This Week: While Criminal Cases Against Trump Move Forward, His Supporters Keep Pushing Anti-Democracy Efforts to Swing Elections in their Favor
This week, in the federal case against former President Donald Trump for allegedly leading a coup attempt after losing the 2020 presidential election, prosecutors asked the judge to issue a gag order so that Trump does not intimidate witnesses or influence jurors, while in the Fulton County case against 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, the judge ruled that Trump will not be tried with co-defendants Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell next month.
In the federal case stemming from whether Trump obstructed justice and willfully retained national security secrets at Mar-a-Lago, the judge ruled that the classified documents at the center of the case are the property of the United States Government.
In Arizona, the lawyer for failed election-denying candidates Mark Finchem and Kari Lake admitted in federal court that his clients do not have evidence that “votes were improperly counted” by tabulating machines and or that the machines were hacked, but argued the courts should still outlaw their use.
In Pennsylvania, a judge ordered Fulton County to turn over the county’s voting machines to a neutral third-party custodian after being caught “allowing unauthorized access” to the voting machines. The custodian preferred by the county “subscribed to the same election conspiracy theories that had spurred the inspections.”
Republican lawmakers in the Wisconsin State Senate voted to remove the nonpartisan administrator of the state’s elections commission after election-denying “conspiracy theorists” accused her of “helping to steal” the 2020 presidential election. She has filed a lawsuit to keep her job.
In Arizona, a federal judge struck down a law pushed through by MAGA supporters to make it more difficult to register to vote, while in North Carolina, MAGA supporters in the General Assembly moved closer to passing a bill that would let the state legislature step in to overturn election results.In Georgia, MAGA supporters and other statewide elected officials appealed a federal ruling that protected voting rights by blocking a requirement that voters provide their birthdate on absentee ballot envelopes and barring the state from penalizing people who give food and drinks to voters waiting in line to vote. These rules were imposed “in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, which he falsely blamed on voter fraud.”
