he was not only permitted but also obligated to sit on two cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol despite controversies over flags displayed outside his houses associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement.
Experts in legal ethics said they welcomed Justice Alito’s decision to explain himself. But they were not persuaded by the reasoning in his letters, which said the flags had been flown by his wife and so did not require him to step aside in the pending cases, on whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution and on whether a federal obstruction law covers participants in the Jan. 6 assault….
Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the quality of the reasoning in Justice Alito’s letters had shortcomings.
“I agree that Justice Alito’s wife has a First Amendment right to express her views,” Professor Frost said. “But if she does so on their shared property, in a way that would lead a reasonable person to question his impartiality, then he should respond by recusing himself.”
Professor Frost added that her conclusion would be no different had the controversy involved a liberal member of the court like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020. “I would say the same,” she said, “if Justice Ginsburg’s husband had placed a ‘Gore won’ sign on the lawn of their shared home while the Bush-Gore election was being contested in the courts.”
“How Texas’ push for election transparency undermines the secret ballot”
Votebeat and the Texas Tribune:
Texas’ efforts to make elections more transparent allows the public — in limited instances — to pierce the anonymity of the ballot and find out how people voted, undermining the secrecy essential to free elections.
The choices voters make in the private voting booth can later be identified in some cases using public, legally available records, a review by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune found.
Since 2020, requests for such records have skyrocketed, fueled by unsubstantiated concerns about widespread voter fraud, and Texas lawmakers have supported changes to make election records easier to access soon after elections.
County elections administrators, trying to fulfill activists’ demands for transparency, have also made information public that can make it easier to determine how specific people voted.
An effort to link a voter to specific ballot choices is more likely to succeed in circumstances involving less populous counties, small precincts, and low-turnout elections….
Votebeat and the Tribune were able to verify and replicate a series of steps to identify a specific person’s ballot choices using public records. But to protect the secrecy of the ballot, the two news outlets are not detailing the precise information needed or the process used to match ballot images with individual voters.
Election administration experts and voter advocates say Texas lawmakers need to find a better balance between transparency and voters’ ballot privacy — and clarify the roles county elections administrators and the Secretary of State’s office play in getting there.
“If we don’t share this information, we’re not able to determine whether or not the ballot is secure,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University and an election administration expert. “On the other hand, if people think that these are things that shouldn’t be shared, then their confidence goes down.”…
“Putting a halt to state election law that blocked candidates is the right move”
Changing the rules in the middle game to give yourself the advantage is never a fair strategy.
That is how Illinois Republicans described the new law Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed earlier this month that requires state House and Senate candidates to run in the primary if they want to end up on the November general election ballot. Typically, party leaders have slated candidates for the November ballot in late spring if the party had no one run in the primary.
The legislation is nothing more than a “dictator-style tactic of stealing an election,” Republicans have contended, as it takes away party leaders’ ability to choose a general election candidate. Democrats have maintained that the law tamps down “backroom” deals.
Maybe so. But there’s no question the law, if allowed to go into effect, would give the Democrat-dominated legislature the upper hand for this year’s general election. The law looks to us like pure gamesmanship. The move, we think, is meant to protect Democrats who hold vulnerable seats.
Prospective Republican candidates hoping to be slated by the party have a legitimate complaint, since the rules were revised in the middle of an election cycle….
“For a party that espouses being the watchdog for voter disenfranchisement, well, this goes against their basic philosophical bent,” said Daniel Behr, one of the four Republicans who filed the lawsuit.
Good point. Not to mention that voters deserve a chance to have options and competitive races on their ballot, something the new law would restrict.
“Political consultant indicted for AI robocalls with fake Biden voice made to New Hampshire voters”
A man who admitted to sending out robocalls mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice on the day of the New Hampshire primary is now facing criminal charges.
Ten indictments have been returned against Steve Kramer out of Rockingham County for bribing, intimidation and suppression and impersonation of candidates. The indictments name five people who said they received the robocall.
Truly Bizarre Story in Mediaite About Texas Voting Technology Making It Possible to Figure Out How People Voted, and FEC Commissioner Trey Trainor Taunting Republican Leader for Voting for DeSantis Rather than Trump
The eyes of Texas were upon the ballots cast by several high-profile Texas politicians on Wednesday, after documents were leaked related to a stunning lawsuit accusing state election officials of failing to properly protect ballot secrecy. The leak included the purported ballot for the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) — catching him in a lie about how he voted in the presidential primary.
The 77-page complaint was filed by an elections security researcher who lives in Williamson County, Texas and four other Texas voters, two of whom also live in Williamson County, one from Bell County, and one from Llano County. Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, Director of the Division of Elections Christina Adkins, and the county election administrators for Williamson, Bell, and Llano Counties are named as defendants, accused of “willful and systematic disregard of election laws” that put at risk the secrecy of potentially millions of ballots cast by Texans in recent elections.
The complaint describes the plaintiffs as all “consistent voters” who “voted in the most recent Texas elections in November 2023 and March 2024,” but either do not qualify to vote by mail under Texas law or prefer to vote in person….
The actual method used to cross-reference the unique identifier ballot numbers with the voter names and the results from individual ballots were originally filed in redacted form with the complaint (a redacted presentation by a Texas A&M University computer scientist regarding the methodology available for download here), according to our source. Rumors have been flying around Texas political circles in recent weeks about the method mentioned in the lawsuit and whether or not Texans’ ballots were really at risk of exposure.
And then on Wednesday, Texas-based website Current Revolt published documents that were produced using the methodology deployed in the investigation for the lawsuit – specifically, Rinaldi’s ballot.
Rinaldi voted in person in Dallas County for the Texas GOP presidential primary in March. He had publicly endorsed former President Donald Trump, said he voted for him, and even continued to insist earlier this week that he had cast his vote for Trump.
That’s not what the ballot and cast vote record images (below) show. Instead, Rinaldi allegedly voted for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose campaign collapsed in an embarrassing sputter in Iowa months earlier.
Why is FEC Commissioner Trainer even asking someone if they will be “in a #MAGA hat at” the Republican convention?
I expect we are going to hear much more about both aspects of the story, especially the potential loss of a secret ballot in Texas. If this pans out, just wow.
“Voting machine firm Smartmatic alleges Newsmax has deleted evidence in lawsuit over false vote-rigging claims”
Smartmatic alleges that Newsmax has destroyed evidence in the voting machine company’s lawsuit against the right-wing news channel over false claims that Smartmatic helped “rig” the 2020 election, according to court documents made public this week.
Lawyers for Florida-based Smartmatic allege that Newsmax engaged in a “cover-up” by destroying texts and emails of key executives that would demonstrate the network’s knowledge that voting fraud claims being pushed by former President Donald Trump and his allies were untrue. Smartmatic says the deletions occurred after Newsmax had received notice to preserve evidence for the pending suit.
In a statement, Newsmax said it “categorically” denies the allegations.
The lawsuit is just one of many major defamation cases filed by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems against news organizations over false claims about fraud in 2020 election. Most are still pending, and several may go to trial this fall — ensuring that Trump’s claims about a “rigged election” in 2020 will continue to be a focus even as the next presidential election nears.
“‘Deceptive’ MO ballot question bans non-U.S. citizens from voting. It’s already illegal”
When Missouri voters head to the ballot box this year, they’ll be asked to sign off on a measure that would ban ranked-choice voting or ranking candidates by preference.
But the first bullet point that will appear on the ballot question has nothing to do with that issue. It instead will ask Missourians whether to ban non-U.S. citizens from voting in the state, a practice that is already illegal. Disputes among lawmakers over whether to include a ban on non-citizen voting ultimately tanked a separate measure to weaken direct democracy. It was a key win for Democrats, who argued Republicans were using the non-citizen language as a way to deceive voters.
However, Missouri voters will still see similar language on the ballot this year. House Republicans, in the waning hours of the legislative session, passed a measure that included a ban on non-citizen voting attached to the ballot question that would outlaw ranked-choice voting.
“Montana’s attorney general said he recruited token primary opponent to increase campaign fundraising”
Montana’s attorney general told supporters he skirted the state’s campaign finance laws by inviting another Republican to run against him as a token candidate in next month’s primary so he could raise more money for the November general election, according to a recording from a fundraising event.
“I do technically have a primary,” Attorney General Austin Knudsen said last week when asked at the event who was running against him. “However, he is a young man who I asked to run against me because our campaign laws are ridiculous.”
Knudsen separately faces dozens of professional misconduct allegations from the state’s office of attorney discipline as he seeks a second term. He made the comments about his primary opponent during the fundraiser on May 11 in Dillon, Montana, according to the recording obtained by the Daily Montanan, which is part of the nonprofit States Newsroom organization.
“Can Suing People for Lying Save Democracy?”
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…
“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.