This Week: Legal Problems for Former President Trump Grow, While MAGA Supporters Continue to Try to Undermine Democracy
This week, special counsel Jack Smith’s federal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election “quietly” chugged along, as did the Georgia case over whether Trump broke state law in his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In the federal case, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a MAGA supporter who represented Georgia in the House, testified before the grand jury, as did Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald and committee member Jim DeGraffenreid, who “were part of the failed 2020 effort to put forward slates of fake electors.”
In the biggest MAGA news of the week, Trump was arrested on 37 felony counts accusing him of taking classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, refusing to return them, and interfering with the Justice Department’s investigation into the matter.
MAGA supporters, seeking retribution, have threatened violence in retaliation for the arrest in the classified document case, including supporters in Congress who have threatened violence and made false claims to try to discredit the case. Andy Biggs, a pro-MAGA congressman from Arizona, tweeted, “We have now reached a war phase,” while MAGA “evangelist” Kari Lake threatened gun violence.
In the North Carolina Senate, MAGA supporters revived legislation to make it more difficult to vote absentee, while in Michigan, pro-MAGA legislators opposed legislation to expand voting rights, including making it easier to vote early and by absentee ballot.
In Georgia, MAGA supporters failed to put Jason Frazier on the Fulton County Board of Elections. Frazier tried to kick approximately 10,000 voters in the county off the voter rolls last year. The board “has the power to cancel or suspend registrations of voters who face challenges” from MAGA activists like himself.
Pro-MAGA supervisors in a rural Arizona county voted to “hand-count ballots in the 2024 presidential election,” even though hand-counting is less accurate than tabulation equipment and illegal under state law. The pro-MAGA hand recount of ballots from the 2020 general election in Maricopa County demonstrated how difficult it would be to accurately count votes by hand.
