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The future of Roe v Wade is in the balance…and so much more.
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McCarthy has been talking out of both sides of his mouth, but more importantly he was in a lot of contact with Trump on the Jan 6th Insurrection day and records of those calls are being held and McCarthy will be examined about them. They are holding his feet to the fire thankfully.
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Bannon energizes the base… 
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
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US Capitol Police just arrested a California man who had a machete, bayonet, and other blades in his truck, which had a swastika and other White supremacist symbols painted on it, lurking near the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
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FBI releases new video footage of person placing pipe bombs near RNC and DNC headquarters before Capitol riot
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A Pennsylvania senate subcommittee has voted to approve 17 subpoenas for personal information on every voter in PA, including partial social security numbers and drivers license numbers, as part of their investigation of the 2020 election.
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Trump Org Forced Into NY Court Over Widespread Tax Fraud Charges
Mazars, Trump’s Accounting Firm, Stuck in an Unenviable Position
Former President Donald Trump’s accounting firm is in a tough spot.
Mazars USA LLP faces supporting its longtime client while also cooperating with authorities who have now charged the Trump Organization with tax fraud.
The firm could opt to end its decades-long relationship with the Trump Organization. But walking away from a client doesn’t end the firm’s professional obligations nor would it halt inquiries into its past work for Trump’s global real estate business.
Mazars may be stuck with Trump for better or worse. In the short term, the criminal case in New York and an ongoing congressional investigation could stain the firm’s reputation. Partners may leave, clients may switch to another CPA firm, revenues could slump.
But there’s also an opportunity to bolster the firm’s reputation and position among the 30 largest firms in the country by standing by its client and its work.
“Accounting firms are going to have clients that have difficulties of one sort or another. And the test of whether or not this accounting firm could be a trusted business partner for a company is how they handle this situation,” said Jon Baumunk, accounting ethics lecturer at San Diego State University.
Professional Duty
Mazars declined to comment about the impact that the criminal charges against the Trump Organization has had on the firm, nor its current business relationship with the real estate developer.
“Due to our industry’s professional obligations Mazars cannot discuss any clients—current or former, the status of our relationships, or the nature of our services in a public forum without client consent or as required by law. We remain committed to fulfilling all of our professional and legal obligations,” the firm said in a statement.
Mazars has complied with a New York grand jury subpoena, turning over eight years worth of records related to former President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns to state prosecutors. Related records remain under dispute as part of a congressional inquiry into Trump’s finances.
Court orders represent one of the few exceptions to accounting ethics rules that generally require firms to guard confidential client information.
But those ethics rules don’t bar the firm from ending a client relationship—an option a firm should consider if a client posed a threat to its reputation, said Joe Schroeder, associate professor of accounting at Indiana University.
And right now Mazars’ brand is being harmed because of its association with Trump, he said.
“The only thing you are selling is your reputation,” he said of CPA firms. “And the minute that your reputation is in question, it’s going to be hard for you to do business.”
When to Walk, or Stay
Risks to a firm’s reputation can spread. Clients may not want to be associated with a firm or its controversial client and could find a new CPA firm to protect their own brand. Others may leave to minimize the chance that investigators would start probing their own tax reporting, he said.
The risks also could cascade to the firm’s partners, who could also decide they don’t want to be associated with the firm and set up shop elsewhere, he said.
Both could result in lower revenues for the firm.
The firm now has 11 offices across the U.S. and roughly 100 partners, and reported $218 million in revenue last year. Mazars USA, part of the Belgium-based global network, has lost ground among the top U.S. firms in recent years, losing partners and sliding from the No. 24 post to No. 26 despite revenue gains, according to Accounting Today’s annual ranking of the Top 100 firms.
Mazars, through a series of mergers dating back decades, basically inherited Donald Trump’s business from his father Fred, according to a Pro Publica story.
Clients facing investigations or litigation need the help of professionals like accountants and lawyers most, said Michael Dell, an accountant liability lawyer with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP.
“People are entitled to counsel,” Dell said. “The mere fact that a client is controversial or facing investigations doesn’t mean that you need to or have a professional responsibility to drop them.”
Accountants’ duty to protect the confidential records of a former client doesn’t end when the fees stop coming in, and the work the firm completed is still their work, Dell said.
Those obligations are spelled out in the profession’s code of conduct, an ethics playbook often baked into state laws and regulations that govern public accounting. Violations could cost a CPA their license.
Criminal Charges Rare
Whether Mazars would face criminal charges is unlikely, said Cliff Capdevielle, managing attorney with Moskowitz LLP. “There is very little risk of criminal indictment against a tax preparer unless they had the two sets of books and reported something that was false. And that almost never happens,” he said.
A tax preparer’s role is limited to receiving the numbers from the client and dropping it into the tax return. The client is ultimately responsible for the accuracy of that information. But providing tax planning advice could open up a firm to fines or penalties, said Allison Koester, a corporate taxation researcher at Georgetown University.
The Trump Organization and its former CFO face tax fraud charges for what prosecutors described as a more than15-year tax scheme designed to under-report income and taxable benefits paid to certain employees, effectively lowering the tax bill for both the employees and the company.
It’s not unusual during a tax investigation for authorities to take testimony from the accountants who did that work. But those investigations don’t always result in charges or allegations of wrongdoing by those outside professionals, Dell said
It’s also not uncommon for a taxpayer to argue that they simply followed the advice of their hired CPA firm, and for the firm to say that it relied on the information provided by the client. “There will be finger-pointing,” said Jack Barcal, associate professor of taxation at USC Marshall School of Business.
Such a defense strategy might not hold up if that outside consultant or accountant didn’t have all the information they needed to properly advise the client—something prosecutors would want to know before pursuing charges, said David Sharfstein, a former federal tax prosecutor who is now a partner with Hogan Lovells US LLP.
Criminal charges against the largest U.S. accounting firms are rare, although the Big Four accounting firms have each faced brushes with federal scrutiny for their tax planning work over the years.
KPMG LLP avoided prosecution for a massive tax shelter scheme after agreeing to a $456 million settlement with the Justice Department in 2005. But it is the specter of Arthur Andersen’s collapse that still haunts the accounting industry two decades later.
That firm was struggling under the weight of a string of pricey settlements related to its audit work but a criminal conviction, though later overturned, related to its audit client Enron Corp. sealed the firm’s fate. The case stands as a stark example of how lucrative clients can skew the judgment, and ethics, of accountants.
Firms with a smaller portfolio may feel more pressure to acquiesce to a large client’s demands. “Is the money worth the potential harm to their reputation and litigation exposure,” Schroeder said.
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Trump Org Prosecutors Find New Evidence—in a Basement
Check the Basement
A lawyer for Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg revealed in open court that prosecutors have found more evidence and that more indictments are expected.
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Memo shows Trump lawyer’s six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election
A conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald Trump’s legal team tried to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence that he could overturn the election results on January 6 when Congress counted the Electoral College votes by throwing out electors from seven states, according to the new book “Peril” from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
The scheme put forward by controversial lawyer John Eastman was outlined in a two-page memo obtained by the authors for “Peril,” and which was subsequently obtained by CNN. The memo, which has not previously been made public, provides new detail showing how Trump and his team tried to persuade Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the election results on January 6.
The effort to sway Pence was just one of several behind-the-scenes attempts that Trump’s team undertook ahead of January 6 in a desperate bid to overturn the 2020 election loss, after dozens of lawsuits were thrown out of the courts. “Peril,” which will be released Tuesday, details how Eastman’s memo was sent to GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and how Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani tried to convince fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of election fraud. But both Lee and Graham scoffed at the arguments and found they had no merit.
“You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can’t do this. You’re wasting your time,” Lee said to Trump’s lawyers trying to overturn the results in Georgia, according to the book.
The Eastman memo laid out a six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election for Trump, which included throwing out the results in seven states because they allegedly had competing electors. In fact, no state had actually put forward an alternate slate of electors – there were merely Trump allies claiming without any authority to be electors.
Under Eastman’s scheme, Pence would have declared Trump the winner with more Electoral College votes after the seven states were thrown out, at 232 votes to 222. Anticipating “howls” from Democrats protesting the overturning of the election, the memo proposes, Pence would instead say that no candidate had reached 270 votes in the Electoral College. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. Since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, a majority could vote for Trump to win the election.
The plan was first proposed to Pence when Eastman was with Trump in the Oval Office on January 4, during one of Trump’s attempts to convince Pence that he had the authority to stop the certification of the election.
“You really need to listen to John. He’s a respected constitutional scholar. Hear him out,” Trump said to Pence at that meeting, Woodward and Costa write in “Peril.”
In the memo, Eastman went so far as to suggest Pence should take action without warning.
“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court,” Eastman wrote. “The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.”
In the end, Pence didn’t go along with Eastman’s scheme, concluding that the Constitution did not give him any power beyond counting the Electoral College votes. He did his own consultations before January 6, according to the book, reaching out to former Vice President Dan Quayle and the Senate parliamentarian, who were both clear in telling him he had no authority beyond counting the votes.
When Pence refused to intervene, Trump turned on his vice president, attacking him on Twitter even as the insurrection at the Capitol was unfolding on January 6.
The memo could be of interest to the House select committee now investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which recently requested documents from the National Archives that specifically included communications involving Eastman.
“It shows intent, a sophisticated plan, a blueprint to illegally and unconstitutionally overturn and steal the election” by Trump and his team based on false and misleading information and legal arguments, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN.
‘Lee’s head was spinning’
Eastman spoke at the January 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. He retired from his position as a professor at Chapman University a week after January 6, which occurred amid protests from faculty at the Southern California university over his participation in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Eastman told the Washington Post that his memo merely “explored all options that had been proposed.” CNN has contacted Eastman for comment through the Claremont Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
As part of the efforts of Trump’s team to convince Congress not to certify the election, the Eastman memo was given to Lee, one of the Senate’s top Republican constitutional authorities. At the same time, Giuliani sent multiple memos to Graham trying to convince him that the claims of election fraud coming from Trump’s team were legitimate.
The memos show how even some of Trump’s closest allies balked at the measures Trump’s team was taking behind the scenes to try to overturn his loss to Biden. But while Lee and Graham heard out the cases from Trump’s lawyers, they soundly rejected their claims, Woodard and Costa write.
Lee was shocked by the claims the memo was making, since no state had considered, let alone put forward, any alternate slates of electors. “Lee’s head was spinning,” the authors write. “No such procedure existed in the Constitution, any law or past practice. Eastman had apparently drawn it out of thin air.”
Lee also dismissed the Trump team’s arguments that it had a case to overturn the election results in Georgia, saying they had to be made in court.
‘Third grade’
Woodward and Costa also obtained several memos Giuliani sent to Graham to try to convince him of election fraud in Georgia and other states. CNN has also obtained those memos.
The authors write that on January 2, Giuliani briefed Graham at the White House. Giuliani presented a statistical analysis arguing Biden’s win was impossible, but Graham dismissed Giuliani’s evidence as too abstract. “Give me some names. You need to put it in writing. You need to show me the evidence,” Graham said, according to the book.
Giuliani then sent Graham several memos and affidavits claiming fraud. But when Graham’s chief Judiciary Committee counsel Lee Holmes went over the claims, he found they were sloppy, overbearing and “added up to nothing,” Woodward and Costa write. “Holmes reported to Graham that the data in the memos were a concoction, with a bullying tone and eighth grade writing.”
“Third grade,” Graham responded, according to the book. “I can get an affidavit tomorrow saying the world is flat.”
Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump has continued to push baseless claims that the election was stolen from him. Last week, he sent a new letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger claiming he should start the process of decertifying the 2020 election.
Criminal investigators in the state have been investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, including an infamous call Trump made to Raffensperger in which Trump urged the secretary of state to “find” more than 11,000 votes that Trump needed to win.
Graham also made a phone call to Raffensperger, which is part of the Fulton County district attorney’s probe. Graham has said his call was to understand the process of verifying signatures on mail-in ballots.
The Memo:
PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL
January 6 scenario
7 states have transmitted dual slates of electors to the President of the Senate. The 12th Amendment merely provides that “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” There is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes (as Adams and Jefferson did while Vice President, regarding their own election as President), and all the Members of Congress can do is watch.
The Electoral Count Act, which is likely unconstitutional, provides:
If more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State shall have been received by the President of the Senate, those votes, and those only, shall be counted which shall have been regularly given by the electors who are shown by the determination mentioned in section 5 of this title to have been appointed, if the determination in said section provided for shall have been made, or by such successors or substitutes, in case of a vacancy in the board of electors so ascertained, as have been appointed to fill such vacancy in the mode provided by the laws of the State; but in case there shall arise the question which of two or more of such State authorities determining what electors have been appointed, as mentioned in section 5 of this title, is the lawful tribunal of such State, the votes regularly given of those electors, and those only, of such State shall be counted whose title as electors the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide is supported by the decision of such State so authorized by its law; and in such case of more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State, if there shall have been no such determination of the question in the State aforesaid, then those votes, and those only, shall be counted which the two Houses shall concurrently decide were cast by lawful electors appointed in accordance with the laws of the State, unless the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide such votes not to be the lawful votes of the legally appointed electors of such State. But if the two Houses shall disagree in respect of the counting of such votes, then, and in that case, the votes of the electors whose appointment shall have been certified by the executive of the State, under the seal thereof, shall be counted.This is the piece that we believe is unconstitutional. It allows the two houses, “acting separately,” to decide the question, whereas the 12th Amendment provides only for a joint session. And if there is disagreement, under the Act the slate certified by the “executive” of the state is to be counted, regardless of the evidence that exists regarding the election, and regardless of whether there was ever fair review of what happened in the election, by judges and/or state legislatures. So here’s the scenario we propose:
VP Pence, presiding over the joint session (or Senate Pro Tempore Grassley, if Pence recuses himself), begins to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).
When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.
At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment – is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.
Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.
One last piece. Assuming the Electoral Count Act process is followed and, upon getting the objections to the Arizona slates, the two houses break into their separate chambers, we should not allow the Electoral Count Act constraint on debate to control. That would mean that a prior legislature was determining the rules of the present one — a constitutional no-no (as Tribe has forcefully argued). So someone – Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, etc. – should demand normal rules (which includes the filibuster). That creates a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.
The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position – that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.
Trump said he tapped Giuliani to lead his election lawsuits because ‘none of the sane lawyers’ could represent him, book says
Trump won these counties big. His supporters question the results there, too.
Pushes to revisit November’s results are underway or being called for in at least nine counties Trump won by more than 24 points.
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Former Rand Paul aide, pardoned by Trump, charged with funneling Russian money into 2016 election
A former campaign staffer for US Sen. Rand Paul has been charged with channeling money from Russia into the 2016 presidential election, the US Department of Justice said Monday.
In an unsealed indictment, dated September 9, prosecutors allege Jesse Benton “conspired to illegally funnel thousands of dollars of foreign money from a Russian foreign national” into the campaign.
In October 2016, Benton received a $100,000 wire transfer from the unnamed Russian national, the indictment states, promising him that he would get to “meet a celebrity” at a fundraiser in Philadelphia on September 22, 2016.
Prosecutors do not name the candidate, but former President Donald Trump was hosting a fundraiser that night at the Ritz-Carlton in Center City, Philadelphia.
The Russian national attended the fundraiser, according to the indictment, his travel to the United States facilitated by an alleged co-conspirator, Roy Douglas Wead, a conservative author. All three “had official photographs taken with Political Candidate 1,” prosecutors say.
The two are accused of falsely portraying the contribution as payment for “consulting work.” Benton kept most of it himself — $75,000, according to the indictment. The rest was donated to the politician in Benton’s name.
Around the same time, Benton — who managed Paul’s 2010 run for office, as well as the 2014 campaign of another Kentucky Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell — was convicted of campaign finance fraud over his role in the 2012 Ron Paul presidential campaign. He was sentenced days before the Philadelphia fundraiser to two years probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.
Before leaving office, Trump pardoned Benton for that crime.
If convicted in this case, Benton and Wead could face significant prison time, with each of the six counts against them carrying a sentence of five t0 20 years behind bars.
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Big lawsuit T 'n Co are dropping on NYT and Mary Trump…a diversion by any other name.
Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against The New York Times , three of its reporters, and his niece—claiming they hatched an “insidious plot” to obtain his private records for a story about his tax history.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Dutchess County, New York, by attorney Alina Habba, alleges that the newspaper convinced Mary Trump to “smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to The Times ” despite her having signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001 after settling a contentious legal battle over the will of Frederick Trump, Donald’s father and Mary’s grandfather.
The new suit seeks damages “in an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be no less than One Hundred Million Dollars” from both Mary Trump and the Times .
It follows a suit filed by Charles Harder on behalf of Donald Trump’s brother Robert to try and stop Mary Trump and publisher Simon & Schuster from releasing her memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
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Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows
Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.
Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.
But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.
By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.
The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.
According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.
Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:
That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election. That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros. And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.
Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.
It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.
“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”
Mr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.
Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”
Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”
And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”
It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.
“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.
But at the time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were both “active supervisors,” as he put it in his deposition, in the Trump campaign’s broader plan to challenge the election results — an effort that eventually included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms. Powell soon went her own way in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the popular vote.
The motion notes that “the lines were blurred” as to whom Ms. Powell was working for at the time: herself, her nonprofit organization or the Trump campaign. Almost immediately after she promoted the conspiracy theory about Dominion at the news conference in November, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from her. But by December, as Mr. Trump’s legal options narrowed, the former president considered bringing her back into the fold and discussed whether to appoint her as a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.
The release of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation. Dominion has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims. Last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward trial.
About the same time, a federal judge in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied against Ms. Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers — Mr. Giuliani was not among them — who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in Michigan using the false claims about Dominion.
“This case was never about fraud,” the judge, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. “It was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”
In June, a New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani’s law license, ruling that he had made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of last year’s election for Mr. Trump.
Even recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have continued to cling to the baseless notion that the election was marred by fraud.
When lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump campaign, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was fraudulent, he answered, “Yes, sir.”
The lawyers then asked, “What is that opinion based on?”
According to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain answer.
“We have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t,” he said.
Susan Dominus, Shay Castle and Mindy Sink contributed reporting.
This is just the first page; all are images. The rest are at the link above.
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Civil and criminal investigations in New York and Georgia. Defamation suits from two women. A civil suit over misuse of inauguration funds. A number of complaints related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. And a new lawsuit related to the disclosure of the former president’s taxes.
Donald Trump is facing even more legal challenges than normal—which is saying something for a man so litigious and familiar with legal duress. But even though he is someone who tends to keep the same people around him for longer than he should, a number of the ex-president’s longtime, high-profile lawyers have recently parted ways with Trumpworld.
Donald Trump is facing even more legal challenges than normal—which is saying something for a man so litigious and familiar with legal duress. But even though he is someone who tends to keep the same people around him for longer than he should, a number of the ex-president’s longtime, high-profile lawyers have recently parted ways with Trumpworld.
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Just a note, I can’t believe they actually created a document detailing all the ways they lied about Dominion and what their slanderous plot was.
Thank goodness for stupid villains.
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Some damning evidence dredged up by the Judiciary Senate group on how T tried to leverage his interim Atty General Clark and others to change the outcome of the Nov 2020 election.
WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.
On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.
Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.
Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.
The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.
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The interim report, expected to be released publicly this week, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”
The report by Mr. Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple Congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.
But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.
- The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.
- The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.
- The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.
The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Mr. Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.
The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.
It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the Washington D.C. Bar Association to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.
The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.
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