Donald Trump's Big Lie reaches the courts. A Grand Jury this Wednesday found sufficient elements to criminally prosecute 18 people who claimed that the former president had won the State of Arizona in the 2020 presidential elections. Among the accused are lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, who was the head of White House Cabinet. Eleven Republican militants who planned fraud to prevent Joe Biden from keeping Arizona's votes in the Electoral College will also face charges. Donald Trump appears as a co-conspirator, but has not been charged.
The charges include fraud, forgery and conspiracy, Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general of Arizona, reported this afternoon. The names of Giuliani, Meadows and John Eastman, another of the lawyers who worked with Trump, have been crossed out from the indictment delivered by the Grand Jury. Mayes' office has explained through a statement that these names, revealed by the press, will be made public once they are personally notified of the process.
“I will not allow democracy in the United States to be undermined. This is too important,” Mayes said in a video published after the Grand Jury opinion.
The indictment identifies Giuliani, nicknamed “the mayor,” as responsible for spreading allegations of fraud without evidence. “He chaired a meeting in downtown Phoenix on November 30, 2020 in which he falsely said that state election officials 'were making no effort to find out' whether the election result was correct,” the text states. its 60 pages. The former New York City councilman also pressured local supervisors and legislators to change the outcome. In December, he was ordered to pay $148 million for defaming Georgia election officials.
A spokesman for the disgraced mayor, Ted Goodman, said in a statement that the new accusation is another proof of how “the American justice system is becoming a weapon, which should worry everyone.” Meadows' lawyer has called the new process “obviously motivated by political interests” and will be defended in court. Eastman's defense attorney has said that his client is “innocent.”
The indictment came after an investigation carried out by the Prosecutor's Office for a year. After the November 3, 2020 elections, the defendants “made false claims of alleged fraud in Arizona to pressure election officials and thus change the result of a democratic vote,” the indictment states. The result of the elections was endorsed by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (Phoenix), the Secretary of State (Democrat) and the governor, then-Republican Doug Ducey.
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Despite the fact that these authorities endorsed Joe Biden's narrow victory over Trump, of only 10,457 votes, eleven members of the Republican party sent a letter to Congress stating that the then president had actually been the winner in the entity. There are eleven electors because Arizona has eleven votes in the Electoral College (calculated by the nine federal congressmen and two senators). Biden's victory had been the first victory of a Democratic candidate in the state in 20 years.
The eleven citizens are Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the state Republican party; Tyler Bowyer Nancy Cottle; Jacob Hoffman, an elected local congressman; Anthony Kern, member of the state Congress; James Lamon; Robert Montgomery; Samuel Moorhead; Lorraine Pellegrino; Gregory Safsten, executive director of the party and Michael Ward.
They met in Phoenix on December 14, 2020 to sign a certificate in which they stated that they were “qualified to choose” Trump as the winner of the elections. The ceremony It was recorded and uploaded to social networks of the Republican Party in Arizona. The law, however, prevents voters from voting for someone whose victory was not certified by local authorities. For this reason, the motion was ignored by the National Archives.
The group of false voters also launched a court battle to deprive Biden of his victory in the State. In total, the local Justice processed eight lawsuits regarding alleged electoral fraud that had favored the Democratic candidate. The authorities did not find any evidence of this alleged plot to favor Biden. The accusation served, however, to fuel the conspiracy theories of many Trump supporters in the State, among them Kari Lake, the Trump candidate for the State Government who currently aspires to reach the Senate in the November elections.
Arizona is not the only state where criminal proceedings are being pursued against false Trump electors. In Nevada there are six Republicans on the bench, who have pleaded not guilty. There are 16 other people in Michigan facing forgery and conspiracy charges. In Wisconsin, ten more people face civil proceedings.
The Georgia case is one of those that has gained the most notoriety. Former President Trump was charged along with 17 other people. This, however, has deflated for the Prosecutor's Office after the trial judge dismissed some of the accusations, including the one that derived from a call in which the former president asked a state official to find 11,780 votes to triumph in the territory.
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