<....That has not always been the case.

In 1992, a federal judicial panel considering a Wisconsin redistricting lawsuit essentially endorsed detached legislative districts. Wisconsin's Democratic-led Legislature and Republican governor had failed to agree on new districts following the 1990 census. The court was left to pick among various plans submitted by the parties. Republican plans proposed districts with literal contiguity, but the judges opted for a Democratic approach that did not.

The federal judges said legislative districts containing disconnected “islands” of land were similar to towns that had been legally permitted to annex noncontiguous areas.

“Since the distance between town and island is slight, we do not think the failure of the legislative plan to achieve literal contiguity a serious demerit,” the judges wrote in 1992.

The political roles are reversed 30 years later. Republicans, who now control the Legislature, proposed Assembly and Senate maps with disconnected districts that the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted last year. Democrats, who control the governor's office, are backing the legal challenge.

"The districts are constitutional because they are legally contiguous,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a statement to The Associated Press alluding to prior court rulings. He declined further comment.

Though contiguity requirements have a long national history in redistricting, they have not always been explicitly defined, thus leaving room for interpretation, said Micah Altman, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose specialties include redistricting.

Criteria such as contiguous and compact districts must be balanced with other principles, such as distributing the population equally and not splitting municipalities and counties among districts, he said.

“Turning one knob on the system makes you have to turn down the other knob at least a bit," Altman said.

In the case of Anderson's district, the disconnected sections likely have not made much difference in the partisan composition of his voters. Anderson is a Democrat, and so are the majority of Madison-area voters.

But redistricting experts say there still is potential for politicians to rig the map to their favor by drawing remote sections of districts.

“When you allow mapmakers to draw districts that are noncontiguous, you give them even more flexibility to perpetrate abuse," Levitt said.>

<One of Donald Trump's excuses for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election has been to blame his lawyers. That's not going to work, said one former Justice Department official.

Speaking to former Robert Mueller senior prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and MSNBC host Ari Melber for a Trump indictment special on Sunday, was former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord. She goes line-by-line with each of the defenses cited by Trump or his lawyers and explains why none of them are going to hold up in court.

Introducing the segment, Melber compared it to "The George Costanza Defense," after the Seinfeld character who claimed, "Remember Jerry, if you believe it was true, it wasn't a lie." As Melber explained, that doesn't necessarily work unless you can claim the insanity defense. That might not help a campaign for the U.S. presidency.

"All criminal charges — almost all, require them to have some knowledge — really issues liability," McCord explained. "But that's very different than saying he had a firm belief that the election was stolen as some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. There are lots of things in this indictment that he engaged in, conduct that he engaged in, that went well beyond what you are legally allowed to do when you firmly believe you did not lose the election."

Melber used another example, that if someone truly believes that a bank is evil, it doesn't entitle them to then rob the bank.

"And [it] might be a 'not guilty by reason of insanity' defense, but not intent for what you've done," McCord said. "You don't have the right to go take it just because you think the bank is evil. It could even have a more simple example. Let's say you think the bank miscalculated the interest on your savings account. And so it's not even at the bank is, evil it's just wrong. And you've asked them for it, and they disagreed with you, but you firmly believe your math is right, and their math is wrong. You just don't get to go hold up the bank. That's exactly what we're talking about here."

What the indictment walked through, she continued, is that Trump could not have reasonably believed that there was enough fraud to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

"But even if he did," she speculated, "that doesn't mean you can orchestrate a scheme of fake electors, send their ballots to the vice president to have then be counted. It doesn't mean that you can put really unlawful pressure on state officials, including either threatening criminal prosecution, as he did with respect to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger."

Weissmann said it's perhaps the worst defense he's ever heard because "no jury will go down that road with him."....>

<....Another defense of Trump's is that he was "just joking" about his attempts to overthrow the government or that he wasn't really going to do something like that. While Trump might claim that it didn't actually happen, McCord disagrees.

"It pretty much did come to fruition," she said. "This notion of a conspiracy is — oftentimes when people say we weren't really going to do it. So, it doesn't work here. It doesn't work factually, and it's something the laws that the law has had to deal with in many of the situations."

The next Trump defense is that his First Amendment rights are being violated and his attacks on the 2020 election were protected speech.

"This is something that Jack Smith dealt with right at the beginning of the indictment, and he makes clear Mr. Trump has the right First Amendment right to speak. He even has the First Amendment right to lie about what he thinks about the election results show. But what he doesn't have the right to do is conduct that is based on a fraud. And fraud always involves some type of expression. That's the very heart of fraud. You have engaged in conduct, here a conspiracy, multiple conspiracies based on a fraud, based on lies. So, there is a distinction between speech, which he is entitled to do, and conduct, which is something clear in the indictment, for the talking points for Trump and his supporters, it makes for a quick clip and makes like what the judge is done is unlawful."

Finally, another excuse Trump gives is that his lawyers told him that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and he believed those lawyers.

"When your co-conspirator is a lawyer, you don't get to rely on the co-conspirators' voice as a defense," McCord laughed. "Here we know from the unindicted co-conspirators who have been identified that most of those, in fact, all but possibly one, were acting as lawyers. That's the 'thing one,' and 'thing two' is you can't just go cherry-pick around when all of your lawyers are telling you there's no significant fraud and this fraudulent elector scheme won't work. You can't just keep trying out new lawyers, hunting lawyers until you find one to agree with you."

Weissmann explained that the perfect dispute for Trump's claim that he trusted his lawyers is Mar-a-Lago. In that case, his lawyers advised him on what to do with the FBI, and he consistently ignored them. In fact, The Nation's legal analyst, Elie Mystal, argued this week that Trump is currently ignoring any legitimate legal defenses.>

<Owners of San Francisco’s office towers, shopping centers, hotels and homes are flooding the county with appeals to slash their property assessments — and tax payments — as real estate prices sink in the beleaguered city.

Some of the world’s biggest landlords, including Brookfield Corp. and Blackstone Inc., have filed for assessment cuts. The volume of such appeals have doubled in the three years since the pandemic. Assessments for this fiscal year went out in early July, and new appeals are expected to surge before a Sept. 15 deadline to request reductions.

“It’s like drinking from a fire hose,” said Mark Ong, founder of Independent Tax Representatives, whose firm filed appeals on about $11 billion of San Francisco property for the last tax year. “I’ve done this 37 years and I’ve never had a year like this one.”

The volume of appeals shows the broader impact of the real estate downturn in cities such as San Francisco, where office workers, shoppers and tourists have been particularly slow to return after the pandemic. Reduced assessments can lower tax revenue for city services from police to homeless aid. And a recognition by assessors that property values have plunged only adds fuel to a potential doom loop of disinvestment, where indebted owners walk away from buildings rather than pour money into assets that are worth less than they paid.

For the fiscal year ended June 30, San Francisco tax filers asked for an average 48% reduction on property assessed at more than $60 billion, according to filings with the city’s assessors office compiled by Bloomberg. The values encompass taxable business items such as fixtures and vehicles, though the bulk of the dollar figures being appealed is tied to land and building assessments.

Of the 2,420 appeals heard by the board in the 12 months through June, about 55% received a reduction.

The city already faces a $780 million budget deficit through 2025, forcing Mayor London Breed to raid her reserves and leave vacant jobs unfilled, among other belt-tightening measures. San Francisco's latest budget assumes the city will be forced to refund $167 million to property owners over the next two fiscal years due to appeals.

“The assessments are going to be challenging, but we’re going to have to adjust to that,” Breed said in an interview last month at City Hall. “And we will.”

San Francisco is far from alone as landlords across the country grapple with shifts in real estate demand and rising interest rates that have sent building prices tumbling. Assessment appeals have also risen in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

Offices in New York may lose an estimated 44% of their pre-pandemic value by 2029 because of the impact of remote work, according to a joint study from researchers at New York University and Columbia University. They typically account for about 20% of the city’s property-tax revenue.

“In New York, everybody protests their taxes,” said Jay A. Neveloff, a real estate attorney with Kramer Levin in Manhattan. “It’s like a right [sic] of passage. But this time it’s really justified.”

For San Francisco, the property forecasts are even more dire: Prices for office towers may plunge as much as 60% from pre-pandemic levels, according to Boston Consulting Group. Owners of the city’s largest shopping mall, two of its biggest hotels and two office buildings controlled by investment giant Pacific Investment Management Co. stopped making mortgage payments this year rather than hold onto money-losing properties.

Meanwhile, the median San Francisco home price sank 16% in June from a year earlier, and residential sales volume dropped almost 17%, according to the California Association of Realtors.

“San Francisco is clearly in the first inning” of this price downturn, said Michael Covarrubias, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based developer TMG Partners and former head of the Bay Area Council, a group of business leaders focused on the region’s economic vitality....>

<....So far, the city has avoided a major hit to its property-tax rolls, which climbed 4.6% to $340 billion for the fiscal year starting July 1. That’s partly because of increases to assessments of long-held real estate, which are still playing catch-up to the boom years because of a law that limits assessment hikes to 2% annually. The last time total assessments fell was in the mid-1990s, following a US recession.

Landlords aren’t waiting for city assessors to catch up with the times. Brookfield requested a 75% reduction in the value of the office tower at 685 Market St., which it bought in 2013. It’s seeking a 68% assessment reduction for One Post St., according to filings with the appeals board. Both appeals, which were filed last year, are still pending. Brookfield declined to comment.

Columbia Property Trust, a landlord acquired by Pimco in 2021, asked for 50% reductions on three office buildings, one of which is part of the portfolio that stopped making mortgage payments in January. A spokesman for Columbia declined to comment.

Others asked for more modest discounts. Blackstone requested cuts ranging from 20% to 25% on three office buildings near the San Francisco waterfront. Apartment landlord Equity Residential filed appeals for reductions of as much as 20% on five properties in the latest two tax years.

Initial reassessment requests are often “placeholder” numbers, because agents for property owners don’t have time to accurately analyze all the properties filing appeals, Ong said. It’s advantageous to ask for a bigger reduction at the outset than to take a conservative position and appeal for a deeper discount later, according to Nick Fogle, a principal with Ryan LLC, the largest property-tax advisory firm in the US.

“There’s probably never been a larger disconnect between appeal outcomes and current assessments,” said Fogle, who’s worked on cases for 15 years. “We have a third-party appraisal for an office building in the city that shows an over 80% decline from its assessed value. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that.”

Some appeals came ahead of bigger troubles. The owners of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street received a roughly 40% cut in the mall’s assessment in March. In June, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield said they were giving up the property to lenders, citing the “declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic.”

Early this year, Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. withdrew an appeal to cut the assessment of the Hilton Park 55 San Francisco hotel by almost half. In June, the landlord said it stopped making payments on a $725 million mortgage on the Park 55 and Hilton San Francisco Union Square hotels. The city’s pandemic recovery may take as long as seven years, Park Hotels CEO Thomas J. Baltimore said on an Aug. 4 call with investors.

"I, like many others, believe that San Francisco will recover," Baltimore said. “It's just going to take longer, and there are real structural impediments and challenges there that we're all aware of.”>

< Former President Donald Trump launched a post-midnight attack Monday on the judge handling the case charging him with seeking to steal the 2020 election, despite a warning from the court late last week against "inflammatory statements."

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan "obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!" Trump said in a Truth Social post just after 1 a.m.

Trump, who also protested an expected indictment in Atlanta in statements over the weekend, cited Chutkan's comments during the sentencing of a person convicted for participating in the insurrection attempt of Jan. 6, 2021.

Noting that the people who mobbed the Capitol that day wore caps and carried flags with the name of one man, Trump, Chutkan said in October 2022: "It's blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”

'Inflammatory statements'

Chutkan, who has been assigned the case that accuses Trump of conspiring to steal the 2020 election from President Joe Biden, issued a protective order Friday restricting what Trump can say publicly about the evidence against him.

The federal judge is known for imposing stiff sentences on the individuals who participated in the Capitol riot, but veteran federal court watchers told USA TODAY that she is a consummate professional who will handle a sensitive case with the utmost care.

'Testing the judge'?

Trump's statements could lead to a speedier trial than the former president wants, the judge indicated.

"I intend to ensure the orderly administration of justice in this case as I would with any other case," Chutkan said during a hearing Friday. "The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case which could taint the jury pool or intimidate potential witnesses, the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial to ensure a jury pool from which we can select an impartial jury."

Prosecutors have requested a trial date of Jan. 2; Trump and his attorneys said that would damage his 2024 presidential campaign. The Iowa caucuses are Jan. 15.

Legal analyst said it looks like Trump is testing Chutkan. "He is just daring the judge now," said national security attorney Bradley P. Moss.

Trump has said he might seek a recusal of Chutkan, but his attorneys have not filed anything formally.

Georgia investigation into Trump

During a weekend that included a visit to the Iowa State Fair, Trump also protested an investigation in Atlanta that appears headed toward a grand jury decision as soon as this week.

An Atlanta grand jury meets this week to discuss charges that Trump and his associates with conspiring to overturn his 2020 loss in Georgia to Biden.

In Truth Social posts, Trump attacked Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and said she "is using a potential Indictment of me." In a series of posts early Monday, Trump attacked Willis as well as one of this week's grand jury witnesses, former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan.

There isn't evidence state or federal officials handling cases against Trump are targeting his reelection bid.>

<Sitting in his office in Georgia’s gold-domed capitol, Brad Raffensperger said he was proud his state “protected the vote.”

Raffensperger was on the receiving end of the phone call after the 2020 election in which then-President Donald Trump pressured him over and over to change the outcome in Georgia, saying, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

To the soft-spoken engineer-turned-Secretary of State, that’s all past now. His office was decorated with a patriotic eagle painting, given to him after he stood up to Trump’s pressure. His state, he contended, emerged with elections that are even more secure and accessible.

As Raffensperger spoke, though, just one floor above him speakers had filled the state elections board meeting to over-capacity. Suspicious of the Dominion-made voting machines, they lined up to demand paper ballots. “Until we can get rid of these machines,” attendee Jeff Jolly said outside, ”our winners are handpicked by a small group here in this building.”

About a mile from the Capitol is ground zero for some of the claims of election fraud: State Farm Arena, where election staff working around the clock at a vote tabulation center were then falsely accused of being “election scammers.” Their defamation lawsuit against Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is still in court.

And just outside Raffensperger’s windows, almost visible, were the orange traffic barricades and police cars ringing the Fulton County Courthouse. There, a grand jury indictment in the investigation of efforts to overturn the 2020 vote was expected any day – an indictment that could come as early as Tuesday and may well include Trump himself.

To some Georgians, a Trump indictment would be a step toward justice; to others, a sign of just how broken the system is. But no matter the indictment, or any trial, or the desire many people here have to move on, there’s no outcome that seems likely to lift the shadow of 2020.

Voting rights advocates say the election and its aftermath left an enduring imprint on access, election politics and simple trust in Georgia, one of America’s most pivotal swing states.

They point chiefly to the state’s sweeping overhaul of elections in 2021. Republican legislators said the changes brought election security. Voter advocates and civil rights leaders say it built lasting barriers to voting access – an attempt, they believe, to undercut the growing clout of Democrats and Black voters.

The state also allowed unlimited citizen challenges to other people’s voter registrations – and right-wing activists filed so many, they swamped some election offices. Election offices were banned from seeking outside funding, which opponents viewed as unfairly helping Democratic counties. After years of threats and intimidation, election and poll workers are scarce.

For some voters – left to make sense of nearly three years of conflicting messages and investigations, of allegations and legislation – all this makes them push a little harder. They know the state that was under fire for voter access issues even before 2020. The year’s fallout fuels their determination to vote.

That’s not true for others, though, who have become convinced the outcome is decided by forces beyond the ballot box.

“A lot of this really goes back to the big lie – the idea that something was wrong with our election and our electoral system, and it has to change. And of course, we all know that's not true, said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University election law professor. “Yet major pieces of public policy have been shifted in response to that lie.”.....>

<.....A land of surveillance video, allegations and threats

Outside an Atlanta coffee shop in early August, Richard Barron recalled the night he got a text from a reporter asking him how he felt.

Barron had no idea what she was talking about, but he soon would understand.

Donald Trump, then the outgoing president, had held a rally in Valdosta, Georgia, to support the Republican in the hotly contested runoff election for the state’s Senate seat. He had fired off false conspiracy theories about stolen elections and voter fraud, and had flashed Barron’s picture on the big screen.

Next came a flood of new threats. One message warned Barron he’d be “served lead.”

“That’s when I really started getting harassment,” he recalled. “I finally got a police officer to stay outside the house when I would sleep at night.”

It’s not as if Barron, Fulton County’s elections director, had never been embattled. Long before, he had faced problems with lines at polling places, administrative snafus and other issues.

He led the department during 2018’s bitter governor’s race, when Stacey Abrams narrowly lost to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Officials rejected hundreds of absentee ballots. Democrats claimed voter suppression. Lawsuits continued for years.

The following year, Georgia purchased a new voting system made by a company that would soon be a household name: Dominion Voting Systems. The year after that, the COVID-19 pandemic put mail-in ballots into broad use.

Meanwhile, the stakes of elections in Georgia were mounting. The once reliably red state became a swing state that put 16 electoral votes up for grabs.

When Biden narrowly won Georgia in November - the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 – Trump quickly alleged fraud. Among his targets were Fulton County, the state’s most populous county.

After Trump demanded a hand recount, a statewide hand recount and a subsequent recount found Biden had won by about 12,000 votes.

But Trump’s claims continued. There were allegations of manipulated ballots. Fraud. Supposedly breached election equipment. Soon, the likes of Rudolph Giuliani and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were visiting Georgia.

In the months following the election, Barron’s staff faced pressure like never before.

Meeting with Georgia lawmakers that December, Giuliani played surveillance footage that included two of Barron’s employees – Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss – counting ballots.

Giuliani said the footage showed the women “surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine,” the AP reported.

What they were actually passing, as Moss would later explain to the Jan. 6 congressional committee, was a ginger mint. But the threats against them exploded.

Trump, in his famous phone call to Georgia, would falsely call Freeman an “election scammer” at least 18 times.

They were forced to leave their home for two months at the urging of the FBI.

Moss, who is Black, said she received messages “wishing death upon me. Telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother. And saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”

“There is nowhere I feel safe,” Freeman told the congressional committee.

In June of this year, a Georgia investigation of the allegations of fraud at the State Farm Arena ballot processing center cleared the two women of any wrongdoing.

Biden’s inauguration didn’t end the pressure. Barron said he continued to take criticism from state elections officials and some local politicians. Fulton County, at the behest of Republican legislators, became the first county in Georgia to undergo a new performance review. Barron’s office faced a possible state takeover.

Finally, in late 2021, he resigned.

Barron, nearly two years later, got through an entire coffee drink on a coffee shop patio near Atlanta’s Ponce City Market as he recounted the years of tumult.

The partisan acrimony took a toll. He struggled to find work in Atlanta, he said. For a while, he drove for Uber. He’s not sure if he can ever work in elections again.

“I started losing faith in the whole….everything,” he said.

But his leaving office was just one chapter in the fallout from 2020. By then, another battle over elections in Georgia was well under way.....>

<....Canceled registrations, new restrictions and voter backlash

At the dining room table of his home east of Atlanta, a red-sided ranch tucked in a quiet neighborhood of neat lawns and leafy trees, Donel Peterman held his phone, typing his name into an app that shows whether a person is still registered to vote.

It’s something the 70-year-old former public transit supervisor regularly shows to people at his church, ever since the time his name ended up falling off the list.

In 2017, he found himself among more than a half million people whose registrations were canceled under the state’s "use it or lose it” law. State officials defended the policy as voter-role maintenance and denied any nefarious intent, but critics said the system had a high error rate and disproportionately impacted Black voters.

Georgia declares registrations “inactive” after five years in which those voters do not participate in elections, contact or respond to elections officials or update their registrations – often because they moved. Those voters’ registrations are then dropped from the rolls if they don’t participate in the next two general elections.

Except Peterman says he had not moved – or missed multiple elections.

“This is totally ridiculous,” he recalled thinking at the time. He had to re-register to vote.

Then came 2020. And Peterman saw what he viewed as new hurdles to the vote.

In 2021, after Democrats had won two Senate runoff elections, a Republican-led legislature passed a sweeping election law.

Supporters said it was aimed at restoring voters’ confidence and making elections more secure in the wake of 2020. Gov. Kemp said it would make it "easy to vote, and hard to cheat." Critics said that was a pretext, and that the law would disproportionately suppress Democratic votes.

Known as SB 202, the law drew criticism on a number of provisions. It limited the number of polling places, added voter identification requirements to get absentee ballots, shortened the time to request them, and limited ballot drop boxes. That caused the number in Fulton County, for example, to drop from more than three dozen to 7. The county’s mobile-voting buses were banned.

The law also shortened the time between an election and a run-off election, shortening the time for voters to receive and return absentee ballots. It limited who could distribute absentee ballots or assist someone with an absentee ballot, a change advocates say impacts voters with disabilities.

And it gave the legislature more control over county election offices. All that came on top of 2021 redistricting, which the ACLU has argued diluted the power of Black voters.

Critics said SB 202 made it harder to vote. They said it would disproportionately affect people of color. Biden called the law “un-American” and the Department of Justice challenged provisions in court. Major League Baseball moved its All-Star game out of Atlanta in protest.

Georgia wasn’t the only place taking aim at elections laws, either. Fourteen states passed 22 restrictive laws in 2021. More did so this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy group. At the same time, other states expanded voting rights to make ballot access safer and easier.

In Georgia, voter access groups responded by redoubling the get-out-the-vote efforts that had powered the Democratic wins in 2020.

Bishop Reginald Jackson, who leads more than 500 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia, helped create the group Faith Works, a network of churches that conducted canvassing and registration drives, and encouraged early voting.

Helen Butler, head of the voting access group the People’s Agenda, said they too provided more rides to the polls than they had in the past.

Despite the worries, overall turnout during the general election was strong, drawing 56.9% of registered voters, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

According to the Brookings Institution, Georgia saw gains between 2018 and 2022 in white voters but a turnout decline among nonwhite voters. Still, its 2022 nonwhite turnout rate still ranks fourth among all states.

Raffersperger says the strong turnout showed that voter suppression was a myth and concerns about SB 202 overblown. A University of Georgia study found more than 90% of voters had said it was easy to cast a ballot.

Jackson and other voting rights leaders credited turnout efforts and people’s determination to vote in spite of the law, and said surveying those who voted left out people who weren’t able to vote....>

<....Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, said the impact of SB 202 has yet to be determined.

In July, U.S. House Republicans introduced a new federal elections bill modeled after Georgia’s law.

At home east of Atlanta, Peterman is retired. His wife recently retired, too. They keep a neat home and have a pet bird named Jingle.

Retirement is good. It means more time to volunteer at a political action ministry at his church, helping educate others about the vote. Some people there believe it just doesn’t matter, he said, that the outcomes will be manipulated anyway.

Peterman – a Democrat, who says he sometimes votes Republican, depending on the candidate – doesn’t think that. He said his own experience – having his record temporarily purged, watching new laws come down and new district lines go up – has only made him more determined to vote.

He votes during the state's early voting window to make sure his vote is counted. Give Gov. Kemp credit for standing up for Trump, he said. But he isn’t happy he signed off on voting bills that concern him.

Still, he thinks efforts viewed as tilting the scales in favor of a particular party have backfired and hopes that will deter those strategies in the future.

“What they’re doing is pissing people off,” he said. “People are going to come and grow the vote.”

Peterman walked from his dining room through the garage, past Jingle’s cage into the leafy green light of a late Georgia summer. He’s watching, like everyone else in Georgia, for the indictments. Maybe, he says, they will stanch the most blatant attempts to sway elections and underscore something that to him seems basic.

“Elections need to be fair and square,” he said.

But what that means in Georgia can, at times, depend on who you ask.

A world of election information and disinformation

Jeff Jolly had made it as far as the Georgia Board of Elections meeting, but he couldn’t get inside. The room had reached capacity.

Jolly stood outside as some walked across the street to watch it on a TV feed.

Inside, people were demanding the state use paper ballots that could be hand-counted for better election security. Jolly agreed.

Some had arrived in a passenger van that towed a trailer pasted with the slogan “Paper Please.” “We call it the war wagon,” Jolly said.

The semi-retired pecan businessman wore a T-shirt with the logo “Georgians for Truth,” a group that supports the ballot change.

While opponents of changes like SB 202 think Georgia’s election procedures are too restrictive, Jolly – who chairs the local Republican Party in Grady County, way down near the Florida line – thinks they aren’t strict enough.

Jolly said he believes Fulton County’s anticipated prosecution of Trump is a “joke” and that the so-called fake electors who sought to certify Georgia for Trump were legitimate. But 2020, he said, “it’s over. We’ve got to move forward. To make sure we have a true election next year.”....>

<.....Garland Favorito, a founder of the group VoterGA, wants to, too. He contends that fraud, errors and irregularities meant the 2020 election never should have been certified. He blamed courts for stymying their efforts to prove it thus far.

While there have been some improvements in election security since 2020, Favorito says, there haven’t been enough to “secure the 2024 elections.”

Lingering doubts about elections security led rural Spalding County to require automatic hand recounts for elections earlier this year, which followed a move to cancel Sunday voting, a change protested by Black voters, according to The Guardian.

SB 202 also allowed residents to make unlimited voter challenges against anyone in their county. Rahul Garabadu, senior voting rights attorney for the ACLU of Georgia, said such challenges were once an arcane part of election law, meant for family members or neighbors to alert officials that someone had moved or died.

Last month, a ProPublica investigation found that the vast majority of the challenges since SB 202 became law — about 89,000 of 100,000 — were submitted by six right-wing activists.

Of those challenges, roughly 11,100 were successful — at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls and at least 8,700 were placed in a “challenged” status. However, the investigation found that many would have been eventually corrected by routine voter-roll maintenance.

One resident who was challenged is Carry Smith, 41, who lives in Savannah and works with a voting rights group. After moving there a handful of years ago, she said, she used a mailbox business as her address while she looked for a place to live. She thought she later updated her voter registration but found she was still registered at the business. Luckily, she noticed the piece of mail about it and was able to change her address to remain on the rolls.

“I think if I didn’t check my mail, I wouldn’t have known,” she said.

In Gwinnett County, which stretches across the increasingly Democratic northern Atlanta suburbs, those challenges created a month’s worth of work in fall 2022, said county elections supervisor Zach Manifold, as he walked among of boxes that included election materials from 2020 that must be retained because of ongoing lawsuits.

In filing them, activists compared change-of-address and other databases with the county’s voter rolls, the AP reported. Manifold said that of the roughly 12,000 voter challenges they went through, all were dismissed for various reasons.

He’s not sure if that will continue. But one thing that may continue is his struggle to hire enough workers. With the history of threats, the long hours, plus a competitive job market, election-season temps are hard to find.

“We’d order 25 employees to start on Monday. They’d come up with 12. Six of them would show up. And then by 5 p.m. on the first day, you had two,” Manifold said.

He started his own job two years ago. Today he says he’s the most senior of any elections leader in any of the four major Atlanta-area counties.

<....Manifold these days, he does a lot of voter education. While voting systems are more reliable than ever, he said, “There’s just a lot of misinformation, and not understanding election processes. That’s probably the biggest concern.”

A state votes in a test of faith

At a job fair in a Baptist Church in Tucker, just east of Atlanta, Diona Holman 27, and Linda Watson, 73, walked past rows of tables. Jobs at the state prisons. Jobs at Waffle House. Jobs at local non-profits. The pair had clipboards in hand. They weren’t looking for employees, just voters.

They were canvassing for the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, which advocates for voting rights – asking people if their voter registrations were updated.

Most people they spoke to said they were registered. One woman said she didn’t vote. She didn’t explain why, but the look on her face said the reason ought to be obvious.

Merri Nance, a 63-year-old real estate agent, realized she needed to get her address updated after she moved. She said all the lawsuits, legislation and investigations have had an impact.

“In the last election, I was reminding people – don’t forget to vote. And people were so discouraged, they’re like, I’m not going to vote… they felt like it wasn’t going to make a difference.”

In July – two and half years after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and its fallout – a national USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll found that 7 out of 10 Americans agreed U.S. democracy is “imperiled.”

But Raffensperger believes those views are in the minority amid a Georgia system he says has strong security, voter confidence and accessibility. It’s never been easier to vote, he says.

A January AJC poll found that confidence was rebounding, with 73% of voters saying they thought elections were fair and accurate, compared with 56% of voters about a year earlier.

There was also a partisan gap. About 87% who identified themselves as liberals said they were confident, compared with 61% of conservatives.

Raffensperger said Trump’s efforts to sow doubts about election results likely diminished the number of Republicans voting for president in Georgia in 2020, which is why he believes that tactic will eventually wane.

“It may be a great way to raise money and run your hustle on people. But at the end of the day, it’s not a winning campaign strategy,” he said.

Political observers and scholars say what role Trump’s indictments play – whether they act as a turning point to a tumultuous era in Georgia elections, or deepen divides and the politicization of voting — remains to be seen.

“There’s a chance it will make polarization worse,” Kreis said. “On the other hand, if people are forced to listen to the evidence and to contemplate what prosecutors are presenting, perhaps that will sway a considerable number of people.”

Yet the pressure and scrutiny on elections will continue in Georgia as long as it’s a swing state. That could mean more turnout or more disinformation. Or both.

In his office in the Capitol, where armed Trump supporters protested the former president’s election loss in 2020, Raffensperger says some people won’t ever change their minds.

“Some people today still have not and will not face and maybe cannot face the brutal truth of what happened in 2020. And that is, in Georgia, President Trump lost by about 12,000 votes,” he said.

He said he’s hopeful that political candidates with positive messages will emerge and leave behind “all this elections nonsense” and stop “looking at the referees and blaming them for all their shortcomings.”

“Honestly, I think most Georgians, most Americans have moved on. They’re tired of all the chattering class back there talking about what happened three years ago,” he said.

Outside his office, 2020 wasn’t going anywhere just yet.

Two days after Raffensperger spoke, Trump arrived back in Washington, D.C. – to appear as a defendant in federal court. That indictment, on charges of trying to overturn the election, was built in part around the phone call he made to Raffensperger.

Now, in the light of a late Georgia summer, in the eighth month of 2023, the year 2020 feels as present as ever. Witnesses in Fulton County said they had been summoned to testify Tuesday. Indictments could come as soon as immediately after.

And just down the street from Raffensperger’s office, the barricades and police wait, along with the rest of the state, for what comes next.>

<Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened her investigation into Donald Trump after the release of a recording of a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.

Trump suggested during the call that Raffensperger, a Republican and the state’s top elections official, could help “find” the votes needed to overturn his narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

More than two years later, the indictment that could soon be brought by a grand jury could go far beyond that phone call, alleging a web of crimes committed by Trump and others. Willis is widely expected to use Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, law to charge Trump and his associates for allegedly participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

Here's a look at how the law works:

HOW WOULD A LAW USED AGAINST MOBSTERS APPLY TO TRUMP AND HIS ALLIES?

The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act originated in 1970 as a tool to fight organized crime. The law enabled prosecutors to target people in positions of authority within a criminal organization, not just lower-level people doing the dirty work.

But its use was never meant to be limited exclusively to organized crime. The U.S. Supreme Court noted in a 1989 opinion that the law was drafted “broadly enough to encompass a wide range of criminal activity, taking many different forms and likely to attract a broad array of perpetrators.”

Within a few years of the federal law taking effect, states began passing their own RICO laws. Generally speaking, RICO laws allow prosecutors to charge multiple people who commit separate crimes while working toward a common goal.

WHAT DOES GEORGIA'S RICO LAW SAY?

Georgia's RICO Act, adopted in 1980, makes it a crime to participate in, acquire or maintain control of an “enterprise” through a “pattern of racketeering activity” or to conspire to do so. It’s important to note that the alleged scheme does not have to have been successful for a RICO charge to stick.

An “enterprise” can be a single person or a group of associated individuals with a common goal. “Racketeering activity” means to commit, attempt to commit — or to solicit, coerce or intimidate someone else to commit — one of more than three dozen state crimes listed in the law. At least two such acts are required to meet the standard of a “pattern of racketeering activity,” meaning prosecutors have to prove that a person has engaged in two or more related criminal acts as part of their participation in an enterprise to be convicted under RICO.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that federal RICO allegations must show continuity, that is to say a series of related underlying acts over an extended period of time, not just a few weeks or months. But the Georgia Supreme Court has made clear there is no such requirement in the state law....>

<.....WHY USE THE RICO STATUTE?

“I’m a fan of RICO,” Willis said during a news conference in August 2022 as she announced a RICO indictment against more than two dozen alleged gang members.

Willis has said jurors want to know all the facts behind an alleged crime and that a RICO indictment enables prosecutors to provide a complete picture of all the alleged illegal activity. A narrative introduction allows prosecutors to tell a story that can include a lot of detailed information that might not relate to specific crimes but is relevant to the broader alleged scheme.

RICO charges also carry a heavy potential sentence that can be added on top of the penalty for the underlying acts.

In Georgia, it’s a felony conviction that carries a prison term of five to 20 years; a fine of $25,000 or three times the amount of money gained from the criminal activity, whichever is greater; or both a prison sentence and a fine.

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES IN USING THE RICO STATUTE?

J. Tom Morgan used the Georgia RICO statute to prosecute a corrupt sheriff when he was the district attorney in DeKalb County, which neighbors Fulton County. He said one challenge is explaining to a jury what the RICO law is and how it works.

“Everybody knows what a murder case is, what a rape case is, what a theft case is. But RICO is not in the everyday vernacular,” he said. "You don’t see a RICO charge on a television show about crime.”

DOES WILLIS HAVE PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE WITH RICO CASES?

Yes. When she was an assistant district attorney in the Fulton County district attorney's office, Willis was a lead prosecutor in a RICO case against a group of Atlanta public school educators in a cheating scandal. After a monthslong trial, a jury in April 2015 convicted 11 former educators of racketeering for their roles in a scheme to inflate students’ scores on standardized exams.

Since becoming district attorney in January 2021, she has brought several RICO indictments against alleged gang members, including several high-profile rap artists.

Lawyer John Floyd, a nationally known RICO expert in Atlanta, helped Willis with the school cheating case. Soon after opening the investigation into potential illegal meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia, she engaged him to serve as a special assistant district attorney to help with any racketeering cases her office might pursue.>

<The New York judge overseeing the hush money criminal case against former President Donald Trump has refused to recuse himself following an effort by Trump’s attorneys to get him to give the case to another jurist for the trial, a court order filed Monday says.

In his ruling, state Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan said, “the judge presiding over a case is in the best position to appreciate the implications of those matters alleged in a recusal motion.”

“In deciding whether to recuse himself, the trial judge must carefully weigh the policy of promoting public confidence in the judiciary against the possibility that those questioning his impartiality might be seeking to avoid the adverse consequences of his presiding over their case,” he wrote.

He added: “Further, this Court has examined its conscience and is certain in its ability to be fair and impartial.”

Trump’s attorneys had argued that the judge’s daughter’s political and financial interests created an actual or perceived conflict of interest. They also argued that Merchan’s “role in a prior case encouraging [former Trump Chief Financial Officer] Allen Weisselberg to cooperate against President Trump and his interests shows a preconceived bias against President Trump.”

The former president’s attorneys also suggested Merchan’s campaign contributions in 2020, if true, raised an appearance of impartiality, according to court filings.

Prosecutors had opposed the request for recusal, and Merchan rejected all of the Trump legal team’s arguments, the order shows.

Trump’s attorneys did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment. The Manhattan district attorney declined to provide comment.

The order comes more than two months after Trump's lawyers filed a motion seeking to remove Merchan from the upcoming hush money trial, which is set to begin on March 25, over alleged conflicts.

The motion sought to have Merchan, who presided over Trump’s arraignment in the business fraud case in Manhattan, step aside, Trump’s lawyers said in a statement in June.

“President Trump, like all Americans, is entitled under the Constitution to an impartial judge and fair legal process,” his lawyers said in the statement.

Trump has complained on social media that Merchan “hates me.” In their June statement, Trump’s lawyers mentioned that Merchan presided over the criminal case against the Trump Organization. Their statement also refers to Merchan’s daughter’s employment with a political firm that worked for President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Merchan fined the Trump Organization $1.6 million for a long-running tax fraud scheme. The prosecution’s star witness was the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, Weisselberg, who testified against the company as part of a plea agreement.

Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud charges last August and was sentenced to five months in jail. He was sent to Rikers Island in January and released in April.

A Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump in March on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his role in paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels weeks before the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about an alleged affair with him a decade earlier. He has pleaded not guilty and has repeatedly denied an affair.>

Maybe a recusal request will be made by the defence in Florida....

Hahahahaha!!!!

<Federal judges reviewing Alabama's new congressional map on Monday sharply questioned if state lawmakers ignored the court's directive to create a second-majority Black district, so minority voters have a fair opportunity to influence elections.

The three-judge panel held a hearing as they weigh whether to let the map stand or to step in and draw new congressional districts for the state. The panel heard arguments Monday but did not indicate when it would rule.

Alabama was forced to draw new district lines after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a surprise June decision, upheld the panel’s earlier finding that the state’s then-map — which had just one Black-majority district out of seven in a state where more than one in four residents is Black — likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act.

Lawyers for plaintiffs in the case argued Monday that the new plan, which maintains one majority-Black district, still discriminates against Black voters. They said it flouts the panel’s 2022 finding that Alabama should have two districts where Black voters comprise a majority or “something quite close to it.”

All three judges pointedly asked the state’s lawyer whether Alabama had ignored their finding that the state should have a second district where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.

U.S. District Judge Terry F. Moorer asked if Alabama had chosen to “deliberately disregard" the court's instruction. U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus asked the state, “Were you not required to draw a new map (that provides a reasonable) opportunity (district for Black voters)?”

Edmund LaCour, Alabama’s solicitor general, said the redrawn map was as “close as you get” to creating a second majority-Black district without violating the U.S. Constitution or traditional redistricting criteria.

“I think it is close as you get without violating the Constitution,” LaCour said.

LaCour accused the plaintiffs of seeking a “racial gerrymander” over traditional guidelines for drawing districts, such as keeping districts compact and keeping communities of interest together.

Abha Khanna, an attorney representing one group of plaintiffs in the case, said Alabama chose “defiance over compliance.”

“Alabama has chosen instead to thumb its nose at this court and to thumb its nose at the nation’s highest court and to thumb its nose at its own Black citizens,” Khanna said.

Khanna said Alabama essentially changed nothing for Black voters by passing a map that maintained a single majority-Black district and where the political wishes of white voters would continue to dominate election outcomes.

Alabama Republicans, who hold a legislative majority, have been reluctant to create a Democratic-leaning congressional district. They instead boosted the percentage of Black voters in the majority-white 2nd Congressional District, now represented by Republican Rep. Barry Moore, from about 30% to 39.9%.

State leaders are wagering that the panel will accept their proposal or that the state will prevail in a second round of appeals to the Supreme Court, which could again test the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

The high-stakes hearing drew a large number of spectators to the federal courthouse in Birmingham where an overflow room was opened to accommodate the crowd. Plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case attended with many wearing T-shirts printed with their proposed map which would have two majority-Black districts.

“The law was really clear about what the issue is here. Did Alabama draw a new opportunity district as the court required them to do? The answer is they did not,” Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, said after court.

The state’s current political landscape is dominated by white Republicans who hold all statewide offices and every congressional seat but one. LaKeisha Chestnut, a plaintiff in the case, said putting her hometown of Mobile in a second-majority Black district would mean Black voters there "actually get a voice."

“We have a very large African American population (in this state). It's not all in Birmingham. It's not all in Montgomery,” Chestnut said.>

Susan has surrounded herself with corrupt employees who don't operate with fairness, integrity. This goes beyond a double standard. It's like being handcuffed, then beaten by the cops. The people in charge are supposed to consistently apply the rules of operation fairly to all instead of catering to trolls and cyberbullies. As a paying member, I am not getting the service (and the freedom of speech) that I have paid for. I am being harassed and restricted!!>

More lies. Quit caterwauling after all the injustice you have inflicted on others.

<Elections have consequences, as election winners like to say whenever they do anything unpopular.

In Florida, elections have consequences except when the winner is a Democrat in an urban area. Then, the governor sometimes decides that elections don’t really count.

And so, the governor has removed another Democratic state attorney from office because of policy differences rather than misconduct. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week that he was suspending elected Orange-Osceola prosecutor Monique Worrell. The suspension will become a removal when the state Senate votes to do so. And because the governor wants her gone, you may assume the Florida Senate will rubberstamp the decision.

Customarily, Florida governors have been reluctant to remove elected officials. Overriding the will of the voters is a serious step in a democratic republic. That’s why in recent times, this has generally been done when criminal charges have been formally filed or a grand jury found wrongdoing. (An exception was when Gov. Rick Scott removed Broward County elections chief Brenda Snipes in 2018, a move decisively slapped down by a federal judge. Snipes resigned in 2019.) But so far, DeSantis has removed four elected officials who were never formally accused of wrongdoing. All Democrats.

Last year, DeSantis had suspended Andrew Warren, a Hillsborough County prosecutor who had been reelected in 2020 with 53% of the vote. The governor cited Warren’s pledge not to prosecute those seeking or providing abortions or gender-affirming health care.

The governor suspended Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, a Democrat, in 2019, citing his officers’ failures in reacting to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings. A special master investigating the case for the Senate concluded there was not enough evidence to remove Israel. But the governor pledged to get the official out, and the Republican-controlled Senate dutifully voted to remove him.

That same year, DeSantis removed Palm Beach County elections supervisor Susan Bucher, a Democrat, citing a slow ballot count. “Those of us who have dealt with Bucher in her 10 years as Palm Beach County’s elections chief know that the charge of incompetence is bunk,” The Palm Beach Post editorial page said of that removal. She resigned, saying she doubted she’d get a fair hearing from the Senate. A reasonable suspicion.

It’s almost like there’s a pattern here.

What happened to DeSantis? Florida governor's presidential campaign forgot about Trump.

The move comes as the DeSantis-for-president campaign is floundering in Iowa, a place where the governor needs to come out of the gate strong if he is to stay in the race. Using the word “woke” in every third sentence has not been making it with ordinary Republican primary voters. Maybe a tough-on-crime, law-and-order theme would work better. Highlighting this by ousting a progressive, Black prosecutor voted in by Democrats might be just the ticket as part of a broader campaign reset.

Worrell, who won election with 66% of the vote in 2020, slammed DeSantis as a would-be dictator intent on nullifying elections: “This is simply a smokescreen for Ron DeSantis’ failing and disastrous presidential campaign. He needed to get back in the media in some positive way that would be red meat for his base.”

DeSantis appointed a Federalist Society judge to replace Worrell, Andrew Bain. Bain quoted John Calvin, a 16th century theocrat, witch burner and executioner of heretics (talk about a law-and-order message!) about the need to use the law to restrain evil. He blasted Worrell for allowing “lawlessness to take root in our community.” And he announced an immediate suspension of jail diversion programs. Lock ‘em all up!

Which is pretty much the opposite of what Worrell’s voters were looking for in 2020. But those votes don’t matter anymore. And if those voters didn’t matter, who will be the next group of Florida voters to have their decisions reversed?>

<House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday said that his prospects of retaining the speakership after 2024’s congressional elections hinge on the GOP winning seats in California, according to his statements during a press conference.

McCarthy, who was elected speaker in January after a contentious process involving 15 rounds of voting, currently leads a House Republican Conference with a slim four-seat majority. After the Conference gained new members in California following the 2022 midterm elections, McCarthy emphasized that maintaining those seats would be crucial to keeping the House in Republican control, according to comments he made at a press conference call regarding the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) new “Bank Your Vote” strategy in the state.

“Is my future as Speaker dependent on holding the five seats we picked up in California? Yeah. We have our entire majority because we won in California. We picked up those House seats over two cycles,” McCarthy said. He added that the gains were primarily due to Republicans’ fielding candidates from minority communities, saying “We’ve elected more women as Republicans … Hispanics as Republicans … [and] black Republicans.”

McCarthy also highlighted some members of the Conference from California whose seats were critical to such a victory. He specifically named Republican Reps. John Duarte and David Valadao of California’s 13th and 22nd districts, representing Berkeley and Oakland as well as the majority-Latino San Joaquin Valley, as such members.

“When you look at a seat like Duarte’s or Valadao’s, Biden carried it by 11 and 13 percent,” McCarthy noted, pointing to Republicans’ efforts to defend seats where President Joe Biden carried a majority of votes in the 2020 election. “We also have seats that Democrats sit in which Trump carried, and we’re going to Bank Votes in those seats, too … Presidential elections change our turnout,” he said.

McCarthy, further, highlighted Republican Rep. Mike Garcia of California’s 27th district, representing the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, as a highlight. “Mike Garcia won in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which no Republican had done since 1994 … [These seats] give Republicans a majority but are also very embarrassing to the Democrats,” he said.

McCarthy was joined on the call by RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, California Republican Party Chair Jessica Patterson and Harmeet Dhillon, who represents California at the RNC and has represented GOP candidates in election integrity lawsuits.

The Bank Your Vote strategy has become a key feature of the RNC’s attempt to turn out Republican voters in 2024 and includes measures such as promoting absentee voting, ballot harvesting and poll watching. It represents a shift from Republican rhetoric in 2020, where then-President Donald Trump often assailed ballot harvesting as affecting the integrity of elections.

Trump has since changed his posture in support of the strategy’s provisions and was featured in a recent RNC video promoting them.>

<Donald Trump asked a judge to pause a civil lawsuit seeking to hold him liable for the violence at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — specifically, the death of a US Capitol Police officer — now that he’s facing criminal charges related to the attack.

In a Monday court filing, the former president’s lawyers argued that the criminal indictment “substantially overlaps” with the civil case. Having both go forward “would undoubtedly compromise either his right to defend himself in this case, his criminal defense, or both,” his attorneys said.

“President Trump will be placed in the untenable position of fully litigating this case and risking his criminal defense, or pleading the Fifth Amendment and hampering his chance of success in this case,” they wrote, referring to the civil suit.

They noted that Trump is presumed innocent in a criminal case even if he invokes his constitutional right to not testify, but a judge or a jury can draw a “negative connotation” if a defendant invokes that shield in a civil case.

A lawyer for Sandra Garza, who brought the case on behalf of the estate of her late partner Officer Brian Sicknick, said they would oppose Trump’s request, calling it “nothing more than a delay tactic.”

“There is no legitimate reason that both proceedings cannot continue on parallel paths, especially since no discovery has yet been initiated in the civil case. At the end of the day, all we need to prove is that a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates Trump’s liability for the death of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and we do not need a guilty criminal verdict to do so,” attorney Mark Zaid said in a statement.

Sicknick was outside the Capitol as the attack unfolded. At one point he was on a front line of law enforcement trying to keep the mob from moving closer to the building and was hit in the face with a chemical spray. He died the next day.

Garza, who sued in January in Washington, claimed that Trump incited the violence by promoting false voter fraud claims after the election and delivering a speech the morning of Jan. 6 where he urged the crowd to “fight like hell” and to go the Capitol.

Trump has denied wrongdoing. His attorneys also have highlighted the fact that the local medical examiner in Washington concluded Sicknick died of “natural causes,” although that official also said at the time that the events of Jan. 6 “played a role in his condition.”

A federal grand jury in Washington returned an indictment this month charging Trump with conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election. He isn’t charged with inciting the Jan. 6 attack, but prosecutors used the indictment to make the case that he was responsible for fueling his supporters’ anger and directing them to the Capitol, and that he later tried to “exploit” the violence to unsuccessfully urge members of Congress to delay certifying the results.

The judge handling the criminal case is expected to set a schedule later this month. The Justice Department wants the trial to begin Jan. 2. Trump is due to respond later this week and is likely to argue a trial shouldn’t be held before the 2024 election.

Trump separately is facing other civil lawsuits related to Jan. 6 brought by Democrats in Congress and law enforcement officers, but those were put on hold while Trump appeals a judge’s ruling that he’s entitled to absolute immunity because he was the president at the time.>

<Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is re-upping his call for Disney to drop its lawsuit against him and other state officials in his ongoing fight with the entertainment giant, warning the company it is “going to lose.”

DeSantis was asked during a sit-down with CNBC what he would say to Disney CEO Bob Iger if the governor were to call and discuss what has become a very public feud that began under former Disney chief Bob Chapek.

“I would just say go back to what you did well, I think it’s going to be the right business decision,” DeSantis said. “We’ve basically moved on, they’re suing the state of Florida, and they’re going to lose that lawsuit. So what I would say is drop the lawsuit.”

DeSantis said Disney has had problems apart from its battle with Florida, and said he believes “parents have lost some confidence that this is a company that’s really speaking to what they want, the way it had been traditionally.”

The governor noted that he and his wife were married at Walt Disney World, “so it’s not like we’re opposed,” and said that “we’ve appreciated working with them over the years.”

DeSantis went on to tout his state’s low unemployment rate and business-friendly environment and suggested Disney could continue to thrive without the self-governing authority it is suing over losing.

“Your competitors all do very well — here at Universal SeaWorld, they have not had the same special privileges as you have,” DeSantis said in his message to Disney. “So all we want to do is treat everybody the same and let’s move forward. I’m totally fine with that. But I’m not fine with giving extraordinary privileges to one special company at the exclusion of everybody else.”

The Walt Disney Co. did not immediately respond to FOX Business’ request for comment on DeSantis’ remarks.

The feud between Disney and DeSantis began last year when the company publicly came out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, coined the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which bans classroom instruction about gender identity or sexual orientation in lower grades.

DeSantis responded by pushing the Florida legislature to strip Disney’s self-governing authority and create the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District CFTOD, which now has control over the park’s development.

However, before the new board took control, Disney pushed through changes to the special tax district agreement that limited the board’s action for decades.

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts U.S. Inc. sued DeSantis, Florida Department of Economic Opportunity Secretary Meredith Ivey, and members of the CFTOD in April over the move, claiming the defendants violated the company’s free speech rights in a “targeted campaign of government retaliation.”

DeSantis asked a federal judge to toss the lawsuit in June, saying Disney’s case has no merit and the officials have immunity.>

<Donald Trump on Monday continued to test a Washington D.C. federal judge who last week warned the former president against making “inflammatory” remarks against those in connection with his case.

Trump on his Truth Social website accused President Joe Biden of indicting him in his latest fiery post – and urged the country not to let it happen.

“I just hope Republicans, and the people of our now failing Nation, see what is happening to our Democracy and Freedom. A sitting President has INDICTED, in many different forms and locals, his political opponent, who is substantially leading him in the Polls,” Trump wrote.

“NOTHING LIKE THIS HAS EVER HAPPENED BEFORE. OUR COUNTRY CAN NEVER LET THIS STAND!”

Trump’s post followed a series of social media posts that began early Monday morning, one of which targeted Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Trump’s Jan. 6 election interference case.

“The following TRUTH is a quote by highly partisan Judge Tanya Chutkan, angrily sentencing a J-6er in October of 2022. She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!” Trump wrote.

Trump was referring to the judge’s remarks in October 2022 before the sentencing of Christine Priola of Ohio to 15 months in jail in connection with the attack on the Capitol.

“I see the videotapes. I see the footage of the flags and the signs that people were carrying and the hats that they were wearing, and the garb,” Trump wrote, claiming that he was quoting Chutkan. “And the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty to one man, not to the Constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this county and not to the principles of democracy. It’s blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day."

Chutkan at a hearing on Friday had warned Trump to tone down his rhetoric.

“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case,” she warned.

“I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”>

<Now we have Donald Trump’s fourth indictment, and the final one, assuming he does not commit any additional crimes (hardly a safe assumption, to be sure). Fani Willis’s indictment in Georgia ensnares Trump in a legal jam from which it may finally become impossible for him to wriggle his way out. The Manhattan charge over paying off a mistress is persnickety and might result in acquittal. The two indictments by Jack Smith are powerful (the first one, for refusing to give back sensitive government documents, is positively open and shut), but will be dropped if Trump or another Republican wins the election. But the Georgia case is the most inescapable, because it is not a federal crime, and thus a future President Trump can’t order the Justice Department to drop it or pardon himself.

Lindsey Graham offered up what has become the standard Republican response to Trump’s prosecution. Unlike Trump, and most of the party’s voters, Graham did not insist Trump had legitimately won the 2020 election. Instead, he argued on Fox News that it is wrong to criminalize Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term. “This should be decided at the ballot box and not in a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail,” he complained. “They’re weaponizing the law.”

Worse, he predicted, the successful use of a state prosecution would unleash copycat tactics on the right. “This is setting a bad precedent,” continued Graham, “and what I fear is, you’re changing the game in America and there’s no going back. We’re in for a very hard time if this becomes the norm.”

It is hardly frivolous to worry about either the psychological effects of settling a great political question through the deux ex machina of legal prosecutions, or the potential for a cycle of retaliatory escalation. Nobody would hold up legal prosecution as the best possible form of accountability for Trump’s crimes, or deny the risks. But the case for the prosecutions is much easier to see when held in stark relief against Graham’s proposed alternatives.

Yes, the prosecution of a leading presidential candidate could set a troubling precedent. But the other option, non-prosecution, would also set a troubling precedent: that attempting to steal an election is legal.

Of course, political candidates have a right to challenge election results, demand recounts when legally available, and expose fraud or tabulation errors. Trump was calling the election fraudulent months in advance and simply manufactured ludicrous claims of fraud as a pretext to retain power.

Put aside the legal question and consider this as a moral matter. If Trump’s attempt to disregard the election was legal activity, would that be a good thing? Should a candidate be able to go beyond legal processes and invent false claims of outcome-determinative fraud? To pressure state officials to back those false claims? Why are those important rights to safeguard?>

<....Perhaps the argument Graham has in his mind is that safeguarding candidates’ right to demand limited, reasonable election challenges means allowing figures like Trump to pursue unlimited and unreasonable ones. That would not explain why numerous candidates for office have managed to challenge results without triggering the criminal code. It is relatively easy to draw distinctions between normal election challenges and Trump’s fever-swamp scheme.

To not prosecute Trump’s coup attempt would effectively legalize the tactics he employed. It would consecrate a new system in which an election result, even a clear one with multiple states providing a margin of error, would merely be the start of a negotiation. The outcome of the process would be determined not just by the votes but also by which party controls the legislative and judicial channels that will steer it and has the will to power to assert the most favorable claims.

Graham’s threat that prosecuting Trump will trigger Republican retaliation echoes the same warning he made when Democrats impeached Trump for inciting the insurrection. “I fear that if this model is followed in the future, impeachment to disqualify one from holding office based on partisan hatred will become the norm,” he argued. “I hope I will be proven wrong, but it seems that impeachment based on partisan differences seems to be becoming the norm, not the exception.”

As Will Saletan has pointed out, Graham led the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about an affair, and has called for impeaching Biden over his immigration policy. So the outcome he claims to fear is actually a course he has already taken.

Graham bitterly opposed convicting Trump in the Senate. Now he opposes convicting him either at the federal level (because the Justice Department is subordinate to Joe Biden) or the state or local level (because they are “liberal jurisdictions”). Instead he deems the sole legitimate venue for holding Trump accountable to be “at the ballot box.”

Yet Graham has endorsed Trump’s presidential candidacy! Which is to say, despite all his crocodile tears about preserving norms, he believes Trump’s scheme to install himself as an unelected autocrat should not be punished at all, but rewarded. The choice becomes clearer when you grasp that this is the true question: not how, but whether, to penalize Trump’s crime.>

<Alabama Republicans were ordered by a federal court to redraw their congressional maps to ensure that there were two majority-Black districts.

They didn’t. Instead, this week, they’re going back to the same federal court after the Supreme Court weighed in, this time to argue that their attempts at coming up with a new map are good enough.

Hearings over the new map kicked off in federal court in Alabama on Monday, and the state is once again arguing that it is not illegally diluting the power of Black voters. This week’s hearing will be crucial to determining if the fight wraps up quickly — or stretches on for potentially years to come.

It's not an academic exercise. The court’s decision could have significant ramifications nationally; Democrats could pick up an additional seat in Congress where they are a handful of seats shy of a majority, and the fight could ultimately make its way back to the Supreme Court. A second majority-Black district in the state would likely lead to a second Democratic representative as well. The state’s congressional delegation is currently 6-1 Republican.

The new maps that were approved by GOP lawmakers last month maintained the one historically Black district the state has had and drew a second that has a Black voting age population just under 40 percent. The redraw came after the panel of three lower court judges wrote in an early 2022 decision that any new map looking to fix the likely Voting Rights Act violation ought to have two districts with a Black “voting-age majority or something quite close to it.” The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s findings of a likely violation earlier this year.

After the legislature redrew a map that fell short of its second majority Black district, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued to the court that the legislature “confuse[s] the issues and ignore[s] precedent.”

The group of plaintiffs argued that the new districts plainly do not meet the court’s standards, and that Alabama Republicans were engaging in political gamesmanship by ignoring the court and drawing lines that would still only present Black voters the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choosing in one district.

Republicans in the state have been proud of their apparent defiance of the court. “The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups,” GOP Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement when signing the new maps into law.

Republicans argue that the new map they redrew effectively resets the clock for litigation. The defendants acknowledge in a brief that the court “opined” that there should be two majority-Black voting districts, or close to that. But, they argue, that act of the legislature redrawing the map effectively starts the process of challenging the lines over — especially because the legislature prioritized keeping specific “communities of interest” together in 2023, which they say was a change from the 2021 map the court previously stuck down....>