This Week: Criminal Cases Against Trump and His Co-Conspirators Advance, While Laws to Limit Voting Rights Imposed After Trump’s Loss Continue to Move Through the Courts
This week, in the Fulton County case against former President Donald Trump for allegedly leading a vast multistate criminal enterprise to overturn the 2020 presidential election in seven states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a judge set bail and warned Trump “not to intimidate or threaten any witnesses or co-defendants.”
In the federal case against Trump for allegedly leading a coup attempt after losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s lawyers, over the objection of prosecutors, suggested pushing the start of the trial to 2026, while, in the federal case stemming from whether Trump obstructed justice and willfully retained national security secrets at Mar-a-Lago, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows undercut “Trump’s primary public defense” when they said they are unaware of an order by Trump to declassify the underlying documents in the case.
In the Michigan case against 16 “so-called fake electors” for signing documents falsely claiming that Trump won the 2020 election in the state, 14 of the 16 “appeared before a judge for a probable cause hearing,” while, in Arizona, the attorney general said her office is investigating fake electors in the state.
MAGA supporters asked the Arizona Supreme Court to “void” the results of 2022 statewide elections and order new elections in Maricopa County, where a majority of the state’s voters live.
In Nevada, the state Supreme Court threw out a case against a conspiracy theorist who “claimed a mysterious algorithm switched votes from him” to his opponent in the 2022 governor’s race.
In Wisconsin, over the objections of MAGA supporters in the state legislature, a judge allowed a case to move forward in support of allowing election officials to “accept absentee ballots with partial witness addresses.”
In North Carolina, MAGA supporters passed and sent to the governor legislation to make same day voter registration more onerous and make it more difficult to cast an absentee ballot by imposing “stricter mail-in voting rules.”
In Georgia, a federal judge temporarily blocked a requirement that voters provide their birthdate on absentee ballot envelopes and temporarily prohibited the state from penalizing people who give food and drinks to voters waiting in line to vote, though he did uphold the parts of the law to limit drop boxes and limit who can return absentee ballots. These rules were imposed “in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, which he falsely blamed on voter fraud.”
In Texas, a federal judge ruled against a law imposed by MAGA supporters to require those who vote by mail to “provide the same identification number they used when they registered to vote.” As a result of this law, the rejection rate for mail-in ballots skyrocketed in 2022.
