At Georgia Senate rally, Trump can help his party or himself

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At Georgia Senate rally, Trump can help his party or himself

2020-12-06 00:59 Last Updated At：01:10

President Donald Trump's first political rally since losing his reelection bid is ostensibly to urge support for the Republican incumbents in Georgia's two runoffs that will decide which party controls the Senate at the start of Joe Biden’s administration.

But the question remains whether Trump will really try to help his party or use the Saturday night event in Valdosta to amplify his conspiratorial and debunked theories of electoral fraud.

Republicans are worried that if Trump does the latter, their voters will think the system is rigged and decide to sit out the two Jan. 5 races. They want Trump to tell people directly and forcefully to vote.

The president’s aides publicly scoff at the idea he might do anything other than encourage Republicans to back Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as they try to withstand Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively.

"I believe it’s the start of these two senators crossing the finish line,” White House press secretary Kelly McEnany said on the eve of Trump’s visit. McEnany credited Trump with being his party’s biggest turnout driver, noting that Republicans narrowed House Democrats’ majority while several vulnerable Republican senators survived challenges by comfortable margins.

Trump's base “is behind him all the way,” she told Fox Business Network. “He is the head of this movement, make no mistake, and that will not be changing.”

But after two pro-Trump lawyers this past week questioned whether voting again is even worth it -- in echoes of the president’s baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud -- even Vice President Mike Pence betrayed concerns that the Republican coalition could crack under the force of Trump’s grievances.

“I know we’ve all got our doubts about the last election, and I hear some of you saying, ‘Just don’t vote,’” Pence said Friday while campaigning with Perdue in Savannah. “If you don’t vote, they win.”

Republicans need one more seat for a Senate majority. Democrats need a Georgia sweep to force a 50-50 Senate and position Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking majority vote.

Few Republicans in Washington or Georgia believe wide swaths of the electorate in this newfound battleground would opt out of voting because of Trump’s false claims or his denigration of the Georgia governor and secretary of state for certifying Biden’s victory in the state.

The risk for the GOP is that it wouldn’t take much of a drop-off to matter if the runoffs are as close as the presidential contest: Biden won Georgia by about 12,500 votes out of 5 million cast. There’s enough noise to explain why Pence felt the need to confront the matter head on after two Trump loyalists floated the idea of the president's supporters bailing on Perdue and Loeffler.

“I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure — and I mean that regardless of party,” lawyer Sidney Powell said this past week at a suburban Atlanta “Stop the Steal” rally.

Atlanta celebrity lawyer Lin Wood, who’s filed thus-far unsuccessful court challenges to Biden’s victory, insisted to Trump's supporters that the state's elections are “rigged.”

Trump’s team has recently tried to dissociate itself from the pair but only after they were given a prominent platform in the flailing effort to overturn the presidential election results. Moreover, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani returned Thursday to the Georgia Capitol for a marathon hearing that featured yet another airing of disproved claims.

Trump has been the source of party angst with his recent declarations that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is “hapless” and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is an “enemy of the people” because they didn't block Biden’s Georgia victory. State law gives them no avenue to do so.

It's resonated with voters such as Barry Mann, a 61-year-old business owner who came to hear Pence in Savannah. Mann hasn’t decided whether he’ll vote for his senators a second time.

“I think there’s some issues with our election and more investigation needs to be done,” Mann said, adding that he doesn’t think Perdue and Loeffler have done enough to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the results. “I want see what happens between now and January,” Mann said.

A third vote count, this one requested by the president’s reelection campaign, was nearing completion. Raffensperger could certify the election again as soon as Saturday; the result is not expected to change.

Tim Phillips, president of the conservative Americans for Prosperity, played down the idea that there are enough voters like Mann to cost Perdue and Loeffler. Phillips' group has about 200 field workers canvassing across Georgia.

After his own door-knocking shift Friday, Phillips described the GOP’s pool of potential voters, especially in rural and small-town areas, as largely "voters who aren’t so much Republicans or even conservatives, but they love Trump.” That loyalty, he said, allows them to “hear two different messages” from Trump.

“He may say some things about the governor or other people, but the dominant message is that he’s down here for Perdue and Loeffler,” Phillips said. That should be "enormously beneficial.”

Associated Press writer Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this report.

12 jurors have been picked for Donald Trump's hush money trial. Selection of alternates is ongoing

2024-04-19 08:35 Last Updated At：08:41

NEW YORK (AP) — A jury of 12 people was seated Thursday in former President Donald Trump’s history-making hush money trial, propelling the proceedings closer to opening statements and the start of weeks of dramatic testimony.

The court quickly turned to selecting alternate jurors, with the process on track to wrap up by the end of the week. Prosecutors could begin presenting their case early next week.

The jury of Manhattanites includes a sales professional, a software engineer, a security engineer, a teacher, a speech therapist, multiple lawyers, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager.

The first-ever trial of a former American president is unfolding in New York during this year's race for the White House, meaning the presumptive Republican nominee will spend his days in court confronted by salacious and unflattering testimony about his personal life while simultaneously campaigning to reclaim the office he held for four years.

He's made clear his determination to use his legal jeopardy, already a central issue in the race against Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, to his advantage. After a full day of jury selection, he complained to reporters that he should have been out campaigning but was in court instead for what he said was a “very unfair trial.”

“Everybody’s outraged by it,” he said. “You know the whole world’s watching this New York scam.”

Jury selection proceeded at a plodding pace earlier Thursday when two jurors were dismissed, one after expressing doubt about her ability to be fair following disclosure of details about her identity and the other over concerns that some of his answers in court may have been inaccurate.

But lawyers who began the day with only five jurors settled on the remaining seven in quick succession, along with one alternate. Judge Juan Merchan has said his goal is to have six alternates.

The process of picking a jury is a critical phase in any criminal trial but especially so when the defendant is a former president and the presumptive Republican nominee. Prospective jurors have been grilled on their social media posts, personal lives and political views as the lawyers and judge search for any bias that would prevent them from being impartial.

Inside the court, there’s broad acknowledgment of the futility in trying to find jurors without knowledge of Trump. A prosecutor this week said lawyers were not looking for people who had been “living under a rock for the past eight years.”

To that end, multiple jurors chosen for the panel acknowledged having personal opinions of Trump or his presidency.

One juror, a man who works in investment banking, earlier described himself as “ambivalent” about Trump, adding, “I might not like some of his policies, but there has been some good” for the country.

A woman picked for the jury said she thought Trump seemed “very selfish and self serving," adding, “I don’t really appreciate that from any public servant.” Defense lawyers were out of peremptory strikes, which would allow them to dismiss a juror without giving a reason.

The trial centers on a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and personal fixer, made to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the final days of the 2016 race.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of the payments in internal records when his company reimbursed Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could get up to four years in prison if convicted, though it’s not clear that the judge would opt to put him behind bars. Trump would almost certainly appeal any conviction.

Trump faces four criminal cases, but it's not clear that any others will reach trial before the November election. Appeals and legal wrangling have caused delays in the other three cases charging Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election results and with illegally hoarding classified documents.

The jury selection process picked up momentum Tuesday with the selection of seven jurors. But on Thursday, Merchan revealed in court that one of the seven, a cancer nurse, had “conveyed that after sleeping on it overnight she had concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in this case.”

And though jurors’ names are being kept confidential, the woman told the judge and the lawyers that she had doubts after she said aspects of her identity had been made public.

“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror," she said. "I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”

A second seated juror was dismissed after prosecutors raised concerns that he may not have been honest in answering a jury selection question by saying that he had never been accused or convicted of a crime.

The IT professional was summoned to court to answer questions after prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County.

A prosecutor also disclosed that a relative of the man may have been involved in a deferred prosecution agreement in the 1990s with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Trump’s case.

Because the juror was questioned Thursday at the judge’s bench, off-microphone and out of earshot of reporters, it was not known whether the man confirmed or denied that either instance was connected to him.

After dismissing from the jury the nurse who had already been selected, Merchan ordered journalists in court not to report prospective jurors’ answers to questions about their current and former employers.

“We just lost, probably, what probably would have been a very good juror for this case, and the first thing that she said was she was afraid and intimidated by the press, all the press, and everything that had happened," Merchan said.

In other developments, prosecutors asked for Trump to be held in contempt over a series of social media posts this week.

The district attorney's office on Monday sought a $3,000 fine for Trump for three Truth Social posts they said violated the judge’s gag order limiting what he can say publicly about witnesses. Since then, prosecutors said Trump made seven additional posts that they believe violate the order.

Several of the posts involved an article that referred to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as a “serial perjurer,” and one from Wednesday repeated a claim by a Fox News host that liberal activists were lying to get on the jury, said prosecutor Christopher Conroy.

Trump lawyer Emil Bove said Cohen “has been attacking President Trump in public statements,” and Trump was just replying.

The judge already scheduled a hearing for next week on the prosecution’s request for contempt sanctions over Trump’s posts.

Tucker reported from Washington.

At Georgia Senate rally, Trump can help his party or himself

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At Georgia Senate rally, Trump can help his party or himself

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