John Eastman and Scott Hall surrender at Georgia jail in Trump election interference case – live | US politics

Martin Pengelly

Michael Cohen turned on Donald Trump after he was sentenced to three years in prison for offenses including tax fraud and lying to Congress.

Becoming a leading Trump critic, he has testified against Trump in court. Last month, Cohen reached an undisclosed settlement with the Trump Organization over his unpaid fees.

Regarding Trump’s bond in Georgia, Cohen told CNN: “At the end of the day, $200,000, he’ll have no problem with raising the money. Worse comes to worse, he’ll go to his stupid supporters to do it and they’ll just pony up to one of his various” fundraising committees.

But I find it ironic or comical that I had to post a $500,000 bond for another man having an affair and [me] receiving back the money … and his is $200,000 for trying to overturn a free and fair election. I just don’t see the correlation, but it is what it is.

Cohen suggested Rudy Giuliani would be wise to “flip” on Trump. “Allegedly from Rudy’s mouth, he claims that he has a smoking gun, information about Donald,” Cohen said.

Well, if that’s true … I don’t have to suggest anything to Rudy. He’s the one that basically came up with this concept of strong-arming when he was head of the southern district of New York. He’s going to need to speak and he’s going to need to speak before everybody else does.

Giuliani’s work for Trump also included digging for political dirt in Ukraine, efforts which contributed to Trump’s first impeachment.

Cohen said:

The job that Rudy did for Donald, I don’t know if I would pay either. But at the end of the day, when your life is basically hanging on the line once again, you just don’t really want to throw another lawyer under the bus.

Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump is an “idiot” for not paying legal expenses incurred by his attorney the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in the Georgia election subversion case, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said.

“Donald’s an idiot,” Cohen told CNN of the former president. “Let me just be very clear when it comes to paying money, he is truly an idiot.

He has not learned yet that [there are] three people you don’t want to throw under the bus like that: your lawyer, your doctor and your mechanic. Because one way or the other, you’re going to go down the hill and there’ll be no brakes.

Trump faces 13 charges in Georgia, including racketeering and conspiracy. With bond set at $200,000, he has said he would turn himself in at an Atlanta jail on Thursday.

Eighteen Trump allies were also charged. Giuliani faces 13 counts including racketeering, an irony widely noted given his past as a crusading US attorney in New York, cracking down on organized crime.

CNN reported last week that Giuliani in April went to Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, to ask for help paying mounting bills also concerning other work while Trump was in the White House. Giuliani was largely rebuffed, CNN said.

Cohen was long close to Trump, his work including making the hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels that are now the subject of 34 criminal charges against Trump in New York state.

David Shafer, one of the 18 co-defendants charged with Donald Trump, has also reached a $75,000 bond agreement with prosecutors at Fulton County.

Chairperson of Georgia’s Republican party since 2019, Shafer was one of the fake electors who falsely claimed Trump won in Georgia.

The Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney ruled last year that Shafer played an outsized role in organizing the signatures and thus could not be treated the same as the other electors indicted in the case.

Shawn Still, who was charged in the state’s election subversion case, has reached a $10,000 bond agreement with prosecutors.

Still, now a Republican Georgia state senator is one of three named fake electors – along with David Shafer and Cathy Latham – in the sprawling indictment. He served as the finance chair for the Georgia Republican Party in 2020.

From Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman:

Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was spotted by ABC News’ Olivia Rubin walking through the lobby of the courthouse.

Willis was noticeably smiling as she made her way through the hall, flanked by half a dozen armed guards, Rubin writes.

Willis has faced a flurry of racist online abuse since the charges against the former president were made public.

Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton County commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.

A Fulton County judge signed an order on Monday banning Donald Trump from contacting his co-defendants or witnesses in the Georgia case accusing him and his allies of illegally scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

In a court document posted online on Monday, bond amounts for the 13 charges against the former president ranged from $10,000, for counts including criminal conspiracy and filing false documents, to $80,000, for a violation of the Georgia Rico Act, often used against organized crime.

Terms included a prohibition of “act[ing] to intimidate any person known to … be a codefendant or witness in this case”. The order says:

The above shall include, but are not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.

Authorities in Georgia are investigating threats made to grand jurors that indicted Trump and 18 of his allies earlier this month after private information about jurors was published online.

The Fulton county sheriff’s Office announced last week that it was “aware that personal information of members of the Fulton County grand jury is being shared on various platforms” and was working to track down the origins of the threats in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, and other jurisdictions.

As the second-place candidate in the Republican primary race, Florida governor Ron DeSantis will likely withstand the bulk of attacks on Wednesday night’s GOP debate stage as he hopes to re-establish himself as the main contender to Trump and give his campaign a much-needed boost.

The challenge facing DeSantis is how to convince Republican primary voters to pick him without attacking Donald Trump, who is the clear frontrunner in national and early state polls, according to a Politico report.

Nick Iarossi, a Florida-based lobbyist who is close to the DeSantis campaign but not advising him on debate preparations, told the news site that the goal is to “consolidate the anti-Trump Republican support”.

It’s still clearly a two-man race, and that’s why Trump keeps attacking DeSantis, but on Wednesday night he has to demonstrate to everybody that he’s clearly the guy to take on Trump.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will stand center stage at Wednesday night’s first GOP presidential nomination debate, according to a lineup released by the Republican National Committee.

Standing alongside DeSantis and Ramaswamy at the Milwaukee stage will be former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Fox News reported.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and South Carolina senator Tim Scott will stand in the number five and six positions.

Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum will stand on the wings of the debate stage.

Hugo Lowell

Breaches of the Coffee County voting machines appear to have happened at least two additional times. On 18 January 2021, they were accessed on a second occasion when elections supervisor, Misty Hampton arrived with Doug Logan, the CEO of elections security firm CyberNinjas, and a retired federal employee named Jeffrey Lenberg.

The pair spent at least four hours that afternoon inside the elections office and then returned the following day for another nine hours. Lenberg then again gained access to the elections office every day for four days starting on 25 January 2021.

What Lenberg did inside remains uncertain. But in a subsequent podcast interview, Lenberg said he and Logan went to Coffee County after hearing about the Senate runoffs incident because they wanted to see if they could replicate the error but “didn’t touch” the machines themselves.

Hugo Lowell

The day after the Capitol attack in Washington, on 7 January 2021, surveillance video picked up Eric Chaney, a member of the Coffee County elections board, arriving at the county’s elections office around 11 am. The Coffee County GOP chair, Cathy Latham, also arrived at the office around an hour later.

The tapes then show Latham greeting data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in “imaging”, or making exact copies, of electronic devices, and Scott Hall, a bail bond business owner with ties to the local Republican party hunting for evidence of election fraud.

What happened inside the elections office is only partially captured on surveillance video, but records show the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives, and flash memory cards.

The company believed it had the authorization to collect the data, SullivanStrickler’s director of data risk Dean Felicetti later said in a deposition and suggested that Hampton and Latham had given their approval.

Most of the imaging work took place off camera, though tapes from the lobby of the Coffee County elections office show Latham, the elections supervisor, Misty Hampton, and Chaney with the SullivanStrickler experts as they bend over to look at computer screens and walk around elections equipment.

Lawyers for Latham and Hampton did not respond to requests for comment. But Latham’s previous lawyer has told the Washington Post that she did not authorize the copying and had “not acted improperly or illegally”. Hall and Chaney also did not respond to requests for comment.

The next day, according to text messages, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – who helped organize the clandestine operation and paid for it through her non-profit – was informed that SullivanStrickler would post the data it had gathered onto a password-protected site from where it could be downloaded.

Larry Elder, the rightwing radio host who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said he plans to sue the Republican national committee (RNC) to halt the party’s first presidential primary debate on Wednesday after he was excluded from participating.

The RNC announced eight candidates for tomorrow’s primary debate in Milwaukee, but three candidates had fallen short: Miami mayor Francis S Suarez, businessman Perry Johnson, and Elder. All three had claimed to have met the donor and polling threshold.

In a statement, Elder said:

I said from the beginning that it appeared the rules of the game were rigged, little did we know just how rigged it is. For some reason, the establishment leaders at the RNC are afraid of having my voice on the debate stage. Just as I had to fight to successfully be on the ballot in the California recall election, I will fight to be on that debate stage because I fully met all of the requirements to do so.

John Eastman, who has surrendered to authorities in Georgia, was charged with orchestrating the so-called fake elector’s scheme designed to keep Donald Trump in office after his election loss.

A central part of Trump’s strategy to reverse his defeat, the fake elector’s scheme was called that because Republican electors in seven key battleground states signed certificates falsely declaring themselves “duly elected and qualified” to affirm Trump won the 2020 election.

Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University in California, drafted legal memos suggesting then vice-president Mike Pence could refuse to accept electoral votes from several swing states when Congress convened to certify the 2020 vote count. Pence rebuffed his arguments, saying he did not have legal authority.

Eastman was also referenced – but not explicitly named – as an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election subversion case against Trump.

John Eastman, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump charged with helping the former president’s fake elector scheme, said he will surrender to Fulton County prosecutors today.

In a statement, Eastman said:

I am here today to surrender to an indictment that should never have been brought. It represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. As troubling, it targets attorneys for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients, something attorneys are ethically bound to provide and which was attempted here by “formally challeng[ing] the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means.” – An opportunity never afforded them in the Fulton County Superior Court.

Each Defendant in this indictment, no less than any other American citizen, is entitled to rely upon the advice of counsel and the benefit of past legal precedent in challenging what former Vice President Pence described as, “serious allegations of voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law” in the 2020 election. The attempt to criminalize our rights to such redress with this indictment will have – and is already having – profound consequences for our system of justice.

My legal team and I will vigorously contest every count of the indictment in which I am named, and also every count in which others are named, for which my knowledge of the relevant facts, law, and constitutional provisions may prove helpful. I am confident that, when the law is faithfully applied in this proceeding, all of my co-defendants and I will be fully vindicated.