2020 Election Fallout Part 16: Public Hearings Are Underway

[47of74]

One of fornicate face's lawyers got in hot water back home

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Jenna Ellis, the Colorado attorney who was former President Donald Trump’s senior legal advisor as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss, has been censured by a Colorado judge for misconduct.

The public censure order was signed Wednesday by Presiding Disciplinary Judge Bryon M. Large, who oversees lawyer discipline cases in Colorado.

As part of an agreement in the case, Ellis admits that multiple statements she made in late 2020 about the presidential election being stolen were “misrepresentations.”

Yates’ complaint cited 10 misrepresentations by Ellis. On Nov. 20, 2020, for example, Ellis made stolen-election claims on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business and Sean Spicer’s “Spicer & Co.” show.

 

[Ozlsn]

On 3/9/2023 at 6:24 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

I don’t want to go to prison until it’s a convenient time:

 

If this isn't an option in for example a burglary case I don't see why it should be in this case.  It still kind of surprises me that it's something at all to be honest, I always thought custodial sentences started from when they were handed down.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump-commissioned report undercut his claims of dead and double voters"

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When Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in a now-infamous bid to overturn the 2020 election, he alleged that thousands of dead people had voted in the state.

“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters,” he said, without citing his study.

But a report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.

In a separate failed bid to overturn the results in Nevada, Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that 1,506 ballots were cast in the names of dead people and 42,284 voted twice. Trump lost the Silver State by about 33,000 votes.

The researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” that 12 ballots were cast in the names of deceased people in Clark County, Nev., and believed the “high end potential exposure” was 20 voters statewide — some 1,486 fewer than Trump’s lawyers said.

According to their research, the “low end potential exposure” of double voters was 45, while the “high end potential exposure” was 9,063. The judge tossed the Nevada case even as Trump continued to claim he won the state.

The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public.

The Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena.

Another person who has received a subpoena said prosecutors have asked for all evidence that would disprove, or substantiate, fraud claims. This person said the questioning from the department was focused on exactly what Trump — and others around him — were told about the election not being stolen, and when, in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

The Berkeley report, which is written in technical jargon, was handled through an intermediary: It was commissioned by Kasowitz Benson Torres, a Trump-associated law firm, and conducted by East Bay Advisory, a subsidiary of the Berkeley Research Group, according to the copy reviewed by The Post. But the report, labeled “privileged and confidential,” states on its third page that the “client” was the campaign of Donald J. Trump For President. The draft obtained by The Post was labeled a “summary report” and dated Jan. 1.

A lawyer for Berkeley Research Group declined to comment on its report or interactions with law enforcement about the report. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, and a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Despite Trump’s claims of rampant election fraud, most election officials around the country have maintained that such malfeasance is exceedingly rare. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials brought only a handful of fraud prosecutions. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation has found fewer than 1,500 instances of “proven voter fraud” — over a 40-year time frame.

Even the small number of potentially ineligible ballots that the Trump report claims were cast by dead people may be an overestimation. It is not uncommon for a small number of voters to cast ballots early or by mail and then die before Election Day. Those ballots are typically counted, and considered legally cast, because of the difficulty of tracking and retrieving the votes in such a short time frame.

The Berkeley report was an object of frustration to some of Trump’s advisers, who were looking for evidence of widespread fraud — and an object of validation for others, who wanted him to stop spreading lies about the election. A meeting between the Berkeley team, Trump and Trump’s team grew tense in December, people familiar with the meeting said.

The Berkeley report never explicitly says who won the election, but it goes through a series of allegations from Trump’s team and either disputes them or does not provide enough evidence to overturn the election.

Trump has repeatedly said there was no way he lost the 2020 election, saying there were illegal vote “dumps” after the election — and that election workers committed a range of misdeeds. He grew angry as mail-in ballots were counted in the days after the election, alleging fraud, urging states to stop counting ballots and railing against mail-in ballots.

But the researchers said there was no reason to believe the final vote totals in five key states were fraudulent. The team cites the expectation from the pandemic that more people would vote by mail — along with changed rules in many states. “This result was not unexpected,” the team writes.

“Our analysis of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada concluded that in each state the final tabulated result was mathematically possible given absentee request rates,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers also sought to study whether there were periods of time that more absentee ballots flooded the system. “That is to say, to detect periods of high intensity absentee ballot application submissions over a short period of time,” the report says.

But the results were not helpful for Trump’s team. “There were 54 counties won by Trump (“Trump Counties”) and 13 counties won by Biden (“Biden Counties”). Accordingly, 162 burst periods were identified for Trump Counties and 39 identified for Biden Counties,” the report said.

Other tests were also performed. “Counsel instructed EBDA to investigate potentially anomalous distribution of birth dates in the Pennsylvania mail-in voting population,” the report says. “The rationale for this test was that if fictional voters had been artificially created during the voter registration process, that activity could create detectable discrepancies between characteristics of the 2020 voter population versus those found in the general population. In this case, dates of birth were the most quantitatively testable element of the voting population.” But the report did not substantiate anything that showed fraud to overturn the results in Pennsylvania.

The researchers also studied absentee ballot rates and said Trump might have won Georgia if absentee ballots were rejected at the same rate they were during the 2016 election — and if the ballots rejected were primarily Biden voters. But there was no reason to say those ballots should have been rejected, or that those precise ballots would have been the ones rejected.

In many cases, the team said they found small irregularities or anomalies, but they often said they could not determine whether fraud had actually occurred — or if there was a less nefarious explanation.

The firm studied a range of other conspiracies and theories, such as alleged ballot harvesting in nursing homes. They offered, for example, a list of about 50 nursing homes and adult-care facilities in Pennsylvania where there were at least 25 Democratic voters. But, the report concluded, the researchers could not prove there was anything necessarily fraudulent about that. Trump has claimed falsely that people in nursing homes voted illegally in Wisconsin, a claim the researchers did not appear to study.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

More:

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[Ozlsn]

On 3/21/2023 at 2:17 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Screw the warning, issue the warrant.

[fraurosena]

Meadows, other top Trump aides ordered to testify in Jan. 6 probe as judge rejects claims of executive privilege

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A federal judge has rejected former President Donald Trump's claims of executive privilege and has ordered Mark Meadows and other former top aides to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Trump's efforts to overturn the election leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff, was subpoenaed along with the other former aides by Special counsel Jack Smith for testimony and documents related to the probe.

Trump's legal team had challenged the subpoenas by asserting executive privilege, which is the right of a president to keep confidential the communications he has with advisers.

In a sealed order last week, Judge Beryl Howell rejected Trump's claim of executive privilege for Meadows and a number of others, including Trump's former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, his former national security adviser Robert O'Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, and former deputy chief of staff and social media director Dan Scavino, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Former Trump aides Nick Luna and John McEntee, along with former top DHS official Ken Cuccinelli, were also included in the order, the sources said.

Trump is likely to appeal the ruling, according to sources briefed on the matter.

"The DOJ is continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege," a Trump spokesperson said in a statement. "There is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump. The deranged Democrats and their comrades in the mainstream media are corrupting the legal process and weaponizing the justice system in order to manipulate public opinion, because they are clearly losing the political battle."

Meadows did not respond to ABC's request for comment and neither did an attorney representing him. Ratcliffe, O'Brien, Miller, Luna, McEntee and Cuccinelli did not respond to ABC's request for comment. An attorney representing Scavino declined to comment.

Some of the aides that have been ordered to testify have already appeared before the grand jury but did not answer some questions related to interactions with the former president, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News, and thus would now be required to return for additional testimony. The grand jury proceedings are being held under seal.

It's not clear the amount of information each of them would have, or the scope of what prosecutors want to question them on, the sources said.

ABC News previously reported that in February, prosecutors investigating Jan. 6 moved to compel testimony from a number of top Trump aides, including Meadows, Ratcliffe and O'Brien.

Previously, Judge Howell had rejected Trump's claim of executive privilege to block the testimony of two top aides to Vice President Pence, Greg Jacob and Marc Short. In rejecting Trump's motion to block the testimony of Jacob and Short, the judge ruled that it is up to the current president to assert executive privilege, not a former president, according to sources familiar with the proceedings.

The judge also previously ruled that former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, along with his deputy Pat Philbin, also had to return to the grand jury to answer additional questions after Trump previously argued they were protected by privilege.

Howell is being succeeded by a new chief judge on the D.C. district court, who will now oversee grand jury matters related to the special counsel's probes.

Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor and former head of the Justice Department's public integrity section, was tapped in November by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the Justice Department's investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election and Trump's handling of classified materials after leaving office.

Meadows, who according to sources was subpoenaed in January, was one of the only aides around Trump on Jan. 6 as the attack unfolded. He was also party to the infamous January 2021 phone call that Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump asked Raffensperger to "find" him enough votes to win the state.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

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[GreyhoundFan]

Wrong thread

Edited March 25, 2023 by GreyhoundFan

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Becky]

QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley is out of prison and in a "reentry" facility.  He served 27 months of his 41 month sentence.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1167319814/qanon-shaman-jacob-chansley-capitol-riot-early-release-reentry

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, Becky said:

QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley is out of prison and in a "reentry" facility.  He served 27 months of his 41 month sentence.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1167319814/qanon-shaman-jacob-chansley-capitol-riot-early-release-reentry

I wish he served 41 out of 41 months.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope he serves the full six years:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope he serves the full sentence.

 

More:

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[Ozlsn]

90 month sentence - interesting that "oh this was a one off event" defence was brought up. So what? It may indeed be a one off but that doesn't mean you get a lighter sentence for crimes committed during it.

[fraurosena]

My eys are popping out of their sockets. Must read thread!

Sorry, I'm at work ant don't have time to put the whole thread under a spoiler. Maybe later.

[Xan]

Here's the story about Kimberly Debrow.  (I quit Twitter when Musk bought it so am having trouble getting it to unroll there.)

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The Fulton County District Attorney’s office said some fake electors for Donald Trump have implicated each other in potential criminal activity and is seeking to disqualify their lawyer, according to a new court filing.

The district attorney’s office is requesting that attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow be disqualified from representing a group of 10 Republicans who served as electors for the former president in Georgia – a state Trump lost to President Joe Biden. The DA’s office also accused the lawyer of failing to present an immunity deal to her clients last year, according to the filing.

The new filing offers the latest indication that immunity offers could still be in the works months after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis suggested charging decisions were “imminent.”

It notes that investigators interviewed some of the fake GOP electors this month and there is jockeying behind the scenes ahead of the announcement on who, if anyone, will face charges in the long-running probe into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.

“The statement of some of her clients that directly implicate another client in additional crimes shows that Ms. Debrow’s continued participation in this matter is fraught with conflicts of interest that rise to the level of her being disqualified from this case in its entirety,” the district attorney’s office wrote in the filing.

During the April 2023 interviews, “some of the electors stated that another elector represented by Ms. Debrow committed acts that are violations of Georgia law and that they were not party to these additional acts,” according to the filing.

Amid a fight last year to compel the fake electors to testify, the court instructed two attorneys, including Debrow, to inform their clients with potential immunity deals. The attorneys told the court that they spoke to their clients and none of the clients were interested, according to filing. Now the DA’s office is claiming those offers were never presented to the clients.

“Additionally, in these interviews, some of the electors represented by Ms. Debrow told members of the investigation team that no potential offer of immunity was ever brought to them in 2022,” the filing states.

Link:  https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/fulton-county-trump-fake-electors/index.html  

Apparently, DeBrow was afraid people might flip and just never told her clients about any immunity deals.  Now they're trying to figure out exactly who was paying her.  Online, it says that the Georgia Republican Party is footing the bill but there are some questions about that.  Also, most of the people being charged are prominent members of the state party's apparatus.

[fraurosena]

For the non-Twitterati, here are the other tweets from the thread I posted earlier, which include useful links.

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[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good read:

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[CTRLZero]

7 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is a good read:

The idea of a murder board is a good one.  So many law-breaking, nefarious characters to keep tabs on.  I see the Mesa County, CO, case mentioned.  I’ll have to refresh my memory on that one.  

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is interesting 

 

[Xan]

Today the Georgia governor signed legislation that would enable an oversight commission to remove prosecutors and district attorneys.  I think they're getting desperate to remove Fani Willis.  I hope she files charges before they show her the door.

Edited May 6, 2023 by Xan