This Week: As Legal Cases Against Trump Slowly Move Forward, Federal Courts Protect Voting Rights
This week, in the federal case against former President Donald Trump for allegedly leading a coup attempt after losing the 2020 election, the judge rejected his request to obtain records from the congressional committee that investigated the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. She called the request a “fishing expedition” and said it was “not in good faith.”
In the Fulton County, Georgia, 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 prosecutor proposed starting the trial in August and anticipated that the trial will likely not conclude before 2025. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers argued before an appellate court that he should be “permitted to pressure possible witnesses not to cooperate with prosecutors.”
In the federal case against Trump stemming from allegations that he obstructed justice and willfully retained national security secrets, the judge has scheduled the trial to start in May, but continued to “run the pretrial process at a leisurely pace that will make a postponement almost inevitable.” And in the New York civil fraud case in which the judge ruled that Trump and his businesses committed fraud by overvaluing their assets, the judge rejected Trump’s request for a mistrial.
Meanwhile, election integrity continues to face threats in the states. In Georgia, pro-MAGA election board members in Cobb, DeKalb and Spalding counties who voted against certifying local elections results claimed “they were taking a principled stand for election integrity.” In Nevada, the attorney general opened an investigation into “individuals who acted as fake electors in the state following the 2020 election.”
In Michigan, an appellate court rejected a challenge to an “online system for requesting absentee ballots” that makes it easier to vote. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge ruled that “mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect dates on their outer envelopes” should be counted in accordance with federal civil rights law.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that pro-MAGA leaders in the Arizona legislature must “answer questions about their backing of legislation making it more difficult to register to vote” in a case challenging the legislation under the Voting Rights Act.
In Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court heard arguments in a redistricting lawsuit seeking to overturn gerrymandered state legislative voting maps drawn by pro-MAGA legislators after the 2020 census. In North Carolina, a lawsuit was filed alleging that the new state Senate districts drawn by pro-MAGA legislators discriminate against Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
