The Messages Included Battle Cries, Crackpot Legal Theories, And ‘Invoking Marshall Law!!’
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged text messages with at least 34 Republican members of Congress as they plotted to overturn President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Those messages are being fully, publicly documented here for the first time.
Former President Donald J. Trump and 18 others, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mark Meadows, face conspiracy charges related to attempts to overturn the state’s results and subvert the will of voters
Former President Donald J. Trump and 18 others, including some of his former lawyers and top aides, have been indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in a sweeping racketeering case focused on Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
The indictment — handed up after a single, extra-long day of testimony — is an unprecedented challenge of presidential misconduct by a local prosecutor. It brings charges against some of his most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time of the election.
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The investigation was led by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. It focused on five actions taken by Mr. Trump or his allies in the weeks after Election Day, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. narrowly won Georgia. Those actions include phone calls that Mr. Trump made to pressure state officials to overturn the result, as well as harassment of local election workers by Trump supporters, false claims of ballot fraud, a plan by Trump allies to create a slate of bogus electors and a data breach at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.
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Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, architects of the plan to use fake Trump electors to circumvent the popular vote in a number of swing states, were among a number of lawyers who advised Mr. Trump who were indicted. So was Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign aide who helped coordinate the elector scheme.
Jeffrey Clark, a former senior official in the Department of Justice who embraced false claims about the election and tried to embroil the department in challenging the Georgia vote, was also indicted. Other lawyers who aided Mr. Trump’s efforts who were indicted include Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis.
A number of Georgia Republicans were also indicted, including David Shafer, the former head of the state party, and Shawn Still, a state senator. Cathy Latham, a party leader in a rural county who served as one of the bogus Trump electors, was also indicted.
All 19 defendants are being charged under Georgia’s racketeering statute, and each of them has at least one additional charge. Racketeering laws are often used to prosecute people involved in patterns of illegal activity, and can be useful in targeting both foot soldiers and leaders in a corrupt organization.
Trump will be “defending” himself against a smoking gun by arguing, while his closest advisers testify that they could not possibly handle a gun without shooting themselves in the leg, that he believes guns are made out of cheese. And should he convince 12 jurors in Georgia and the District of Columbia that he is an insane person with low-IQ support staff, and secure a not-guilty verdict on the basis of such a triumph, he will then be asking the rest of his fellow citizens to reinstall him as president.