Judge Tosses Chesebro, Powell’s Desperate Attempt to Sever Cases in Georgia Trial

A Georgia judge on Wednesday dealt a huge blow and denied requests from two of Donald Trump’s ex-lawyers to sever their lawsuits from the indictment against the former president for trying to overthrow the state’s 2020 election.

Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro were charged alongside Trump and 16 other co-defendants with felony racketeering for trying to overturn Georgia’s election results. All of the defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Judge Scott McAfee heard arguments Wednesday from Powell and Chesebro’s lawyers. Powell was charged with racketeering, conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, trespass and invasion of privacy and conspiracy to defraud the state. Her lawyers argued that she is not connected to the other defendants because she never officially represented Trump in Georgia.

Chesebro was charged with racketeering and conspiracy. He requested that his trial be severed not just from Trump’s but from Powell’s too. He has argued that he didn’t commit any unlawful actions because he was only sharing legal advice, not actively participating on Trump’s team.

Both his and Powell’s lawyers insisted that they could only get fair trials if they were tried alone, instead of alongside the other co-defendants, as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis plans.

But McAfee found their arguments unconvincing—and delivered a partial win for Willis. Although he also said he remained “very skeptical” of trying everyone at once, he gave Willis more time to make her case.

“Based on what’s been presented today, I am not finding the severance from Mr. Chesebro or Ms. Powell is necessary to achieve a fair determination of the guilt or innocence for either defendant in this case,” he said at the hearing.

Chesebro was the original mastermind behind the plan to use slates of fake electors to swing the election for Trump. He also attended the rally on January 6 that eventually turned into the insurrection. It is unclear if he entered the Capitol, but video footage shows Chesebro following conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones into sections of the restricted area around the building.

Powell was one of the main people pushing the falsehood that the election had been rigged. She regularly appeared on Fox News to spread the conspiracy theory. She was sanctioned in Michigan for alleging the election was fraudulent.

The disgraced founder of Project Veritas, the right-wing nonprofit known for undercover “stings,” used the organization’s funds on a desperate attempt to D.J. at Coachella, a Washington Post report published Wednesday found.

James O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010, rising to far-right prominence for his secretly recorded videos. O’Keefe claimed he was trying to expose wrongdoing by journalists, labor unions, and liberal figures and organizations, but it was later proven the videos were edited to leave out crucial context. O’Keefe was forced out of the nonprofit in February under a cloud of allegations of workplace misconduct and mismanaged funds.

Following O’Keefe’s departure, the Project Veritas board hired an outside law firm to conduct an internal audit. The nonprofit raised millions of dollars from conservative donors but recently was forced to lay off more than half of its staff and has since been operating on a skeleton crew. The results of the audit were shared with The Washington Post.

The audit found that O’Keefe had used hundreds of thousands of organization dollars to pay for personal expenses. This included $2,500 for a set of D.J. equipment, because O’Keefe wanted to perform at Coachella, the Post reported, citing two anonymous former employees. O’Keefe was apparently upset that his staff couldn’t book him a performance slot at the music festival, which has featured major acts including Beyoncé, Blackpink, and Billie Eilish.

O’Keefe also allegedly pressured his staff to set up donor meetings in California so he could use the organization’s funds to visit his girlfriend, who has been identified as California real estate agent and Selling the OC cast member Alexandra Rose. O’Keefe would write his romantic getaways off as work trips but only meet with minor donors. He also allegedly demanded his employees buy Rose “many expensive bottles of tequila,” according to the Post.

Other expenses included $600 for bottled water during one trip to San Antonio and $20,500 to move some staff operations to Virginia from Mamaroneck, New York, to coincide with O’Keefe’s stint as the lead in a September 2021 production of the musical Oklahoma! O’Keefe left his staff to deal with Hurricane Ida flooding their Mamaroneck office while he evacuated early to make one of the performances.

In August 2022, O’Keefe spent $12,000 for a helicopter flight to Southwest Harbor, Maine, from New York, and then $1,400 for a chauffeured black car from Portland to Southwest Harbor when bad weather forced the helicopter to land early. He actually spent $208,980 on luxury black-car travel over the course of two years.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Donald Trump is liable for defaming E. Jean Carroll in 2019 and owes her monetary damages, which will be set at a later trial.

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. She had a second defamation lawsuit against him for comments that he made in 2019 that was originally set to go to trial in January.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who also presided over her first lawsuit, issued a partial summary ruling Wednesday in Carroll’s favor, noting that Trump was already found to have defamed her.

“The truth or falsity of Mr Trump’s 2019 statements therefore depends—like the truth or falsity of his 2022 statement—on whether Ms Carroll lied about Mr Trump sexually assaulting her,” Kaplan said. “The jury’s finding that she did not therefore is binding in this case and precludes Mr Trump from contesting the falsity of his 2019 statements.”

Kaplan said that the January trial will simply be to set the amount of monetary damages Trump owes Carroll. The judge also denied Trump’s request to cap any future damages, meaning that the previous amount awarded should not be a factor the jury considers. Trump already owes Carroll $5 million from the first trial, and she is seeking $10 million this time around.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her first case was the first to make it to a courtroom.

Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall earlier this year. She amended her second lawsuit to include those comments.

Trump has tried repeatedly to wiggle out of paying Carroll what he owes her and of going to trial a second time. He even countersued her for defamation. But his efforts have been thwarted at every turn.

Kaplan has repeatedly tossed out Trump’s requests, slamming the arguments as “entirely unpersuasive” and noting that Carroll’s accusations that Trump raped her—not just sexually abused her—are “substantially true.” Trump also suffered a major blow in July when the Department of Justice said it no longer considers him immune in the case.

The secretary of the Navy has condemned Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville for “aiding and abetting” Communist regimes with his months-long blockade of military promotions in objection to the Department of Defense’s abortion policy.

The Republican senator has blocked hundreds of promotions since March in protest over the department’s policy of reimbursing travel costs for service members who have to go out of state for an abortion. The Defense Department has warned that the blockade, which has left three branches of the military without official leaders, harms U.S. national security. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on Tuesday issued the most scathing denunciation yet.

“As someone who was born in a Communist country, I would have never imagined that actually one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting Communist and other autocratic regimes around the world,” Del Toro, who was born in Cuba, told CNN. “This is having a real negative impact.”

Tuberville has blocked an unprecedented 301 military promotions over the abortion policy, resulting in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps being led by “acting” military leaders instead of confirmed ones. Some Pentagon officials have commented that if this continues, the Joint Chiefs of Staff will have to be renamed the “Joint Chief of Staff,” the Defense Department noted wryly in a Tuesday news brief.

The Pentagon says the policy will stay in place, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley warned that U.S. adversaries could interpret Tuberville’s blockade to mean the “United States was in a situation of internal division, instability … at the highest levels of its military.”

Tuberville continues to falsely insist that he is not endangering U.S. security or military readiness. “I’m disappointed that a secretary would say that about a senator. Makes you feel bad that we got leaders in the country like that,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday. “If I thought it was hurting readiness, I wouldn’t be doing this. But it’s not.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby hit back later that evening. “My best advice to the senator is, if you don’t like being criticized for this outrageous effort to hold up these promotions and advancements, then lift your hold,” he said on CNN.

“If it bothers you that we’re publicly talking about the impacts it’s having—and it is having an impact—then just lift the hold.”

Tuberville may have already reaped some consequences for the blockade. President Joe Biden announced in July he will keep the U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado, instead of moving it to Alabama as his predecessor wanted. White House officials said abortion policy had no influence in the decision, but the move still means that Alabama will miss out on 1,400 jobs and millions of dollars in economic impact.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll announced that most voters think Joe Biden is too old to be president for a second term—and a 2024 matchup between Biden and Donald Trump would be evenly split. The poll has since been covered across multiple mainstream media outlets, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox.

There’s just one problem: The poll was conducted in part by Trump’s former campaign pollster.

The poll, which was published Monday, found that Biden and Trump are tied with 46 percent support each. But “nearly three-quarters of voters say the president is too old to run again,” the Journal article said. It has garnered widespread media attention and outrage. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough pointed out that Trump has been indicted four times and lied many, many more times, and yet he is tied with Biden simply because the latter is just three years older.

But the Journal neglects to provide information about one of the men behind the poll. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio conducted the survey in partnership with a Democratic colleague, Michael Bocian. In a separate piece, the Journal acknowledged that Fabrizio “works for a super PAC supporting Trump’s candidacy.”

What the Journal does not mention anywhere is that Fabrizio also worked as the chief pollster on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And since the start of 2023, Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has paid Fabrizio’s company more than $567,000, according to FEC filings.

Fabrizio also has extensive ties to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort was convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud in 2018 (as well as of having terrible taste in jackets by the court of public opinion).

Fabrizio owned the firm that made a shady payment of $125,000 to Manafort in 2017. Fabrizio was also the lead Trump campaign pollster at the time Manafort provided raw polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, via Manafort’s associate Konstantin Kilimnik. Deripaska has been under U.S. sanctions since 2018, and Kilimnik has been discovered to be a Russian spy.

Over 60 protesters have been indicted on RICO charges for their efforts to block construction of the massive police training facility known as “Cop City” outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

The indictment out of Fulton County court last Tuesday charges 61 protesters with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Many are facing additional charges of domestic terrorism or money laundering. The indictment was handed up by the same grand jury that handed up the indictments against Donald Trump and his co-defendants, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and is being prosecuted by Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr.

Over the past year and a half, Georgia police have made dozens of arrests at the proposed site for Cop City, with charges ranging from alleged property damage and trespassing to domestic terrorism.

In May, Atlanta police arrested the organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund for the protesters of Cop City. One of the fund’s organizers who was arrested, Marlon Kautz, had predicted in February that the state would level RICO charges at the protesters. 

“We understand that this movement is as broad as society itself. It includes environmental activists, community groups, faith leaders, abolitionists, students, artists, and people from all over,” Kautz said in February.

“But police, prosecutors, and even Governor Kemp have been trying to suggest in the media and in court that the opposition to Cop City is actually the work of a criminal organization whose members conspire to commit acts of terrorism. In essence, they’re trying to concoct a RICO-like story about the movement.”

Kautz along with fellow Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers Adele Maclean and Savannah Patterson are listed in the RICO indictment, and are also facing an additional 15 counts of money laundering.

The date listed on the indictments is May 25, 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. Although this date predates any Stop Cop City protesting, it’s possible that the Attorney General’s office plans to link the Stop Cop City movement with the larger protests that followed Floyd’s death.

The Cop City Vote coalition, an Atlanta-based campaign leading a referendum to halt the construction of the police facility, released a statement condemning the indictment.

“Today, Republican Attorney General Chris Carr, who used his platform to recruit for the January 6 insurrection, announced blatantly authoritarian RICO charges against 61 people,” the statement said. “These charges, like the previous repressive prosecutions by the State of Georgia, seek to intimidate protestors, legal observers, and bail funds alike, and send the chilling message that any dissent to Cop City will be punished with the full power and violence of the government.”

In June, Atlanta District Attorney Sherry Boston announced that her office would withdraw from criminal cases tied to the Cop City Protests the state’s Republican Attorney General had leveled at protesters. Boston cited the domestic terrorism charges specifically and said that she and Attorney General Chris Carr had “fundamentally different prosecution philosophies.”

The new indictment out of Fulton County is the state’s latest attempt to suppress political protest and dissent, even in the wake of violent police brutality—and to push through the massive $90 million police facility, no matter the cost.

This story has been updated.

Democratic state Representative Gloria Johnson, a member of the Tennessee Three, announced Tuesday that she will run to unseat Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn in 2024.

Johnson, alongside Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, gained national attention in March when she joined thousands of pro–gun control protesters in the state Capitol in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville. Republicans accused all three lawmakers of violating House decorum rules and voted to expel Jones and Pearson, both of whom are Black. The GOP fell one vote short of expelling Johnson, who is white.

Johnson used that same sense of activism when she launched her Senate campaign Tuesday near Knoxville’s Central High School, where she worked for years as a special education teacher and survived another school shooting in 2008. Johnson referred to the recent Tennessee legislature’s special session, which ended abruptly last week with no resolutions on gun control.

“I’m tired of Tennessee families being betrayed by those that represent them, over and over and over,” she said.

Several hundred people attended the launch event. Johnson will make stops in Nashville, which Jones represents, and Memphis (Pearson’s district) throughout the rest of the day. Pearson is also co-chairing the campaign.

In addition to gun control, Johnson has made abortion rights a central part of her campaign. Supporting abortion rights has proved massively beneficial to other Democratic campaigns, even in traditionally Republican strongholds.

“Republicans and Marsha Blackburn specifically … have taken away equality for women,” Johnson said at her launch event. “When you take someone’s bodily autonomy away, you have taken away equality.”

It won’t be an easy fight. Tennessee hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1995, and the last Democrat who won a statewide race was Governor Phil Bredesen, who was in office from 2003 to 2011. Blackburn beat Bredesen for her Senate seat in 2018 by nearly 11 percent.

But Johnson is confident she can mobilize enough grassroots support. She pointed to how the political landscape has changed dramatically, particularly with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and said that people who have historically voted Republican are telling her they plan to support her instead.

“I have never seen people so excited in my life as they are right now for 2024 to happen,” Johnson told Knox News.

A federal court on Tuesday struck down Alabama Republicans’ latest discriminatory congressional map and assigned a special master to ensure the state actually creates a second majority-Black district this time around.

The Supreme Court shocked everyone in June, ruling 5–4 that Republican-drawn congressional districts in Alabama discriminated against Black voters under the Voting Rights Act. The high court ordered Alabama to redraw the map to include at least two majority-Black districts. But Alabama has repeatedly tried to redraw districts in a way that keeps the status quo and dilutes Black votes.

“Based on the evidence before us, including testimony from the Legislators, we have no reason to believe that allowing the Legislature still another opportunity to draw yet another map will yield a map that includes an additional opportunity district,” the three-judge panel said in the Tuesday ruling. “We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”

“We are disturbed by the evidence that the State delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”

The judges assigned a special master to oversee the remedial map. Alabama has until October 1 to finalize a new map to ensure that there is enough time to prepare for the 2024 election, according to Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen. State officials will need to reassign voters and print and distribute ballots.

More than a quarter of Alabama residents are Black, but currently only one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts is majority-Black. Black voters are scattered throughout the other districts, dramatically reducing their ability to elect their preferred candidates. As a result of the racial gerrymandering, the state only has one Black representative.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices in the June Supreme Court ruling that found Alabama’s congressional map illegally diluted Black votes. Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and repeatedly rejected Alabama’s arguments in favor of keeping the current map as “unpersuasive” or of “little merit.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling—and the outcome of the new map in Alabama—could have bigger implications across the South, and even help Democrats retake the House in 2024. Several other states including Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia are facing legal challenges to their racially gerrymandered districts. Those states could see a very different map in the coming election.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s former chief of staff and co-defendant in the Georgia indictment may flip, one of the most high-profile defections from Team Trump yet.

Mark Meadows served as White House chief of staff at the end of Trump’s presidency. He was charged alongside Trump and 17 other co-defendants with felony racketeering for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results. At his hearing last week, Meadows’s legal team signaled that their main defense strategy will include blaming Trump as the principal force behind efforts to thwart the election, Politico reported Tuesday.

Meadows organized and participated in the now-infamous phone call during which Trump begged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes—the exact amount needed to flip the state’s election results to Trump. Meadows also sent an email pressuring Georgia Republicans to sign slates of fake pro-Trump electors.

“What I didn’t want to happen was for the campaign to prevail in court action and not have this [organized]”, Meadows said during his August 28 hearing.

When asked why, he explained, “Because I knew I’d be yelled at by the president of the United States.”

Meadows has already shown himself willing to undermine his former boss in order to save his own skin. In mid-August, Meadows and former Vice President Mike Pence said separately that they had no knowledge of Trump declassifying a large number of documents, completely undermining the former president’s main defense in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Other former Trump allies are also starting to turn. In July, a Mar-a-Lago employee named Yuscil Taveras changed his testimony in the indictment against Trump for mishandling classified documents. Taveras was assigned a new public defender in July, replacing his Trump-appointed lawyer, and “immediately” recanted his testimony denying that there had been any conversations about security footage that prosecutors subpoenaed in 2022 as part of the investigation.

Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani may also soon turn on his boss (who is refusing to pay him). Giuliani met in June with special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump in Florida for mishandling classified documents and in Washington for trying to overturn the 2020 election. It’s not clear what happened during the meeting, but it’s not unthinkable that Giuliani may try to reach a deal with prosecutors to save his own skin.

Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee ordered Thursday that all court proceedings in Georgia’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants will be televised and livestreamed.

Trump has been indicted four times. In the Georgia case, he faces 13 charges, including racketeering, related to his attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Judge Tanya Chutkan has set the trial date for March 4, 2024, which falls one day before Super Tuesday, the busiest day in the Republican presidential primaries. McAfee says the trials will be accessible to watch through the Fulton County Court YouTube channel.

McAfee also said journalists will be able to use cell phones and computers inside the courtroom for non-recording purposes during the trial and hearings—a departure from the federal election interference case against Trump.

Read more at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.