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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — August 8, 2023

By August 8, 2023No Comments

Driving the Day

Must Read Stories

Inside the multi-faceted battle surrounding Trump’s 2020 election federal indictment and defense strategy

  • New York Times: What to Know About Prosecutors’ Request for Protective Order in Jan. 6 Case: The first miniskirmish in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election involves a step that is taken in the early phases of many prominent criminal cases: a proposal to impose rules on how the voluminous discovery evidence in the matter should be handled. The disagreement started on Friday, when prosecutors in the office of the special counsel asked the judge who is overseeing the case for what is known as a protective order governing the disclosure of discovery material to Mr. Trump’s lawyers. The entreaty was routine, although in making their request, the prosecutors took what could be considered an extra step. In their motion, the prosecutors drew Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s attention to a threatening message that Mr. Trump had posted that day on social media. Vague but strongly worded, it read, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
  • Washington Post: Prosecutors cite Trump’s social media posts as they seek limits on handling of evidence: The Justice Department urged in a Friday-evening court filing that a federal judge in Washington impose firm rules on Donald Trump and his attorneys as they review materials during the discovery process for his trial, citing, in part, the former president’s history of revealing details about cases on social media. The filing comes as the federal case centered on Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election gets underway. Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to four crimes that the government has accused him of committing, including scheming to disrupt the election process and depriving Americans of their right to have their votes counted.
  • Hill: Trump’s Jan. 6 legal defense comes into focus: Donald Trump’s legal team is signaling his defense will focus on the First Amendment and his reliance on counsel in the battle over charges connected to Jan. 6 and the former president’s efforts to remain in power following the 2020 election. Trump, who pleaded not guilty during a Thursday arraignment, has denounced the prosecution as a witch hunt while floating the idea of moving the trial from the predominantly Democratic city of Washington, D.C. On Friday, he called on the Supreme Court to “intercede.” Legal experts say the indictment presents at length a seemingly strong case against Trump built on phone records, emails and contemporaneous notes taken by people in the former president’s orbit. Prosecutors describe a multi-pronged effort from Trump to use “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to remain in power following an election he lost.
  • Washington Post: Awkwardness in Trump’s circle: Top aides could be trial witnesses: At least seven currently serving advisers to former president Donald Trump took actions that are mentioned prominently in one of his three criminal indictments or have been interviewed by prosecutors, potentially setting up uncomfortable situations in which they are working for his 2024 presidential bid while also serving as witnesses at one of his upcoming trials. They include his top presidential campaign adviser, as well as a senior communications aide and several other campaign staffers. Walt Nauta, his closest personal aide who is frequently at his side on the campaign trail, is now a co-defendant in the case in which Trump is accused of mishandling classified documents.
  • New York Times: How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks: In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances, heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict. “Especially in a case like this, you want to have multiple charges that are applicable or provable with the same evidence, so that if on appeal you lose one, you still have the conviction,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor. That structure in the indictment is only one of several strategic choices by Mr. Smith — including what facts and potential charges he chose to include or omit — that may foreshadow and shape how an eventual trial of Mr. Trump will play out.
  • Washington Post: That ‘admission’ from Trump’s attorney? Trump had already admitted it: There it was. He admitted it, live on TV. “President Trump wanted to get to the truth. He desperately wanted to get to what happened in the 2020 cycle,” Trump’s attorney John Lauro said on Newsmax on Thursday evening. So, he said, “at the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting” — that is, counting the submitted electors on Jan. 6, 2021 — “for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in and then they could make a determination to audit or reaudit or recertify.” Boom. There’s Lauro, copping (as he also did on Fox News) to Trump’s efforts to obstruct the finalization of his 2020 loss. Special counsel Jack Smith’s case, handed to him on a silver platter. Except, not really. The impulse to identify that one moment that would lead to the capitulation of Donald Trump is by now eight years old and has spawned a healthy, still-viable economy. Over and over, there’s been the one thing, the one detail that was sure to spell doom for Trump — and then didn’t.
  • Messenger: Trump Wants to Try Election-Interference Case ‘In the Media,’ Not the Courtroom, Jack Smith Says: Hours after Donald Trump’s legal team sought to loosen a proposed protective order, Special Counsel Jack Smith told a federal judge that the former president wants to litigate his election-interference case in the media rather than the courtroom. “The defendant’s proposed order would lead to the public dissemination of discovery material,” Smith’s assistant Thomas Windom wrote in an eight-page legal brief. “Indeed, that is the defendant’s stated goal; the defendant seeks to use the discovery material to litigate this case in the media.” Fully written and entered into the court’s record some two and a half hours after Trump’s defense filing, the prosecution prepared its rejoinder in breakneck speed. The special counsel’s swift and decisive response emphasizes that they want to remove any perceived stumbling block in the way of a speedy trial. It also shows how closely prosecutors have been monitoring the public statements of Trump and his lawyers.

Trump targets judge, calls for recusal in 2020 election federal criminal case

  • New York Times: Trump Calls for Judge’s Recusal as His Lawyer Deems Effort to Overturn Election ‘Aspirational’: Appearing on five television networks Sunday morning, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued that his actions in the effort to overturn the 2020 election fell short of crimes and were merely “aspirational.” The remarks from his lawyer, John F. Lauro, came as Mr. Trump was blanketing his social media platform, Truth Social, with posts suggesting that his legal team was going to seek the recusal of Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the case, and try to move his trial out of Washington. With his client facing charges carrying decades in prison after a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Trump for his role in trying to overturn the election, his third criminal case this year, Mr. Lauro appeared in interviews on CNN, ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS. He endeavored to defend Mr. Trump, including against evidence that, as president, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject legitimate votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of false electors pledged to Mr. Trump.
  • New York Magazine: Trump Is Already at War With the Judge in the January 6 Case: Trump has found a new target: the judge herself. “There is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge ‘assigned’ to the ridiculous freedom of speech/fair elections case,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, again in all caps. “Everybody knows this and so does she!” Trump then wrote that his legal team would ask for the “recusal” of Judge Chutkan on “very powerful grounds” and a venue change from Washington, D.C., where all the events in the indictment took place. On Monday morning, Trump doubled down on his call that Chutkan must be recused and referred to her as the judge of special counsel Jack Smith’s “dreams” — a reference to Chutkan’s history of severe sentencing on January 6 cases she oversaw. (Trump’s legal team doesn’t seem to be fully onboard with the recusal idea yet; “We haven’t made a final decision on that issue at all,” attorney John Lauro said on Sunday.)
  • Politico: Trump and his new lawyer are not on the same page about judge’s recusal: Donald Trump blared Sunday morning that his legal team would be “immediately asking for recusal” of U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan from his latest criminal case, proclaiming (but not revealing) “very powerful grounds” for the demand. Hours later, his attorney John Lauro would publicly walk back that plan, saying Trump was speaking with a “layman’s political sense” and reacting primarily because Chutkan was nominated to the bench by a Democrat. (She was confirmed 95-0 by the Senate in 2014 after Barack Obama nominated her). “We haven’t made a final decision on that issue at all,” Lauro said on a podcast hosted by Florida defense attorney David Markus. “I think as lawyers we have to be very careful of those issues and handle them with the utmost delicacy.”

In The States

OHIO: Voters will decide Tuesday how easy it should be to amend the Ohio constitution, impacting the future of abortion rights and redistricting

  • The Guardian: The election that could determine the future of democracy in Ohio: An under-the-radar election in Ohio on Tuesday has quietly emerged as one of the most high-stakes stress tests for American democracy in recent years. The question Ohio voters will decide on 8 August is simple: how easy should it be to amend the state constitution? Like 17 other states, Ohio allows citizens to place constitutional amendments on the statewide ballot if they get a certain number of signatures and more than 50% of the statewide vote. The process has been in place for more than a century in Ohio, and in November, voters will use it to decide whether to protect abortion rights. In May, Republicans who control the state legislature abruptly sent a proposal to the ballot called Issue 1 that would make it much harder to change the constitution. If approved, a constitutional amendment would need 60% of the vote to pass instead of a simple majority. It would also make it significantly harder for citizens to even propose a constitutional amendment, requiring signatures from 5% of the voters in all of Ohio’s 88 counties (the state currently requires organizers to get signatures in 44).
  • Washington Post: Ahead of abortion vote, Ohioans weigh making it harder to amend constitution: For 111 years, Ohioans who couldn’t get politicians to listen to them have had a straightforward way to try to bring about change. They can sidestep the governor and lawmakers to amend the state constitution on their own. By gathering several hundred thousand signatures from around the state, they can put issues on the ballot and, with the support of a simple majority, put new policies in place. Under this system, abortion rights advocates have placed a measure on the November ballot that would guarantee access to abortion in a state where restrictions at about six weeks of pregnancy have been put on hold by a judge. But Ohio Republicans, who control both chambers of the state legislature and have sought to restrict access to abortion, are trying to make the process more difficult. They scheduled a special election for Tuesday with just one issue on the ballot: Should constitutional amendments require the support of 60 percent of voters rather than a simple majority?

MISSISSIPPI: Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era voting law struck down by federal appeals court

  • New York Times: Appeals Court Overturns Mississippi’s Lifetime Ban on Voting for Former Felons: Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of a range of felonies is cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Eighth Amendment and “is at odds with society’s evolving standards of decency,” a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. In an emphatic 2-to-1 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upbraided Mississippi officials for what it called a pointless “denial of the democratic core of American citizenship.” “Mississippi denies this precious right to a large class of its citizens, automatically, mechanically, and with no thought given to whether it is proportionate as punishment for an amorphous and partial list of crimes,” the judges wrote. They added: “It is an especially cruel penalty as applied to those whom the justice system has already deemed to have completed all terms of their sentences. These individuals, despite having satisfied their debt to society, are precluded from ever fully participating in civic life. Indeed, they are excluded from the most essential feature and expression of citizenship in a democracy — voting.”

TENNESSEE: Two state reps. expelled for protesting gun violence win back seats in special election

  • PBS Newshour: Both expelled members of ‘Tennessee Three’ win back their state House seats after special election: Tennessee Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who became Democratic heroes as members of the “Tennessee Three,” reclaimed their legislative seats Thursday after they were expelled for involvement in a gun control protest on the House floor. The young Black lawmakers were reinstated by local officials after being booted from the GOP-dominated Statehouse, but only on an interim basis. They advanced Thursday through a special election to fully reclaim their positions. Both faced opponents in districts that heavily favor Democrats and easily defeated them according to unofficial results from Tennessee’s Secretary of State’s office. Jones, who lives in Nashville, was up against Republican candidate Laura Nelson. Meanwhile, Pearson, from Memphis, faced independent candidate Jeff Johnston.

What Experts Are Saying

Joyce Vance, former US attorney, re: federal 2020 election criminal case: “The government is exceptionally eager to turn over its discovery at the earliest possible moment. This is unusual, and we see the government chomping at the bit here because they want to get discovery out early and then push for a prompt trial date. In giving Trump time to respond, albeit on an abbreviated schedule, the Judge is showing her colors as a former criminal defense lawyer, determined to be fair to the defendant, while moving the process along. This is really what you want from a judge—someone who protects the rights of both parties and moves the matter expeditiously towards a final decision.” Civil Discourse 

Brie Sparkman, policy counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): “While the fake electors in Michigan may be the first charged for the scheme, they likely will not be the last, as several other jurisdictions are investigating their own fake electors. The charges in Michigan could provide a useful blueprint for seeking accountability in other states.” CREW Report

Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor, re: Michigan criminal charges for 2020 voting machines “plot”: “It’s also important to emphasize how apolitical the Matthew DePerno prosecution is. [MI Attorney General Dana] Nessel has been very careful to avoid the perception of partisan bias, going as far as to disqualify herself from overseeing the grand jury investigation because she had been DePerno’s opponent in the 2020 election. The investigation into DePerno and Rendon was ultimately led by special prosecutor D.J. Hilson. He is ordinarily the Muskegon County prosecutor and was appointed special prosecutor by the state’s independent prosecuting attorneys coordinating council. And the grand jury made its own determination to indict based on facts. Hilson announced Tuesday that his office “made no recommendations as to whether an indictment should be issued or not.”  These 23 citizens considered all of the evidence and seemed to have come to a decision that reaffirms how accountability, our elections and our freedom are bound together. Whether at the state or federal level, that kind of citizen commitment to the rule of law represents our democracy’s best hope.” MSNBC Op-Ed 

Lauren Miller, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, and Wendy Weiser, vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and who directs its Democracy Program: “The plot to overturn the 2020 election has spawned an ongoing election denial movement that is undermining voting rights, weakening our electoral system and making it more vulnerable to future attacks. This plan not only builds off the playbook used by Trump and his co-conspirators in 2020, but also invokes the same lies about voter fraud and a “stolen” 2020 election detailed in the indictment. Although these thoroughly discredited lies continue to unravel as more and more of their purveyors face accountability, the damage being done in their name is far from over. Perhaps most jarring are the attacks on election officials and election workers. Since 2020, false claims of voter fraud and election “irregularities” have prompted widespread harassment and threats of violence against election officials and their families. For example, violent threats forced one top local election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County into hiding to protect his safety and that of his family while he presided over the 2022 vote count…Undoubtedly, Trump’s indictment is a critical step in reckoning with the plot to overturn the 2020 election. But we also need to confront the ongoing antidemocratic attacks that are an outgrowth of that plot. In addition to holding perpetrators accountable, we must shore up our election system so it is less susceptible to attack.” Brennan Center Analysis: Threats to Elections Didn’t End on January 6

Media Matters for America: “Following the indictment of disgraced former President Donald Trump on federal charges for his attempt to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, mainstream media outlets are seemingly bending over backward to seek commentary from Republican sources, many of whom end up spreading misinformation and spin, or simply wasting what could have been useful airtime.” MMFA Research: Mainstream media quote and host Republican sources who mislead audiences on indictment charges

Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University and former acting solicitor general of the United States: “The upcoming trial of United States v. Donald J. Trump will rank with Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education and Dred Scott v. Sandford as a defining moment for our history and our values as a people. And yet, federal law will prevent all but a handful of Americans from actually seeing what is happening in the trial. We will be relegated to perusing cold transcripts and secondhand descriptions. The law must be changed…This criminal trial is being conducted in the name of the people of the United States. It is our tax dollars at work. We have a right to see it. And we have the right to ensure that rumormongers and conspiracy theorists don’t control the narrative.” Washington Post Op-Ed: Why the Trump trial should be televised

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Washington Post: A majority of Americans think the Trump probes are about 2024

Rolling Stone: Trump and His MAGA Minions Are So Patriotic That They’re Celebrating America’s World Cup Loss

Trump Investigations 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Geoff Duncan subpoenaed in Fulton’s Trump probe

CNN: Exclusive: Trump ally Bernie Kerik meets with special counsel investigators

Washington Post: House Democrats push for televising Trump trials on classified documents, 2020 charges

New York Times: Trump’s Legal Team Is Enmeshed in a Tangle of Possible Conflicts

CBS: CBS News poll finds after latest Trump indictment, many Americans see implications for democracy. For some, it’s personal

Hill: Trump calls on Supreme Court to ‘intercede’ in legal fights

ABC 7: SEE IT: Rally held in DC ahead of Trump’s court appearance for Jan. 6 arraignment

Axios: Numb to Trump: Data shows drop in scandal interest

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Washington Post: DeSantis says Trump’s stolen-election theories were all false

CBS (Face The Nation): Pence disputes Trump legal team’s claims, and says Trump asked him “what he thought” they should do after 2020 election

Newsweek: ‘QAnon Shaman’ Rubbishes Claims Tucker Carlson Got Him Released

ABC: Nearly two-thirds of Americans think Jan. 6 charges against Trump are serious: POLL

Daily Beast: Why Have FBI Arrests Slowed Down for Jan. 6 Suspects?

Opinion

Washington Post: How Trump will fight back in court

New York Times: Even Conspiracy Theorists Are Alarmed by What They’ve Seen

In the States

KTAR News: Former AG candidate Abraham Hamadeh asks Arizona Supreme Court for new election trial

New Jersey Monitor: In reversal, some states make it harder for people with felony convictions to vote

Local10: Plaintiffs challenging City of Miami’s redistricting map over racial gerrymandering dealt legal blow