Arizona grand jury indicts Meadows, Giuliani, other Trump allies

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Arizona grand jury indicts Meadows, Giuliani, other Trump allies for 2020 election interference

Kyle Cheney and Betsy Woodruff Swan

Wed, April 24, 2024 at 6:37 PM CDT·4 min read

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An Arizona grand jury has indicted 18 allies of Donald Trump for their efforts to subvert the 2020 election — including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn.

The indictment, which includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery, also describes Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator.

“Defendants and unindicted coconspirators schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona's voters,” the 58-page indictment reads.

The names of seven of the defendants, including Meadows, Giuliani and Epshteyn, are redacted, but the document makes clear who they are by describing their roles. Others include attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb, as well as Trump 2020 campaign operative Mike Roman.

Ken Chesebro, an attorney who helped devise Trump’s post-election strategy, is described as “unindicted coconspirator 4.” The other three unindicted co-conspirators are state Sen. Kelly Townsend, former state Rep. Mark Finchem, and former Arizona GOP lawyer Jack Wilenchik.

The only defendants whose names are visible in the version of the indictment released by the Arizona attorney general’s office Wednesday evening are the 11 Republicans who falsely posed as the state’s presidential electors despite Joe Biden’s narrow victory there. Among them: former Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, and Arizona’s RNC committeeman Tyler Bowyer.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has been helming the aggressive investigation. Though she initially appeared to be focused primarily on the false electors, in recent months it became clear that the scope of the probe was broader than previously understood and swept up prominent Trump allies at the national level.

Mayes is the fifth prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the sprawling, multi-state bid by Trump and his allies to upend the 2020 results. Special counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with federal crimes for those efforts. Prosecutors in Georgia have charged Trump and many of his allies for their efforts to overturn the results in that state, including the fake electors plot. Prosecutors in Michigan and Nevada have also charged Republicans who posed as fake electors in those states.

Michigan prosecutors revealed Wednesday that Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in their own investigation as well. And many of the newly charged defendants in Arizona, including Meadows, Giuliani, Eastman and Ellis, were charged in the Georgia case. Ellis pleaded guilty in Georgia and avoided jail time, while Meadows, Giuliani and Eastman have pleaded not guilty.

The charges against Bobb are notable because she was recently elevated to a senior position at the Republican National Committee focused on “election integrity.”

Mayes was elected as Arizona’s attorney general in 2022, replacing a Republican. As a result, her probe of the 2020 election plot got off to a later start than those of her counterparts in other states, but it recently appeared to be gathering momentum, with numerous witnesses receiving subpoenas to appear before the grand jury, including several of the false electors. Hoffman, one of the state lawmakers to face charges, appeared before the grand jury on April 8 and asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Mayes also subpoenaed several figures in Trump’s national orbit, including two Republican members of Congress, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, who played vocal roles in Trump’s bid to overturn the election. Neither Gosar nor Biggs, however, were considered targets of the probe, and they were not charged in the indictment.

Mayes also spoke to Chesebro, a Trump attorney who helped craft the fake electors strategy and who appeared to be cooperating with the probe. And her team questioned Rusty Bowers, who was Arizona’s speaker of the house in 2020 and resisted intense pressure from Trump’s allies to move to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

A witness who testified to the grand jury told POLITICO that grand jurors appeared to come from a mix of political backgrounds. Some asked questions that suggested they sympathized with Democrats, while others sounded more politically conservative and still others were inscrutable. The witness was granted anonymity to discuss the secret proceedings.

Regardless of the politics, the witness described the jurors, on the whole, as energetic and proactive, driving substantial lines of questioning, even while prosecutors seemed more focused on nuts-and-bolts efforts to substantiate discrete pieces of evidence.

 

 

trump...........the gift that keeps on giving.

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Arizona indicts 18 in election interference case, including Giuliani and Meadows

JACQUES BILLEAUD, JONATHAN J. COOPER and JOSH KELETY

Updated Wed, April 24, 2024 at 10:34 PM CDT·6 min read

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Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

FILE - Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani speaks during a news conference outside the federal courthouse in Washington, Dec. 15, 2023. Guiliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, was among those indicted Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in an Arizona election interference case.(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump 's chief of staff Mark Meadows, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and 16 others for their roles in an attempt to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

The indictment released Wednesday names 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Trump won Arizona in 2020. They include the former state party chair, a 2022 U.S. Senate candidate and two sitting state lawmakers, who are charged with nine counts each of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.

The identities of seven other defendants, including Giuliani and Meadows, were not immediately released because they had not yet been served with the documents. They were readily identifiable based on descriptions of the defendants, however.

Trump himself was not charged but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator.

With the indictments, Arizona becomes the fourth state where allies of the former president have been charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related to the election. Heading into a likely November rematch with Biden, Trump continues to spread lies about the last election that are echoed by many of his supporters.

“I will not allow American democracy to be undermined,” Democratic state Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a video released by her office. “It’s too important.”

The indictment alludes to Giuliani as an attorney “who was often identified as the Mayor” and spread false allegations of election fraud. Another defendant is referred to as Trump’s “ chief of staff in 2020,” which describes Meadows.

Descriptions of other unnamed defendants point to Mike Roman, who was Trump’s director of Election Day operations; John Eastman, a lawyer who devised a strategy to try to persuade Congress not to certify the election; and Christina Bobb, a lawyer who worked with Giuliani.

A lawyer for Eastman, Charles Burnham, said his client is innocent. Bobb did not respond to a text message seeking comment, nor did a lawyer who is representing Roman in a case in Georgia.

George Terwilliger, a lawyer representing Meadows, said he had not yet seen the indictment but if Meadows is named, “it is a blatantly political and politicized accusation and will be contested and defeated.” Giuliani's political adviser, Ted Goodman, decried what he called “the continued weaponization of our justice system.”

The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.

Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes. Of the eight lawsuits that unsuccessfully challenged Biden’s victory in the state, one was filed by the 11 Republicans.

Their lawsuit asked a judge to de-certify the results that gave Biden his victory in Arizona and block the state from sending them to the Electoral College. In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa said the Republicans lacked legal standing, waited too long to bring their case and “failed to provide the court with factual support for their extraordinary claims.”

Days after that lawsuit was dismissed, the 11 participated in the certificate signing.

The Arizona charges come after a string of indictments against fake electors in other states.

In December, a Nevada grand jury indicted six Republicans on felony charges of offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument in connection with false election certificates. They have pleaded not guilty.

Michigan’s Attorney General in July filed felony charges that included forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery against 16 Republican fake electors. One had charges dropped after reaching a cooperation deal, and the 15 remaining defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Three fake electors also have been charged in Georgia alongside Trump and others in a sweeping indictment accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn the results. They have pleaded not guilty.

In Wisconsin, 10 Republicans who posed as electors settled a civil lawsuit, admitting their actions were part of an effort to overturn Biden’s victory. There is no known criminal investigation in Wisconsin.

Trump was indicted in August in federal court over efforts to cling to power after his defeat, including the fake electors scheme. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday will hear arguments on his claim in that case that he can't be prosecuted for acts he committed while serving as president.

In early January, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said that state’s five Republican electors cannot be prosecuted under the current law. In New Mexico and Pennsylvania, fake electors added a caveat saying the election certificate was submitted in case they were later recognized as duly elected, qualified electors. No charges have been filed in Pennsylvania.

In Arizona, Mayes’ predecessor, Republican Mark Brnovich, conducted an investigation of the 2020 election, but the fake elector allegations were not part of that examination, according to Mayes’ office.

The so-called fake electors facing charges are Kelli Ward, the state GOP’s chair from 2019 until early 2023; state Sen. Jake Hoffman; Tyler Bowyer, an executive of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA who serves on the Republican National Committee; state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was photographed in restricted areas outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and is now a candidate in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District; Greg Safsten, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party; energy industry executive James Lamon, who lost a 2022 Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat; Robert Montgomery, chairman of the Cochise County Republican Committee in 2020; Samuel Moorhead, a Republican precinct committee member in Gila County; Nancy Cottle, who in 2020 was the first vice president of the Arizona Federation of Republican Women; Loraine Pellegrino, past president of the Ahwatukee Republican Women; and Michael Ward, an osteopathic physician who is married to Kelli Ward.

In a statement, Hoffman accused Mayes of weaponizing the attorney general’s office in bringing the case but didn’t directly comment on the indictment’s allegations.

“Let me be unequivocal, I am innocent of any crime, I will vigorously defend myself, and I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this naked political persecution by the judicial process,” Hoffman said.

None of the others responded to either phone, email or social media messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.

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Associated Press writers Gabe Stern and Scott Sonner in Las Vegas, Kate Brumback in Atlanta and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.