In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas
Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel – November 3, 2023
Motorists drive past a giant billboard depicting Muslim peoples walking with their national flags towards the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, erected in Valiasr Square in the centre of Tehran on October 25, 2023. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images) (ATTA KENARE via Getty Images)
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is fast becoming a world war online.
Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States.
Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also joined the fight online, along with extremist groups, like al-Qaida and the Islamic State, that were previously at odds with Hamas.
The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before, according to government officials and independent researchers — a reflection of the world’s geopolitical division.
“It is being seen by millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president at Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv, Israel, “and it’s impacting the war in a way that is probably just as effective as any other tactic on the ground.” Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.
The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict. Iran, though it has denied any involvement in the attack by Hamas, has threatened as much, with its foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, warning of retaliation on “multiple fronts” if Israeli forces persisted in Gaza.
“It’s just like everyone is involved,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The institute, a nonprofit research organization in London, last week detailed influence campaigns by Iran, Russia and China.
The campaigns do not appear to be coordinated, American and other government officials and experts said, though they did not rule out cooperation.
While Iran, Russia and China each have different motivations in backing Hamas over Israel, they have pushed the same themes since the war began. They are not simply providing moral support, the officials and experts said, but also mounting overt and covert information campaigns to amplify one another and expand the global reach of their views across multiple platforms in multiple languages.
The Spanish arm of RT, the global Russian television network, for example, recently reposted a statement by the Iranian president calling the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 an Israeli war crime, even though Western intelligence agencies and independent analysts have since said a missile misfired from Gaza was a more likely cause of the blast.
Another Russian overseas news outlet, Sputnik India, quoted a “military expert” saying, without evidence, that the United States provided the bomb that destroyed the hospital. Posts like these have garnered ten of thousands of views.
“We’re in an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries,” James Rubin, the head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said in a recent interview.
From the first hours of its attack, Hamas has employed a broad, sophisticated media strategy, inspired by groups like the Islamic State. Its operatives spread graphic imagery through bot accounts originating in places like Pakistan, sidestepping bans of Hamas on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Cyabra’s researchers.
A profile on X that bore the characteristics of an inauthentic account — @RebelTaha — posted 616 times in the first two days of the conflict, though it had previously featured content mostly about cricket, they said. One post featured a cartoon claiming a double standard in how Palestinian resistance toward Israel was cast as terrorism while Ukraine’s fight against Russia was self-defense.
Officials and experts who track disinformation and extremism have been struck by how quickly and extensively Hamas’ message has spread online. That feat was almost certainly fueled by the emotional intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and by the graphic images of the violence, captured virtually in real time with cameras carried by Hamas gunmen. It was also boosted by extensive networks of bots and, soon afterward, official accounts belonging to governments and state media in Iran, Russia and China — amplified by social media platforms.
In a single day after the conflict began, roughly 1 in 4 accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X posting about the conflict appeared to be fake, Cyabra found. In the 24 hours after the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, more than 1 in 3 accounts posting about it on X were.
The company’s researchers identified six coordinated campaigns on a scale so large, they said, that it suggested the involvement of nations or large nonstate actors.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s report last week singled out Iranian accounts on Facebook and X that “have been spreading particularly harmful content that includes glorification of war crimes and violence against Israeli civilians and encouraging further attacks against Israel.”
Although the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denied the country’s involvement in the attack, the accounts have depicted him as the leader of a “Pan-Islamic resistance” to Israel and neocolonial Western powers.
A series of posts on X by a state-affiliated outlet, Tasnim News Agency, said the United States was responsible for “the crimes” and showed a video of wounded Palestinians. On Telegram, accounts have also spread false or unverified content, including one widely debunked account that CNN had faked an attack on a television crew.
Cyabra also identified an online campaign in Arabic on X from Iraq, evidently from Shiite Muslim paramilitary groups supported by Iran, including the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. A network of accounts posted identical messages and photos, using the hashtag #AmericasponsorIsraelTerrorism. Those posts peaked on Oct. 18 and 19, amassing more than 6,000 engagements, and had the potential to reach 10 million viewers, according to Cyabra.
Israel, which has its own sophisticated information operations, has found itself unexpectedly on the defensive.
“Like its military, Israel’s social media was caught flat-footed and responded days late,” said Ben Decker, the CEO of Memetica, a threat intelligence consulting firm, and a former researcher for The New York Times. “The response, even when it got off the ground, was chaotic.”
Two Israeli government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said Israel was tracking the bot activity from Iran and other countries. They noted that it was larger than any previous campaign they had seen.
The war has heightened concerns in Washington and other Western capitals that an alliance of authoritarian governments has succeeded in fomenting illiberal, anti-democratic sentiment, especially in Africa, South America and other parts of the world where accusations of American or Western colonialism or dominance find fertile soil.
Russia and China, which have grown increasingly close in recent years, appear intent to exploit the conflict to undermine the United States as much as Israel. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which combats state propaganda and disinformation, has in recent weeks detailed extensive campaigns by Russia and China to shape the global information environment to their advantage.
A week before Hamas attacked Israel, the State Department warned in a report that China was employing “deceptive and coercive methods” to sway global opinion behind its worldview. Since the war began, China has portrayed itself as a neutral peacemaker, while its officials have depicted the United States as a craven warmonger that suffered a “strategic failure in the Middle East.”
Accounts of Russian officials and state media have shared that sentiment. Numerous pro-Kremlin accounts on Telegram abruptly shifted after Oct. 7 from content about the war in Ukraine to post exclusively on Israel, including an Arabic-language channel linked to the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary force that rebelled against President Vladimir Putin in June.
Putin, who met with Hamas leaders after the war began, described the wars in Ukraine and Israel as part of the same broad struggle against American global dominance. He also claimed, without evidence, that “Western intelligence services” were behind a riot Sunday that targeted Jews at the airport in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia.
“They’re in a conflict, a geostrategic competition, with the United States,” said Michael Doran, a former White House and Pentagon official who is now director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. “And they recognize that when Israel, the U.S.’ primary ally in the Middle East, is wrapped up in a war like this, it weakens the United States.”
Florida voters are ‘hoodwinked’ alright. But not by women seeking abortion access | Opinion
Fabiola Santiago – November 2, 2023
The debate over abortion rights in Florida isn’t, as Attorney General Ashley Moody has alleged before the state’s highest court, too hard for voters to understand.
She underestimates us.
The issue boils down to basics: Who gets to make one of the hardest and most personal decisions a woman has to confront in her life? A choice that affects her physical and mental health forever.
Under the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican politicians decided last legislative session that they have the ultimate say — imposing on Florida’s 10.8 million women a near-ban on abortion, without giving any consideration of the opposition.
For years, the Florida GOP has been inching toward total control of this vital healthcare right, first coming after Planned Parenthood with bogus accusations, then banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy in 2022, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
With a Republican super-majority in the Legislature in place — and emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning Roe vs. Wade’s constitutional protection — the governor and lawmakers went quite far this year.
They passed, and DeSantis signed in a telling private ceremony in his office, a near ban by instituting a six-week limit on access. The restriction means that by the time many women find out they’re pregnant, they no longer can legally get an abortion in the state — and that any doctor performing the procedure could go to prison.
Now, DeSantis and Moody are trying to keep voters from fighting back, Kansas-style, by putting abortion on the ballot — and winning constitutional protection.
Did Republicans really think women and their male allies would sit back and allow politicians to take over bodily rights, family decisions and healthcare choices — without pushing back?
Now, the 15-week ban is under legal challenge in the state Supreme Court — and it’s not the only one.
A petition to put an abortion rights amendment on the November 2024 ballot that would prevent the outright ban the GOP ultimately wants — ensuring constitutional access against political whim — has gathered an impressive 500,000 of the 891,523 voter signatures needed by the Feb. 1 deadline.
The committee behind the petition, Floridians Protecting Freedom, has raised almost $5 million in six months. Both are strong indicators of voter support.
But, Moody claims, the ballot initiative is an effort to “hoodwink” voters and she calls the all-American democratic practice of activism to secure rights, “war.”
Florida voters are being hoodwinked alright. But it’s not by women seeking access to safe, legal abortion.
It’s by a Florida GOP doing the bidding of the wealthy, ultra-conservative Christian lobby buying political power — and doesn’t care if studies show that the women most affected by abortion bans are poor and dark-skinned.
By going straight to the state’s conservative Supreme Court to ask for a repeal of the petition, Moody shows that she’s running scared of voters’ will and complex points of view on abortion. She’s afraid they’ll exercise their say and vote in favor of constitutionally protecting abortion in Florida — as they did in 2018 when 65% voted to restore the voting rights of felons who done their time.
She has put forth no valid legal argument for seeking to quash people’s right to make their voice heard by unilaterally taking the proposed amendment off the ballot — especially before the committee has completed gathering signatures.
It’s not a democratic move on Moody’s part, but Florida’s autocratic Republicans are beyond caring about democracy and its institutions.
It’s their way or the highway, voters need not opine and neither should Democratic lawmakers. The abortion debate proved there’s no room for bipartisanship or working to reach a consensus.
Republicans assume that Florida is a blindingly red state, and people will keep voting for them in support of an increasingly intrusive, extremist agenda. That’s how it’s been in recent elections, but in the case of abortion restrictions, families are experiencing what it’s like to live under someone else’s choice when it’s their daughter, wife or girlfriend’s life on the line.
That’s when the public debate becomes deeply personal — and choice matters.
If Moody — or any other woman, for that matter — doesn’t want an abortion, she doesn’t have to get one. Under restrictions, women and families have no choice.
It is that simple.
No party, no politician should be making the decision for the woman who feels that having one more child may kill her. Or, for the teen swept away by hormones and false promises of eternal love whose future suddenly is a question mark.
With extremist DeSantis vying for the GOP presidential nomination and the privilege of leading the nation, Florida’s abortion rights debate becomes a matter of national importance.
DeSantis, who as Trump did nationally has stacked the courts with conservatives — at least two critical appointees, highly inexperienced — only serves a narrow sliver of the population. In other words, his view of governance is minority rule over the diverse majority.
If Florida’s attorney general prevails with the state Supreme Court and silences voters’ voice on a topic as crucial as abortion, she will have set a dangerous precedent.
If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda
Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Donald J. Trump’s ambitions. His allies are planning to install more aggressive legal gatekeepers if he regains the White House.
Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman – November 1, 2023
Top Trump allies, including Russell Vought, seated in the middle, have come to view the Republican Party’s legal elites — even leaders with impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step.Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.
The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.
Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influentialFederalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.
These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the former president and are likely to serve in a second term.
The interviews reveal a significant break within the conservative movement. Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.
Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.
Two of the allies leading the push are Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former senior adviser, and John McEntee, another trusted aide whom the then-president had empowered in 2020 to rid his administration of political appointees perceived as disloyal or obstructive.
The nonprofit groups they are involved in are barred by law from supporting a candidate, and none of the work they are doing is explicitly tied to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Miller and Mr. McEntee remain close to the former president and are expected to have his ear in any second term.
Mr. Trump himself, focused for now on multiple criminal and civil cases against him, appears disengaged from these efforts. But he made clear throughout his term in office that he was infuriated by many of the lawyers who worked for him, ranting about how they were “weak” and “stupid.”
By the end of his term, lawyers he appointed early in his administration had angered the White House by raising legal concerns about various policy proposals. But Mr. Trump reserved his deepest rage for the White House and Justice Department legal officials who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people who spoke with him. Casting about for alternative lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, Mr. Trump turned for that effort to a group of outside lawyers, many of whom have since been indicted in Georgia.
People close to the former president say they are seeking out a different type of lawyer committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump. They want lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House who are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause. This new mind-set matches Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is waging a “final battle” against demonic “enemies” populating a “deep state” within the government that is bent on destroying America.
Several of Mr. Trump’s key allies — including Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser — are drawing up lists of lawyers they plan to hire if the former president returns to the White House in 2025.Credit…Cooper Neill for The New York Times
There were a few lawyers like that in Mr. Trump’s administration, but they were largely outnumbered, outranked and often blocked by more traditional legal conservatives. For those who went to work for Mr. Trump but grew disillusioned, the push to systematically install Trump loyalists who may see the law as malleable across a second Trump administration has been a cause for alarm.
John Mitnick was appointed by Mr. Trump as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department in 2018. But he was fired in 2019 as part of a broad purge of the agency’s leaders — whom Mr. Trump had installed — and was replaced by one of Mr. Miller’s allies.
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Mr. Mitnick predicted that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term, and that instead it would be “predominantly staffed by opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”
In many ways, the Federalist Society has become synonymous with the Republican establishment, and its members’ most common interests — including pushing an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and federal statutes — can be distinct from the whims and grievances of Mr. Trump himself. Its membership dues are low, and politically ambitious Republican lawyers of various stripes routinely join it or attend its events. Many of the more aggressive lawyers the Trump allies are eyeing have their own links to it.
But after both the legal policy fights inside the Trump administration and the refusal by the group’s most respected luminaries to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the phrase “Federalist Society” became a slur for some on the Trump-aligned right, a shorthand for a kind of lawyerly weakness.
Hard-right allies of Mr. Trump increasingly speak of typical Federalist Society members as “squishes” too worried about maintaining their standing in polite society and their employment prospects at big law firms to advance their movement’s most contentious tactics and goals.
“Trump and his administration learned the hard way in their first term that the Democrats are playing for keeps,” said Mike Davis, a former congressional aide who helped shepherd judicial nominees during the Trump administration and has become a close ally of the 45th president. “And in the Trump 47 administration, they need much stronger attorneys who do not care about elite opinion who will fight these key cultural battles.”
The chilling of the relationship between Mr. Trump and Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, embodies a broader rift between Mr. Trump and conservative legal elites.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
A Fraught Union
When Mr. Trump wrested the 2016 Republican presidential nomination from the party’s old guard, it was unclear whether social conservatives would turn out in the general election to vote for a thrice-married New Yorker who had cultivated a playboy reputation and once described himself as “very pro-choice.” But Mr. Trump won their support by essentially striking a deal with legal conservatives: He agreed to fill Supreme Court vacancies from a list of prospects compiled by a small number of movement stalwarts.
This group helping to shape the judiciary included Leonard A. Leo — arguably the most powerful figure in the conservative legal movement and a leader of the Federalist Society — and Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign general counsel and first White House counsel. With a seat already open after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the move worked: Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped secure Mr. Trump’s narrow victory.
Along with the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mr. Leo and Mr. McGahn — and later Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s second White House counsel — created an assembly line for turning Federalist Society-style lawyers into appeals court judges and Supreme Court justices.
But the union between Mr. Trump and the conservative legal establishment could be more fraught than it sometimes appeared. As his presidency wore on, Mr. Trump attacked and sidelined many of the lawyers around him. That included Mr. Leo.
One episode, described by a person familiar with the incident, illustrates the larger chill.
In January 2020, Mr. Leo was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Mr. Trump strode up to his table. The president stunned Mr. Leo, publicly berating him and accusing him of recommending the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to investigate ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
Taken aback, Mr. Leo protested that he had actually suggested someone else for the position — Mr. Cipollone. Mr. Trump walked away without apologizing.
Nearly a year later, when Mr. Trump was trying to enlist legal assistance for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, he reached out three times to Mr. Leo. But Mr. Leo declined to take or return Mr. Trump’s calls, and has since only dealt with him through others.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I have nothing to say regarding his current efforts, but I’m just grateful that President Trump transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in his first term.”
Mr. Mitnick’s experience underscores the style of lawyering that Trump allies saw as too cautious. His role as the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security put him in the path of increasingly aggressive policy proposals from a top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller.
In 2019, the White House purged the leadership ranks of the Homeland Security Department, firing Mr. Mitnick. Mr. Trump ultimately installed as his replacement Chad Mizelle, who had been out of law school just seven years but was a close Miller ally.
Like numerous other positions filled later in Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Mizelle was appointed as “acting” general counsel, sidestepping a Senate vetting and confirmation process that would most likely have closely scrutinized whether he was qualified for the job.
With Mr. Mizelle acting as the department’s top lawyer when the Covid-19 pandemic arose, the Trump administration seamlessly invoked emergency powers to flatly refuse to consider the petition of any asylum seeker arriving at the southern border.
Seeking ‘America First’ Lawyers
Mr. Miller has stayed close to Mr. Trump and is expected to play an even more important role in shaping policy if Mr. Trump returns to power.
While out of office, Mr. Miller has been running a foundation focused on suing the Biden administration and recruiting a new generation of “America First” lawyers, with some from attorney general and solicitor general offices in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. “America First” Republicans are often opposed to both legal and illegal immigration, protectionist on trade and skeptical of international alliances and military intervention overseas.
One first-term Trump lawyer who would most likely serve in a second term is Mark Paoletta, who served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and worked closely with Mr. Vought, the agency’s director. The O.M.B. team saw itself as an island of facilitators within an executive branch they believed was too quick to tell Mr. Trump that his ideas were unachievable or illegal.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell Vought, a former senior Trump administration official.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Together, Mr. Vought and Mr. Paoletta came up with the idea of having Mr. Trump declare a national emergency and invoke special powers to spend more taxpayer money on a border wall than Congress was willing to appropriate.
Mr. Paoletta also believed that Mr. Trump could have exerted greater personal control over the Justice Department, although Mr. Paoletta said in an interview that he did not advocate using the presidency’s command over federal law enforcement for partisan and personal score-settling. He and other advisers likely to follow Mr. Trump back into power view White House authority to direct the Justice Department as proper under the so-called unitary executive theory. It holds that presidents can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that pockets of independent decision-making authority are unconstitutional.
“I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.,” Mr. Paoletta said, adding: “It’s not an independent agency, and he is the head of the executive branch. A president has every right to direct D.O.J. to look at items that are his policy priorities and other matters of national importance.”
Mr. Trump is not known for pondering legal philosophy. But he has found common cause with lawyers who have a sweeping view of presidential power.
In his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family — shattering the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. More than any legal policy statement on his campaign website, retribution may be the closest thing to a governing philosophy for Mr. Trump as he seeks a second term.
‘Legal Creativity’
Mr. Trump has rarely looked closely at a lawyer’s area of specialty. Instead, he has often looked at whether a particular lawyer can help him gain something he wants. He spent much of his first term railing against the lawyers who worked for him and wondering aloud why none of them could live up to the memory of his notoriously ruthless mentor, Roy Cohn, who represented Mr. Trump in his early business career in New York.
When he sought to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump was unsatisfied with his government lawyers, including his second White House counsel, Mr. Cipollone, who largely rejected his efforts to subvert the results. Mr. Trump turned to a different set of outside lawyers.
Those lawyers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, John C. Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney K. Powell, all of whom have since been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case that charged the former president and 18 of his allies with conspiring to overturn his election loss there in 2020. Ms. Powell, Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis have pleaded guilty.
Mr. Trump was also infuriated that the justices he had put on the Supreme Court declined to repay his patronage by intervening in the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump criticized the court, Mr. Leo with the Federalist Society is said to have told associates he was disappointed that the former president’s rhetoric made his judicial appointment record look “transactional,” aimed at advancing Mr. Trump’s personal interests rather than a broader philosophical mission.
Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, was criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state. Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh
In the same way, Mr. Trump had a falling-out with his attorney general, William P. Barr, who refused to falsely say that the Justice Department had evidence of widespread voter fraud. After Mr. Barr resigned, his deputy and successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, also refused to throw the department’s weight behind Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Trump then explored the idea of installing Jeffrey Clark — an official who was willing to raise concerns about purported election fraud — as acting attorney general.
Mr. Clark has also been indicted in the Georgia case, but remains in favor with Mr. Trump and has met with the former president at his private clubs. Over the summer, at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Clark attended a fund-raiser for the people who have been imprisoned for rioting at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Clark will most likely be in contention for a senior Justice Department position in any second Trump administration, depending on the outcome of his legal travails. He has written a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent,” that amounts to an intellectual blueprint for direct presidential control of federal law enforcement.
He declined to comment. On a conservative podcast last year, Mr. Clark said that “extraordinary times call for extraordinary, responsive legal creativity.”
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Trump allies sour on the group that pushed his SCOTUS takeover because their lawyers aren’t radical enough: report
Brent D. Griffiths – November 1, 2023
Trump’s allies have soured on a legal group that is behind his biggest legacy.
According to The New York Times, Trump allies are distancing themselves from The Federalist Society.
The conservative legal group helped Trump takeover of the Supreme Court.
Former President Donald Trump’s allies are reportedly souring on the conservative legal group that helped him cement a takeover of the US Supreme Court and reshape lower courts for years to come.
According to The New York Times, Trump allies that have begun the planning for his potential second term have begun to distance themselves from the Federalist Society, one of the key outside groups that vetted and assembled Trump’s list of then-potential Supreme Court nominees in 2016. After his surprise election, Trump’s White House worked virtually hand in glove with the organization and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to confirm over 200 federal judges.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official told The Times.
But Trump allies now view Federalist Society lawyers as “squishes,” according to The Times. One of the major points of contention is that the former president does not think the society did enough to help him after the 2020 presidential election. Leonard Leo, who is co-chairman of The Federalist Society, ignored Trump’s calls after the election as the president frantically sought to find lawyers who would back his challenges, according to The Times. Trump is also incensed that the Supreme Court, including his three nominees, did not intervene in his favor to overturn the election.
The current turn illustrates how if Trump is able to return to the White House, he may rely on increasingly fringe figures and legal views to push a second administration into even more provocative actions.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who was previously a keynote speaker for the society, has warned that Trump will focus on retribution and chaos if he returns to the White House. Barr and Trump’s relationship cratered after the election when Barr made it clear he would not support Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud that would have flipped the election.
Representatives for Trump and the Federalist Society did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Trump’s Demands for Extreme Loyalty Are Starting to Backfire
Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng – October 31, 2023
Throughout the criminal investigations of Donald Trump, the former president has expected his co-defendants, alleged co-conspirators, and potential witnesses for the prosecution to stay fiercely loyal to him. This has included — according to people who’ve discussed the matter with him — his belief that some of his former lieutenants should risk jail time rather than turn on him.
As he’s faced an array of criminal charges, Trump’s demands for aides and lawyers to martyr themselves for him hasn’t saved him. If anything, it’s done the opposite, driving several possible key witnesses to consider throwing Trump under the bus before he gets the chance to do it to them.
That’s because, as is often the case with the former president, the notion of extreme loyalty only goes one way. Rolling Stone spoke to seven potential witnesses, former Trump confidants ensnared in the Fulton County, Georgia, and federal criminal probes, their legal advisers, and other sources familiar with the situation. All of them say that Trump’s willingness to hang them out to dry has fueled legal strategies focused on self-preservation.
Three of these sources say that Team Trump’s comically unsubtle search for patsies and fall guys — MAGA die-hards who would take the blame and possible prison sentences in lieu of Trump — drove a larger wedge between the ex-president and many of his former fellow travelers.
“If I went to jail for Donald Trump, if I did that, what would that do for me and my family?” says a former Trump administration official who has been interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith’s office. “I don’t think he would even give us lifetime Mar-a-Lago memberships if I did that for him.”
Lawyer Sidney Powell, for example, put her adulation of Trump to work in the aftermath of the election by filing bogus lawsuits and making bizarre false claims against voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems. The moves got her sanctioned by a Michigan court, sued for a billion dollars by Dominion, and charged alongside Trump in Fulton County.
But her legal ordeal has brought her no meaningful help from the former president. Trump has gone out of his way to claim publicly that Powell was never his attorney while other Trump allies have worked to try to pin the blame for any criminal wrongdoing after the election on her. She has since also taken a plea deal this month, a move that shocked a number of top Trump lawyers and loyalists. Trump’s communications aide Liz Harrington has recently claimed the former president was “confused” by his allies’ plea deals because, in his apparent belief, “there’s no crimes here.” Powell, for her part, is still trying to have it both ways, portraying herself as a victim of a zealous prosecution and as a stalwart defender of Trump’s election lies.
But as some contemplate potentially cooperating with authorities, others have already publicly flipped, a decision that Trump now associates with “weaklings” who betray him.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Trump’s lead counsel in the Fulton County Steven Sadow wrote that “[Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed charges in return for probation. What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for Willis. Truthful testimony will always exonerate President Trump.”
Jenna Ellis, an attorney for the Trump campaign charged in the Fulton County election-subversion case, has been vocal about her disappointment in the former president’s abandonment of his co-defendants. Ellis wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in August that she had been “reliably informed Trump isn’t funding any of us who are indicted,” and wondered “why isn’t [the pro-Trump Super Pac] MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?”
After an attempt at crowdfunding her legal fees, Ellis accepted a plea deal from prosecutors last week. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” a tearful Ellis said in a courtroom speech accepting responsibility for making false statements about the election that President Joe Biden clearly won.
For much of this year, Trump attorneys had been concerned that Kenneth Chesebro, one of the legal theorists behind the fake-electors scheme, would end up cooperating with prosecutors. The attorney accepted a plea deal in Fulton County and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents, but his attorney, Scott Grubman, denied any suggestion that his client was turning against Trump. “I don’t think he implicated anyone but himself,” Grubman told CNN earlier this month. Still, Chesebro and his legal team have been dropping hints for months that the blame and criminal exposure lay elsewhere in Trumpland, not with him.
“Whether the campaign relied upon that advice as Mr. Chesebro intended,” Grubman told Rolling Stone in August, “will have to remain a question to be resolved in court.” He continued: “We hope that the Fulton DA and the special counsel fully recognize these issues before deciding who, if anyone, to charge.”
These public statements came months after some of Trump’s closest allies and legal counselors began amassing informal lists of the best possible fall guys in the Jan. 6 riot-related probes and the Mar-a-Lago documents case. John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Powell, and Chesebro were indeed among the names. The lawyers, such as Chesebro, were easy scapegoats for Team Trump, who have openly signaled that the former president’s courtroom strategy will lean on an “advice of counsel” defense.
Asked if Chesebro could tell how much of Trumpland wanted him to take the fall to help insulate Trump, a lawyer who’s known Chesebro for years, and has spoken to him about this matter, simply tells Rolling Stone, “Of course.”
In private, Trump reserves some of his harshest words for one-time loyalists who are willing to cut deals with prosecutors, securing light sentences in exchange for likely testifying against Trump and others. However, the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner’s fury often extends to his lieutenants who don’t have formal cooperation agreements — but are simply willing, or legally bound, to answer prosecutors’ questions.
According to people close to Trump, the mere act of talking to federal investigators can sometimes be enough to get you branded a traitor or a snitch in the former president’s mind. This is because, his longtime associates say, Trump often doesn’t see a meaningful difference between witnesses who have formal cooperation agreements (to flip, in other words) and those who happen to tell investigators useful information during interviews.
Further, Trump and several of his closest advisers have been trying for months to find out how generous his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been with prosecutors lately. In June, The New York Times revealed that Meadows had testified before grand juries in both the special counsel’s Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case and its investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. This has fueled suspicions among Trump’s inner orbit this year, with some advisers now simply referring to Meadows in private communications by using the rat emoji.
Last week, ABC News reported that Meadows was “granted immunity” by the special counsel in order to spill potentially damaging details about Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meadows’ lawyer has since disputed much of the report as “inaccurate,” though he refused to say what in the story supposedly wasn’t correct.
In the days since that news broke, a few of Trump’s political and legal advisers have tried to assure him that the ABC story doesn’t mean that Meadows has “flipped,” and that he is just doing what he is legally compelled to do in these conversations with federal investigators.
And yet, Trump isn’t entirely buying it. In the past week, the ex-president has asked confidants, with clear annoyance in his voice, why his former chief of staff would be telling prosecutors anything about Trump’s activities “at all,” two people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone. The former president’s position is that Meadows should invoke claims of executive privilege in these cases — the doctrine that some communications with a president should be shielded from outside scrutiny in certain circumstances.
It’s a similar move to what former Trump administration official Peter Navarro attempted in defying a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee, landing him a conviction for contempt of Congress.
If Meadows and other witnesses indulged Trump’s demands for a blanket defiance of prosecutors, Trump’s ex-chief could also risk jail time. Trump’s attorneys had attempted to block Meadows from testifying before a federal grand jury investigating the effort to overturn the election, citing executive-privilege claims. But in March, Judge Beryl Howell rejected the argument.
Navarro, a former top trade aide in the Trump White House, stonewalled a subpoena from the congressional Jan. 6 inquiry demanding he appear before the panel and turn over documents related to its investigation of the 2021 insurrection. Navarro’s defiance earned him a criminal referral and a conviction on contempt of Congress charges in September. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist and campaign aide, also defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House committee and earned a conviction for contempt of Congress. Both men have appealed their convictions.
Trump’s lack of loyalty to allies facing legal jeopardy for allegedly assisting him in various crimes has landed him in difficult spots in a number of cases.
“Trump’s view of loyalty is one way, and that one way benefits only him. Donald has a history of using and abusing his associates, and he has shown no hesitation in throwing them under the bus when it suits his needs,” Michael Cohen, a former Trump fixer and attorney who experienced that lack of reciprocal loyalty firsthand, said. “This is not the kind of person that people are willing to or should sacrifice their freedom for.”
“It’s done, he’s going to be convicted”: Christie says Mark Meadows poses “deadly” threat to Trump
Tatyana Tandanpolie – October 31, 2023
Mark Meadows Alex Wong/Getty Images
“It’s over” for Donald Trump, who knows “he’s going to be convicted” in his criminal cases, fellow 2024 Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie declared Tuesday on MSNBC, blaming the former president’s recent flubs on the campaign trail — struggling to remember Joe Biden’s name and forgetting which city he’s stopping in — on the stress of his intensifying legal battles. The former New Jersey Governor and ex-U.S. attorney appeared on the Tuesday edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to talk Trump’s legal woes, telling the hosts that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows likely adds to the former president’s worries after securing an immunity deal with federal prosecutors.
“I think it’s the stress of what he knows is coming in his criminal problems, and I think this week, because a lot of that was from the last week. That’s all post-Mark Meadows,” Christie said. “Everyone watching needs to understand, from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don’t give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable.” He then described what Trump will likely face when Meadows takes the stand in the federal election subversion case’s March 2024 trial. “He’s going to be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, ‘He committed crimes in front of me, on my watch,'” Christie predicted. “Look, this is a guy who was velcroed to Trump’s hip for the entire 2020 campaign and all the post-campaign nonsense, so this is deadly. It’s done, he’s going to be convicted – it’s over,” Christie added later, noting that he doesn’t believe Trump will be able to delay the trial based on his impression of the presiding district court judge, who reinstated a gag order against Trump on Sunday, and the lack of co-defendants in the case.
You’ll Love What Chris Christie Had to Say This Morning about Mark Meadows
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling – October 31, 2023
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a message for Republican voters holding out for Donald Trump: It’s time to stop.
Christie’s warning comes days after news that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and so-called “special friend,” flipped against his former boss, dishing dirty details on election fraud claims in exchange for immunity. It’ll be Meadows’s testimony, according to Christie, that seals Trump’s fate.
“This is deadly. It’s done. He’s going to be convicted. It’s over,” Christie told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, describing Meadows as someone “velcroed to Trump’s hip” through the entire 2020 campaign and beyond.
In several alleged meetings with special counsel Jack Smith’s team this year, Meadows told federal investigators that Trump knew he was lying when he claimed he won, mere hours after the polls closed on election night. To this day, Meadows said he has yet to see any evidence of election fraud.
“I think everybody watching needs to understand from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don’t give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable,” Christie noted.
And Christie believes Trump knows it too. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate pointed to a flurry of Trump’s recent gaffes and verbal slipups on the campaign trail as evidence of heightened stress following the news of Meadows’s deal.
“I want all Republican voters to understand this, what’s going to be happening in March,” Christie said. “He’s going to be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, he committed crimes in front of me, on my watch.”
Ex-Trump Lawyer: This Is the Factor that Will Finally Put Trump Behind Bars
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling – October 31, 2023
A onetime Trump attorney thinks the former president’s social media addiction might be the end for him in his legal trials.
Throughout October, Trump has been slapped with multiple gag orders for threatening and insulting court staff and witnesses in his various legal cases—though that hasn’t been enough to stop him.
So far, Trump has been fined twice for violating the gag order in his $250 million New York bank fraud trial, but he also faces the real possibility of being jailed if he continues his antics, warned Judge Arthur Engoron.
Meanwhile, in his federal election subversion trial in Washington, D.C., Trump slammed Judge Tanya Chutkan and a potential witness, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, just hours after his gag order was reinstated on Monday. In posts to Truth Social, Trump described Barr as “dumb, weak, slow-moving, lethargic, gutless, and lazy.”
That kind of behavior will probably be enough to lock him up, according to Ty Cobb, a former Trump attorney and current partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells.
In an interview with CNN, Cobb argued that the violations in the New York trial, which are a civil matter, aren’t as “consequential” as the criminal conspiracy charges he faces in D.C.
“I think she’ll come in with a much heavier penalty and, ultimately, he’ll spend a night or a weekend in jail,” Cobb said.
“I think it’ll take that to stop it,” he added.
Ty Cobb was a part of the Trump administration legal team from July 2017 until May 2018 and managed matters related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Cobb later described Mueller as an “American hero.”
Cobb has since commented several times on Trump’s ongoing legal woes—in August, the attorney told CNN that the evidence against the former president is “so overwhelming” in the classified documents case, describing it as “tight.” In September, Cobb likened Trump to a “mob boss.”
Fact Check: GOP Rep. Byron Donalds Says ‘More Black Americans’ Want Donald Trump to Be President Again. Does He Really Speak for Black Folks?
Yasmeen Freightman – November 1, 2023
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.). (Photo: Fox Business screenshot / YouTube)
U.S. House Rep. Byron Donalds says that Black people want Donald Trump back in office.
In an appearance on Fox News, anchor Maria Bartiromo asked the Florida Republican how he would assess the support by African-Americans for Trump.
“Oh, it’s growing, I can tell you that right now,” Donalds said. “Because, at the end of the day, our economy is struggling. That’s hurting every segment of America, including Black America. More and more Black Americans say we gotta have Trump back.”
Social media users hit back hard at Donalds’ comments.
“Byron doesn’t speak for black folks. He’s selling a narrative that is void of facts. I’m a black man; I wouldn’t vote for #DefendantTrump even if I were required to,” another X user wrote. “There is no lie Byron Donalds is unwilling to tell if it garners favor with the racist MAGA faithful,” another person commented.
Is Donalds right, though? Are more Black people siding with Trump for the 2024 presidential election? We checked the poll numbers.
Trump insisted that when his mug shot was released after he turned himself into Fulton County authorities in August for the criminal election interference indictment in Georgia, his support shot through the roof, especially among members of the Black community.
“The Black community is so different for me in the last – since that mug shot was taken, I don’t know if you’ve seen the polls; my polls with the Black community have gone up four and five times,” Trump told conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt.
He might just be confusing support with mockery. While Trump trended on social media sites for some days after the photo’s release, there’s nothing to suggest that the mug shot’s trending status directly correlated with more support for his presidential campaign.
Some polls show a slight uptick in Trump’s favorability among Black voters, but those results don’t at all align with the former president’s claim that support for him in the Black community has quadrupled. A Pew Research analysis revealed that Trump received 8% of the Black vote in the 2020 election.
Donalds has served as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party on some matters of race in politics to bolster the party’s favorability. And it’s no surprise that he’s also a loyal Trump ally. Along with numerous other Trump loyalists, the Florida congressman put his stamp of approval on Trump’s 2024 run for president back in April rather than endorse Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Donalds said the former president is the “one leader” who can get the U.S. “back on track.”
Donalds was also recently asked if he would accept becoming Trump’s running mate and possibly becoming the next vice president.
“With respect to being potentially on the ticket, that’s really up to the president. I have no control over that,” Donalds said. “The only thing I will say is, I just want to do whatever I can to get our country back on track. That’s what I have always been committed to.”
Donalds has tried to boost his political standing in recent weeks. He made a play for House Speaker after Kevin McCarthy’s removal from the position, but he dropped his bid after he couldn’t garner enough party support.
GOP Rep. Byron Donalds Says More Black People Want Trump Back. What Is He Talking About?
Jessica Washington – November 1, 2023
DES MOINES, IOWA – AUGUST 12: Former U.S. President Donald Trump visits the Iowa Pork Producers Tent with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) at the Iowa State Fair on August 12, 2023 in Des Moines, Iowa. Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls are visiting the fair, a tradition in one of the first states that will test candidates with the 2024 caucuses.
DES MOINES, IOWA – August 12: Former U.S. President Donald Trump visits the Iowa Pork Producers Tent with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) at the Iowa State Fair on August 12, 2023 in Des Moines, Iowa. Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls are visiting the fair, a tradition in one of the first states that will test candidates with the 2024 caucuses.
Apparently “more and more Black Americans” are hankering for former President Donald Trump’s presidency. At least, that’s if you believe Republican Congressman Byron Donalds.
During an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Representative Donalds was asked about African American support for the former President. “Oh it’s growing, I can tell you that right now,” said Rep. Donalds. “Because, at the end of the day, our economy is struggling. That’s hurting every segment of America, including Black America. More and more Black Americans say we gotta have Trump back.”
Donalds, a Black Republican, pushing the idea that Black people love Trump now obviously works in his favor. Democrats certainly should be concerned about any shifts towards Trump among Black voters. Black voters not turning out for Democrats in 2024 in large numbers would be disastrous for their political ambitions. But there’s no evidence that Trump is suddenly a welcome guest at the average Black cookout.
