A Brooklyn federal grand jury on Tuesday returned an indictment against a top former fundraiser and vendor for Rep. George Santos (R-NY)’s campaign for impersonating a top House Republican staffer.
Continue reading “Ex-Fundraiser For George Santos Hit With Federal Fraud Charges”How Not to Fall for Trump’s ‘What He Believes’ Nonsense
You’ve probably noticed that Donald Trump has announced that he’s holding a press conference Monday in which he’ll release a 100-page report which shows both that the 2020 election in Georgia was “stolen” and that all charges against him and his criminal associates should be dropped. In other words, he’s responding to the charges by doubling down on the Big Lie. This isn’t surprising. Trump only has one gear — all-in and over-the-top. But as Clark Neily says in this post at CATO, “Being an inveterate liar is a major liability in litigation.”
He also has an apt description of who Trump is. These are all points we’ve made before. But it’s a tight and concise run-through.
Continue reading “How Not to Fall for Trump’s ‘What He Believes’ Nonsense”Trump And Co-Defendants Expected To Be Booked At Fulton County Jail With Possible Mugshots
Former President Donald Trump and the 18 co-defendants that were charged alongside him for various alleged attempts to overturn the result of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election have until Aug. 25 at noon to turn themselves in voluntarily, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis told reporters late Monday night after the indictment was made public.
Continue reading “Trump And Co-Defendants Expected To Be Booked At Fulton County Jail With Possible Mugshots”Why Georgia Was Always a Special Case
There seems to be a consensus that the coup indictments out of Georgia are unexpectedly strong. I don’t know why it’s “unexpected” or exceeded expectations. The Fulton County DA’s office has been working on this for a very long time and they’ve always seemed in earnest about it, even when it was unclear whether federal investigators were focused on the people at the top of the conspiracy. But it’s a reminder that Georgia was always unique in the broader story of Trump’s failed coup. It’s not simply that there was a more aggressive local prosecutor on hand.
Continue reading “Why Georgia Was Always a Special Case”Was Elon Musk Trying To ‘Cozy Up’ To Trump In Fight With Jack Smith?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Federal Judge Pulls No Punches
An unsealed transcript of a court hearing in the fight earlier this year between Special Counsel Jack Smith and Elon Musk’s Twitter shows an extremely suspicious federal judge questioning why the social media company was so intent on warning Donald Trump that it had received a search warrant in the Jan. 6 criminal investigation.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who while chief judge of the district court in DC presided over many of the grand jury disputes in the Trump investigations, noted that Twitter was taking what she called “momentous” steps that were unlike any the company had taken before in response to a search warrant.
Her questions were brutal:
- “Is it because the new CEO wants to cozy up with the former president?”
- “Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter?”
At issue wasn’t merely whether and how Twitter would respond to the search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account. It focused instead on a nondisclosure order that prevented Twitter from notifying Trump, as account holder, of the search warrant.
Ultimately, Howell ruled against Twitter, enforcing the nondisclosure order and the search warrant. She then held Twitter in contempt and sanctioned it $350,000 for being delinquent in complying with the search warrant. An appeals court just upheld the sanction.
(As for the substance of the search warrant, it’s intriguing but don’t get too excited.)
MUST READ
TPM’s Hunter Walker: How Kanye West’s publicist, an “MMA fighter,” and a Lutheran pastor teamed up to pressure a Georgia election worker.
Mark Meadows Wastes No Time
With a real lawyer and a lot at stake, Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows quickly took action to remove the Georgia indictment from state to federal court.
Trump Will Try It, Too
Laurence H. Tribe, Donald Ayer, and Dennis Aftergut: Don’t Let Donald Trump Take His Case to Federal Court
What Dumping Trump Looks Like
Making Sense Of The Georgia Indictment
- TPM: The 6 Interlocking Schemes Fani Willis Is Trying To Make Stick To Teflon Don
- LawFare: The Fulton County Indictment: An Initial Examination
- Norman Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland: This Indictment of Trump Does Something Ingenious
- Rick Hasen: The Biggest Difference Between the Georgia Indictment and the Jan. 6 Indictment
Book ‘Em, Danno
Fulton County Sheriff’s Office: “At this point, based on guidance received from the District Attorney’s office and presiding judge, it is expected that all 19 defendants named in the indictment will be booked at the Rice Street Jail.”
Want More Georgia Indictment News?
- NYT: Inside a Georgia Prosecutor’s Investigation of a Former President
- LawFare: What the Heck Happened in Coffee County, Georgia?
- TPM: Meet The 18 Others Charged With Trump
- AP: Special prosecutor will examine actions of Georgia’s lieutenant governor in Trump election meddling
ICYMI
Special Counsel Jack Smith: There is no ‘law or precedent’ for building a criminal defendant a SCIF to see classified evidence.
Success!
After some delay, all three defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case have now been arraigned.
‘Trump’s Toast, Folks’
Clark Neily: “Being an inveterate liar is a major liability in litigation. So is being openly disdainful of the entire process. And so is complexity. But put all three of those together at the same time for the same defendant, and his goose is cooked. So you can put a fork in Donald Trump—he’s done.”
‘You Better Recalculate, Motherfucker!’
Texas Tribune: Bodycam video shows confrontation between Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and law enforcement
What A Tool
WaPo: Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to websites he dislikes
Hunter Biden Poised To Fight Over Plea Agreement
The attorney who helped negotiate Hunter Biden’s plea deal with federal prosectors is moving to withdraw from representing Biden because he may be a witness in the case. The implication is that Biden will seek to enforce the agreement. In what looks like a corresponding move earlier this week, DC uberlawyer Abbe Lowell, who has been representing Biden for a few months but hadn’t been of record in the Delaware case, entered his appearance in the case.
McGonigal Pleads Guilty In New York Case
WaPo: “Former high-ranking FBI official Charles McGonigal pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and to laundering money by secretly working on behalf of a Russian oligarch he had been tasked with investigating.”
DiFi’s Difficult Twilight
San Francisco Chronicle: Dianne Feinstein’s bombshell new lawsuit alleges financial abuse over husband’s estate
2024 Ephemera
- Still not clear whether Donald Trump will participate next week in the first GOP presidential debate of the 2024 cycle.
Maui Death Toll Reaches 106
Difficult stories to read:
- Star-Advertiser: Maui Officials Begin to Formally Identify the Dead
- NYT: Honolulu Burn Unit Put to the Test by Fires in Maui
- NPR: Cell phone photos and some metadata. A son’s search for his mother in Maui
Ben Shapiro Batted Around Like A Piñata
All it took was one ill-advised tweet:
Remember when you wrote a whole book advocating the prosecution of President Obama under the RICO statute? https://t.co/hlpMoZvW5B pic.twitter.com/P9qYBMKUKs
— Christian Vanderbrouk 🇺🇸🇺🇦🌻 (@UrbanAchievr) August 15, 2023
Like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Where Things Stand
Reminder: Your TPM evening briefing, written by me, has moved to a new location — same time, same place, but we’ve moved it out of the editor’s blog and onto the main frontpage.
Where Things Stand: Trump Allies Already Suggesting Georgia GOP Should Change State Law To Pardon Trump
In the wake of the Fulton County grand jury indictment of Donald Trump and 18 of his allies, Republicans and MAGA fiends are pulling out the usual stops to decry the ever-mounting list of charges against the former president. Some are calling for “civil war”; others are claiming that they fear it may now somehow be illegal to watch TV.
But at least one MAGA pal is raising a more concrete plan of action to shield the four-times-indicted former president from legal accountability in Georgia: Write a Trump loophole into the law. Lawyer and commentator Mike Davis, who is a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and former aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), took to Fox News last night to argue that Georgia Republicans should rally together to change state law so Trump can be pardoned.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Trump Allies Already Suggesting Georgia GOP Should Change State Law To Pardon Trump”The Full Story Behind The Bizarre Election Episode That Led To Charges In Trump’s Latest Indictment
The sprawling Fulton County indictment against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants for their alleged efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election includes a brief recounting — and a set of charges — related to one of the more bizarre episodes mounted by Trump and his allies in the final days of 2020.
Continue reading “The Full Story Behind The Bizarre Election Episode That Led To Charges In Trump’s Latest Indictment “The 6 Interlocking Schemes Fani Willis Is Trying To Make Stick To Teflon Don
Fulton County DA Fani Willis sorted Trump’s attempt to reverse his 2020 election loss into several distinct categories, or schemes, in her indictment of the former President and eighteen others.
Continue reading “The 6 Interlocking Schemes Fani Willis Is Trying To Make Stick To Teflon Don”Meet The 18 Others Charged With Trump
If you had to Google a few of the 18 non-Trump defendants charged in Fulton County Monday with violating Georgia’s RICO Act, you’re not alone.
Some of them are nearly household names. Their roles in allegedly trying to pressure Georgia officials to throw out the 2020 election results and to otherwise interfere with election certification are publicly known and have been well documented, including through press reports, through the allegations in special counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment, and through the House Jan. 6 Select Committee’s investigative work. Whats new, in these cases, is the Georgia grand jury’s accusation that some of these actions violated state law.
But others named in the indictment are little-known local GOP officials, pastors, party activists — even, in one case, publicists for rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. A whole cast of Trumpworld characters has been indicted in Willis’ state-level prosecution.
Here’s a brief rundown of each of the 19, and details on those you may not be acquainted with quite yet.

Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani
Donald Trump is identified by prosecutors as the head of a “criminal enterprise” which, they allege, had the sole aim of manipulating the 2020 election results, including in Georgia. Many of the events that prosecutors describe as Trump’s orchestration of the scheme have long been public. Trump faces 13 counts.
Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is depicted in the indictment as one of the central players in multiple facets of the election-overturning scheme. Like Trump, he faces 13 counts, six of which are tied to efforts to create a fake slate of Trump electors. He also faces charges related to his attempts to spread false claims about voter fraud in Georgia during three separate state legislature committee hearings. It was during those hearings that he allegedly pushed false claims of widespread fraud and tried to lobby Republican state lawmakers to get behind the fake electors plot, episodes the indictment details. He’s charged with a count of soliciting lawmakers to violate their oaths of office for those efforts.
In addition to the RICO charge that applies to all of the co-defendants, Trump’s former chief-of-staff Mark Meadows faces a charge of solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer related to his alleged participation in events related to the now-infamous phone call in January 2021 in which Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” the votes necessary to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, according to the indictment.
John Eastman, Ken Chesebro
Both attorneys are often referred to as key architects of the fake electors scheme, and are cited in the indictment for the ways in which that scheme played out in Georgia. Both John Eastman and Ken Chesebro face conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer charges for their roles in various elements of the scheme. Eastman also had a hand in trying to pressure then Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the vote on Jan. 6 and, prosecutors allege, helped Giuliani urge state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors.
Jeffrey Clark
Jeffrey Clark, a Department of Justice official and stalwart Trump ally, was preoccupied in the final days of 2020 with sending a letter to officials in Georgia to inform them that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia,” according to the indictment. The letter also would’ve requested that officials not certify its election results until the Justice Department had had a chance to investigate baseless claims of election fraud. Trump was, as was confirmed in the House Jan. 6 select committee hearings, hoping to appoint Clark as acting attorney general to lead such an investigation, but ultimately didn’t do that upon protest from DOJ officials. This alleged scheme caught prosecutors’ attention; the indictment actually includes a line from that letter, which was not ultimately sent.
Jenna Ellis
Jenna Ellis was Giuliani’s right-hand woman as he traveled to state legislatures attempting to convince Republican lawmakers to go along with the fake electors scheme, according to media reports and details of those hearings outlined in the indictment. She also wrote a memo on December 31, 2020 that “outlined a strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress,” according to the indictment. That strategy involved having Pence block the certification of the results.
Ray Smith
A lawyer who was hired to be part of Trump’s legal team in Georgia, Smith appeared at all three of the hearings with Giuliani and helped promote false claims about dead voters, according to the indictment and local reports at the time. Smith played a key role in these hearings, prosecutors allege; he testified that more than 130,000 illegal votes had been cast in Georgia in the 2020 election. He also helped gather and question Trump team witnesses in an attempt to back up the false fraud claims, the indictment alleges.
Robert Cheeley
Robert Cheeley, an attorney, faces 10 charges, most of which are tied to the fake electors plot. He appeared at the same Georgia legislative subcommittee hearings and was the lawyer who raised false claims that “election workers at State Farm Arena ordered poll watchers and members of the media to leave the tabulation area on the night of November 3, 2020” in order to overcount Biden votes, the indictment said. He also faces one count of perjury for allegedly making at least one false statement to the grand jury on September 15, 2022 about his communications with Eastman and/or his knowledge of a December 14, 2020 meeting of Trump presidential elector nominees in Georgia, per the indictment.
Mike Roman
A campaign aide at the time, Mike Roman faces charges related to the fake electors scheme as well. Roman helped orchestrate the unofficial “ceremonies” for the slate of false pro-Trump electors, according to reports.
David Shafer, Shawn Still
These are two of the 16 false pro-Trump electors who signed documents on December 14, 2020 claiming to be presidential electors in the state of Georgia. They are indicted for their actions as false electors, among other charges. Shawn Still is a sitting state senator who used to serve as the finance chairman for the Georgia Republican Party. David Shafer is a former Georgia state senator who recently left his position as chairman of the state’s Republican Party. He faces the same charges as Still but is also accused of lying to Fulton County prosecutors on April 25, 2022 about his communications with other fake electors, claiming to prosecutors that he did not “call each of the individual members and notify them of the meeting or make any of the other preparations necessary for the meeting,” the indictment says.
Cathleen Latham
Cathleen Latham is a retired teacher who also signed documents as a false elector. She is the former chair of the Coffee County Republican Party and faces 11 counts, most of which are tied to the Jan. 7, 2021 breach at a Coffee County elections facility. As CNN has reported, she he was allegedly spotted allowing employees of a tech firm — allegedly hired by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell — to enter the building that day. The equipment was later breached and copies were made of election data, per the indictment.
Sidney Powell
Among other charges related to her work on Trump’s legal team, Sidney Powell is also charged with violating Georgia election laws and conspiracy to commit election fraud related to the Coffee County breach. She worked with other Trump lawyers to argue that the federal government had the authority to seize voting machines and, according to the indictment, paid a tech data firm in Fulton County “for the performance of computer forensic collections and analytics on Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan and elsewhere.” That work ultimately resulted in the illegal breach in Coffee County when forensic experts copied election data there.
Scott Hall, Misty Hampton
Both face charges related to the Coffee County breach as well. Scott Hall is a Georgia bail bondsman and another one of the individuals whom Latham allegedly welcomed into the Coffee County elections office on January 7, according to the indictment and media reports. He faces charges related to efforts to illegally breach the voting machine equipment. Misty Hampton was a Coffee County elections supervisor who posted a video that went viral making false claims about Dominion Voting Machines, the Washington Post reported in May 2022. She was present when the Powell-hired forensics team copied data from the Coffee County machines and faces charges for her alleged involvement in giving others access to the elections office later in January, according to the indictment.
Stephen Lee, Harrison Floyd, Trevian Kutti
All three allegedly played a role in trying to influence Ruby Freeman’s testimony before the grand jury, prosecutors allege. Freeman was a Fulton County election worker. Per the indictment, Stephen Lee, a pastor from Illinois, allegedly went to Freeman’s home on two separate occasions to try to influence her grand jury testimony. He also allegedly contacted Harrison Floyd — a leader of the Black Voices for Trump group — for help in talking to Freeman, apparently concerned she was “afraid to talk” to him “because he was a white man,” the indictment said.
Floyd then allegedly helped Lee try to convince Freeman to make false statements about Election Day operations. Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Ye, was recruited by Floyd to travel from Chicago to Georgia and engaged in a series of bizarre attempts to persuade Freeman to meet with her — like calling her and telling her she was in danger, the indictment said — to try to influence her grand jury testimony.