Lawyers for Donald Trump in the New York fraud case tried to falsely implicate Michael Cohen again in emails to Judge Arthur Engoron, who was presiding over the New York fraud trial. It backfired again.
Allen Howard Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, was reported to have lied in Engoron's courtroom during his testimony, prompting the District Attorney's office to explore perjury charges. Raw Story explained on Wednesday that this isn't the first time Weisselberg has been purportedly caught in a lie, the first of which being in Michael Cohen's case.
The New York Times article about Weisselberg's plea deal "simply does not provide any principled basis for the Court to reopen the record or question the veracity of Mr. Weisselberg's testimony in this case,” Trump's lawyer, Cliff Roberts, wrote in the letter to Engoron. They chastised Engoron for paying attention to the news and believing the Times article.
Engoron never said he believed the report; rather, he asked about it and asked that information be provided to him about whether it was true.
Further, he blasted the lawyers for having the temerity to challenge his request for information about someone who reportedly lied in his courtroom during a proceeding under which he was presiding.
Instead of directly answering whether or not the story was true, Roberts responded with legalese amounting to claiming Cohen lied in court.
Cohen never lied in Engoron's court, rather he lied when he accepted his plea agreement in the hush money case. Cohen has been open about it, flagging that the Southern District of New York forced him to take the false plea deal or they would go after his family.
Trump frequently conflates that with Cohen admitting to lying about the facts in the fraud case, which is false. He even went so far as to claim that Cohen had "recanted" his entire testimony. That is also false.
Engoron was not amused: "Your invocation of Michael Cohen's testimony and veracity is completely out of bounds. You have already submitted your post-trial briefs and made your final arguments. I am not reopening the case, but if someone pleads guilty to committing perjury in a case over which I am presiding, I want to know about it."
"The facts continue to speak for themselves," Cohen told Raw Story on Thursday. "Allen Weisselberg lied again to the court which we know to be true based upon him pleading guilty to the offense."
Former President Donald Trump's dubious displays of dominance fail in almost every arena except the one that he's determined to command; the Republican party, according to a new political analysis.
Atlantic columnist McCay Coppins penned a piece Thursday arguing Trump's purported ability to "dominate" has only ever proven true among his fellow Republicans.
“It’s funny. In the business world and in the entertainment world, I don’t think Donald was able to intimidate people as much ... But he has all these senators in the fetal position," ex-Trump adviser Sam Nunberg told the Atlantic. "They do whatever he wants."
Coppins argued Trump has an "animal instinct for weakness" that allowed for some kind of psychological jujutsu over elected Republicans, so desperate to keep their jobs they'd do anything.
“They’re good at keeping their jobs, not their promises," Nunberg recalled writing in a Trump speech. Trump read it at the time and laughed.
“It’s so true,” he said, according to Nunberg. “That’s all they care about.”
Coppins argues Trump offered them a new way to keep their jobs.
"As long as you did your best to look like you were obeying," Coppins writes, "you could expect to keep winning your primaries."
Where that has come into conflict is the divide between the GOP and the general electorate, which is going further and further away from the party.
"Republicans in Congress might be the only ostensibly powerful people in America who will allow him to boss them around, humiliate them, and assert unbridled dominance over them," he closed. "They’ve made the myth true. How could he possibly walk away now?"
Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade fired back at one of Donald Trump's co-defendants for seeking bank records.
In a filing on Thursday, Wade told Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee that co-defendant Mike Roman was using a subpoena to find dirt on him.
"This Court's job is not to help Roman and his attorney sift through the personal records of the prosecuting attorney in hopes of finding something they could spin into salaciousness for a tabloid," Wade wrote. "In short, nothing would be —or could be gained from allowing production of these records."
Last month, an attorney for Roman accused Wade and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of an improper relationship and financial gain.
Roman subpoenaed Willis, Wade, and others at the District Attorney's Office and requested documents, including bank records, from Wade and his law firm.
Roman and Trump are among 19 people charged in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
A long list of Democrats — as well as Never Trump conservatives like The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes, the Washington Post's Max Boot and former GOP strategist Tim Miller — have been warning that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 GOP presidential primary and defeats Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden in the general election, he will carry out a decidedly authoritarian agenda. And Trump, they warn, will be better able to do it than before because he will make a point of installing an army of unquestioning loyalists in the United States' federal government.
But history professor/author Nancy MacLean, in an article published by The New Republic on Feb. 8, argues that Democrats need to do a lot more than bash Trump in their defense of U.S. democracy. They also need to show voters that the "radical right" in general is a threat to democratic values.
"Lurking behind the full-frontal assault by Donald Trump and his enablers lies a more far-reaching threat," MacLean warns. "If the Republicans gain control of both Houses of Congress, expect a state-authorized constitutional convention to eviscerate core rights and protections most Americans hold dear. Imagine living in a country without Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the right to organize a union, civil rights enforcement, and clean air and water protections — let alone action to stop climate collapse."
According to the historian, Democrats should be "alerting every voter to what is in store for them if the radical right succeeds in its endgame to enchain American democracy."
"That's big talk, 115 years," MacLean comments. "Think it can't be done? Although the convention push has been all but ignored by the commentariat and national Democratic leaders, it has powerhouse backing. The Koch network and other dark-money donors are generously funding it. The corporation-underwritten American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has supplied 'model legislation' and training to Republican state legislators. Endorsers include Mark Meadows, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Sean Hannity, and many more."
MacLean adds that "the only way to permanently entrench minority rule by plutocrats and theocrats" is to "encase it in a dramatically altered Constitution."
"But this is madness, you will say," MacLean writes. "These reactionaries could never get away with rewriting the Constitution! Except they could…. For the American people to realize how much is at stake will require vast and to-the-point popular education."
Read Nancy MacLean's full New Republic article at this link.
The 91-year-old Colorado Republican who challenged former President Donald Trump's eligibility to be on the state's primary ballot referenced the existential threat to democracy and invoked Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler when explaining why she got involved in the case that came before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments on Thursday.
"You have to remember, as old as I am, I was born in the Great Depression," Norma Anderson, who previously led the Colorado Senate and House of Representatives, told NPR. "I lived through World War II. I remember Hitler."
"I remember my cousin was with [then-U.S. President Dwight] Eisenhower when they opened up the concentration camps," Anderson continued. "I mean, I understand protecting democracy."
Recalling when she watched on her home television as Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, she added, "They're trying to overthrow the government is what I was thinking."
Backed by the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Anderson in September joined five other GOP and Indepedent Colorado voters in filing a lawsuit to keep Trump off the state's ballot, citing the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars anyone who has taken an oath to support the Constitution "as an officer of the United States" and then "engaged in insurrection" from holding any civil or military office, unless two-thirds of each chamber of Congress votes to allow them to do so.
The Colorado Supreme Court disqualified the Republican presidential front-runner from the state's primary ballot in December, agreeing with the voters that Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 loss that culminated in the Capitol attack during the certification of the election results amounted to engaging in insurrection.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last month, at the urging of both the Colorado voters and Trump. The court has a right-wing supermajority that includes three Trump appointees—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—plus Justice Clarence Thomas, whose activist wife Ginni Thomas was involved with the GOP's 2020 election interference effort. None of them recused.
"On the merits, this is an open-and-shut case," Take Back the Court Action Fund president Sarah Lipton-Lubet said in a Thursday statement about Trump v. Anderson. "The 14th Amendment plainly states that insurrectionists are barred from holding office."
"Of course, the Republicans on the Supreme Court have shown they have no problem ignoring the obvious meaning of laws that conflict with their party's political interests," she added. "Donald Trump anticipated a moment like this one when he installed his right-wing supermajority. He thinks that these are his justices, on the court to do his bidding. Soon, we'll see if—and to what degree—he's right."
Common Cause was among various groups that submitted an amicus brief to the high court in support of removing the twice-impeached former president from the ballot.
"American democracy has never meant unchecked mob rule," Colorado Common Cause executive director Aly Belknap said Thursday. "Donald Trump sent an armed mob to the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of an election."
"His ongoing incitement has led to an unprecedented rise in attacks and death threats against election workers, judges, and other public servants," Belknap asserted. "There must be consequences for political violence—the Supreme Court must hold the former president accountable to the people and to the Constitution."
The presidential primary season is already underway. Trump has won the GOP's Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary by significant margins, setting him up to face Democratic President Joe Biden in November, unless he is barred from the contest.
The case before the country's highest court is "of extraordinary importance to our democracy," Campaign Legal Center senior vice president Paul Smith stressed Thursday. "It is vital that, one way or another, the court returns a clear ruling as quickly as possible to avoid any potential confusion in the upcoming presidential election. However the court decides, election officials deserve time to properly prepare for the upcoming election, and voters deserve time to make an informed decision."
Several arguments made in the case offer the Supreme Court an opportunity to defer the dispute to a different branch of government, said Derek T. Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on election law.
"All of them are ways for the court to shift responsibility to another branch and to say, 'We're not going to deal with it now,'" Muller said. "And it leaves open questions for resolution, or maybe indeterminacy, in the weeks and months ahead."
During arguments, Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern said on social media that questions from Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Kavanaugh and Thomas "suggest to me that a consensus off-ramp is emerging: the notion that individual states cannot enforce Section 3's disqualification provision against federal candidates, or at least against the president."
"The problem is that Jonathan Mitchell's atrocious briefing and argument failed to put meat on the bones of this idea, so SCOTUS will have to improvise a justification," Stern added, referring to the Trump attorney who argued the case.
Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's three liberals, also expressed "deep skepticism that a single state should be able to decide who can 'be president,'" he noted. "In my view this argument is as good as over. A majority will hold that individual states can't enforce Section 3 against the president, at least without congressional approval."
Currently, Republicans have a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, while Democrats narrowly control the Senate, though the November elections could change that.
While voters and groups in several other states have launched similar legal battles to disqualify Trump, the only other successful one so far was in Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, cited statute and the evidence of Trump's conduct to determine his name should not be on the ballot. Trump appealed the Maine disqualification, but a state judge in January deferred a decision in the case, citing the looming Supreme Court ruling.
"People from across the political spectrum and from all walks of life—from former members of Congress to constitutional scholars to everyday Americans—have come together in this exceptional and fragile moment in the history of American democracy to reinforce the Constitution's very purpose in safeguarding our democracy from insurrectionists," CREW president Noah Bookbinder said in a statement after the hearing.
Anderson, also weighing in post-arguments, said that "we stand here today not just as voters, but as defenders of the principles that define our democracy."
"Our fight to uphold the integrity of our electoral process is not about partisan politics; it's about preserving the very ideals for which our forefathers fought," she added. "Donald Trump's actions on January 6th stand in direct opposition to those sacred ideals and today, we stand before the Supreme Court seeking justice to ensure that no one, regardless of their party or popularity, is above accountability."
Former White House adviser Peter Navarro must go to prison despite any pending appeals, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
In a 12-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta denied Navarro's request after he was sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee.
"In his sentencing memorandum, Defendant requested release pending appeal if the court imposed a term of prison," Mehta wrote. "Defendant raises four grounds to support his motion for release pending appeal. As explained below, because Defendant has not shown that any of those issues will pose a 'substantial question of law' on appeal, his motion is denied."
Mehta said that former President Donald Trump's executive privilege claim "likely will not lead to reversal of his conviction for refusing to appear for testimony." The judge pointed out that Trump was not a sitting president when he invoked executive privilege.
"Thus, even if the former President had invoked privilege, at a minimum, such invocation did not reach testimony pertaining non-official acts," Mehta explained. "Therefore, no authority excused his complete non-appearance before the Select Committee."
"For the foregoing reasons, Defendant’s request for release pending appeal is denied," the ruling concluded. "Unless this Order is stayed or vacated by the D.C. Circuit, Defendant shall report to the designated Bureau of Prisons ('BOP') facility on the date ordered by the BOP."
Legal analysts anticipate that Colorado lost at the U.S. Supreme Court in the arguments for Trump v. Anderson on Thursday.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann pointed to the way that the questions were going and anticipated the ruling would be a "win" even if the court's Democrat-appointed judges affirmed Colorado's decision.
"Colorado will lose, with the only issue being whether a single Justice will dissent. Tough and smart questions by the Justices, including the 3 in the liberal wing," he posted on social media.
"The Nation's" legal analyst, Elie Mystal, agreed, "The case is submitted. I think it's 9-0 Trump on the ballot. I'm going to scream into the void and then write. Thank you all for joining me on yet another journey of 'How Democracies Die' that took an unexpected detour into 'Why Democrats Fail.'"
"My bet: Between 7-2 and 9-0 for the very specific proposition that states can’t unilaterally disqualify candidates running for President on the ground that they engaged in insurrection," said University of Texas Law School professor Steve Vladeck.
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal argued that the Colorado team was horrific in the way that they argued. One problem he had was that the argument lacked an appeal to the exact language in the Constitution's clause barring insurrectionists from holding federal office.
"So, you need to say about the other side, you are gutting the Constitution, Donald Trump," Katyal continued. "You need to say to the court, look, for years, you have staked yourself on a strict construction of the document, on the original intent of the document. The original intent was to clear against Donald Trump. You need to be using their methodology that they have used to say, look, you have to be consistent with what you have said before. We heard none of that today. I'm not sure why. That makes it, frankly, a really easy case for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide in favor of Donald Trump."
He said that this line of reasoning gets the court out of the requirement of determining whether Trump committed insurrection and can instead use technicalities to keep him on the ballot.
"You could imagine a world in which the gravity of the court, the center of the court, that's the Chief [Justice John Roberts], Justice [Amy Coney] Barrett, [Brett] Kavanaugh saying, look, our principal is to reduce the temperature about the Supreme Court, stay out of decisions wherever we can," he said. "The way to do that, the path forward, is to say Trump wins; the 14th Amendment is not self-executing because of the technical argument. You need Congress to act."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who once went a full decade without speaking during oral arguments, asked the first question Thursday as the high court heard a case challenging former President Donald Trump's eligibility to run for a second White House term.
But Thomas, whose initial question focused on whether the 14th Amendment is "self-executing," shouldn't even be involved in the case, progressive watchdogs and other observers argued, given his wife Ginni's role in far-right efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—an effort that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
"The Supreme Court is facing its most significant electoral test since Bush v. Gore. The stakes are high, and the American people should be able to trust that this case will be decided without outside influence," Tishan Weerasooriya, senior associate of policy and political affairs at Stand Up America, said in a statement shortly before oral arguments kicked off Thursday.
"Justice Thomas should recuse himself from this monumental case," Weerasooriya added. "Ginni Thomas' involvement in the seditious conspiracy that led to the January 6 insurrection is a bald-faced conflict of interest. If Thomas refuses, it will not only be a blatant denial of impartial review but also a rejection of Chief Justice [John] Roberts' recently issued Code of Conduct."
That code states that "a justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the justice's impartiality might reasonably be questioned." A University of Massachusetts at Amherst survey released Wednesday found that 64% of U.S. voters believe Thomas should recuse from any case related to the 2020 election given his wife's role in trying to subvert the results.
Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argued that Thomas' failure to recuse from the case on Trump's eligibility "is a giant middle finger to American democracy."
"It's no wonder public trust in the court is terrible. Corrupt Thomas should resign."
The case in question, Trump v. Anderson, stems from the Colorado Supreme Court's December ruling that Trump engaged in insurrection and is thus disqualified from running for federal office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Trump quickly appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to an expedited review of the case amid the 2024 presidential primaries.
Just over a week after the Colorado Supreme Court handed down its ruling, Maine's secretary of state moved to disqualify Trump from the 2024 primary ballot—a decision that was paused by a state judge pending the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. Anderson.
As oral arguments in the case proceeded Thursday, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) wrote that "Clarence Thomas is participating in a Supreme Court hearing today on Donald Trump's eligibility after trying to overthrow the government even though Thomas' wife conspired to help Trump."
"It's no wonder public trust in the court is terrible," Pascrell continued. "Corrupt Thomas should resign."
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed an amicus brief in Trump v. Anderson supporting the former president's disqualification, noted in an analysis released earlier this week that Colorado and Maine are "the only two states that have substantively grappled with whether the 14th Amendment bars Trump from the ballot and reached a final decision based on the merits."
"Other individuals and groups have brought ballot eligibility challenges in other states across the country, some of which are pending and many of which have failed," CREW observed. "None of the cases that have been dismissed reached the stage where a court heard evidence and ruled on the merits, which includes questions of whether Trump is an insurrectionist and whether the 14th Amendment applies in his case."
A Republican senator was sent scurrying away from his own news interview outside the Supreme Court Thursday when an anti-Donald Trump protester decided to explain, quite loudly, her understanding of the word “insurrection.”
The angry protester slapped back at Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) after he spoke out in support of Trump — whose eligibility to appear on presidential ballots was being argued before the nation's highest court — and tried to compare the riots on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to migrants who daily cross the southern border.
“Why wouldn’t we call 10 million people crossing the border illegally an insurrection?” Marshall demanded. “Why wouldn’t we call the situation when we take away your freedoms of speech, your freedoms of religion, your freedoms to bear arms, why wouldn’t we call that an insurrection as well?”
This argument against the 14th Amendment insurrectionist ban challenge to the former president's candidacy did not sit well with the woman standing behind Marshall with a “Remove Trump” sign.
“To try and like confuse people by trying to say the stuff on the border is an insurrection, it makes you sound like an idiot,” the woman declares, as Marshall scurried to pick up a paper he left on his podium. “When you're a white man in this country you have so much power, you don't even have to be educated, you can just say s---.”
The woman’s speech began with a question — “What kind of education have you had sir?” — that she sought to rectify with a lesson on recent history.
“When you have tens of thousand of people attack the... Capitol, people are killed because of that, beaten?” the woman said. “That was an insurrection.”
Four people died on Jan. 6.
Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was shot trying to enter the House Chamber; Kevin Greeson died of a heart attack, Rosanne Boyland died of an accidental overdose and Benjamin Philips died of a stroke, it was later determined.
Police officers who died in the weeks that followed include Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was attacked by a mob, and Officers Jeffrey Smith and Howard S. Liebengood, who both died by suicide.
“Trump called it,” the woman told Marshall. “You know it."
With Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel reportedly heading for the exit just one year after having won her fourth term, RNC insiders for the most part praised her tenure but also noted that she let her loyalty to Donald Trump get in the way of getting other Republicans elected to down-ballot offices.
According to a report from Politico, McDaniel is learning the hard way that loyalty to Donald Trump is a "one-way street" in more than just his recent comments that changes need to be made at the RNC as the 2024 November election looms.
"It wasn’t enough, and under pressure from Trump, McDaniel decided it was time to step aside," the report states. "After a nearly two-hour meeting at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Trump posted that McDaniel was a 'friend' but that he would be 'making a decision the day after the South Carolina Primary' on 'RNC growth.'"
According to one RNC member -- who also told Politico that Trump "is only loyal to himself" and "he’ll turn on his kids if he has to" -- McDaniels is not fully responsible for the organization stands as of today, stating, "None of that stuff is her fault.”
Another chimed in with, "I think she’s just a very loyal person — she was loyal to Trump, she was loyal to her staff. I like her. … I think she is a good person,” before adding, "I think she was a failed chair.”
One RNC official agreed by stating her record "speaks for itself," and then added, "We lost the House, the Senate and the White House while she was chair — the only time it’s ever happened in the history of the RNC.”
Former President Donald Trump blamed people in Colorado who "really hate" him as the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments on a case that could remove him from the state's ballot.
Trump spoke on Thursday before the nation's high court was set to hear oral arguments in a case that could see him disqualified from the ballot because he allegedly participated in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
"We have sort of a rogue person working in Colorado that, you know, wants to take the election on by that person's self. And it's very inappropriate," Trump told radio host John Fredericks. "Very few people go to the other side, unless they truly hate me."
"They want to have, you know, the Supreme Court rule or vote to take me out of the race," he continued. "It's a terrible thing. I think it's terrible, but it's important that a very powerful decision be made on this."
Trump cited his poll numbers as proof he should be allowed to remain on the ballot.
"Leading by these massive numbers, and then you say, oh, well, that person can't run," he opined. "That would be so bad for democracy. That would be so bad for our country, and I can't imagine that would happen."
Donald Trump's lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, had a rough start to the arguments in Trump v. Anderson on Thursday before the U.S. Supreme Court, legal analysts noted.
Live-tweeting the proceeding, several attorneys couldn't help but notice that Mitchell was struggling.
The Nation's legal analyst Elie Mystal explained that Mitchell was caught by Justice Elena Kagan making an argument that wasn't based on the text of the Constitution.
"You're not making a constitutional argument. You're making a statutory pre-emption argument... is that right?" she asked.
Mystal noted that "one of the fun things about the Trump argument is that it's actually *not* grounded in constitutional law."
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Kagan in the argument, which is when Mitchell was forced to admit that his argument wasn't a constitutional one.
Mystal pointed out that Justice Samuel Alito came "to the rescue" by "restating Mitchell's argument for him since he was flailing."
Norm Eisen, former ethics czar and longtime legal analyst, observed the same.
"Alito arguing that self-executing is a misnomer here -- throwing Trump lawyer a lifeline," he posted on social media.
Jed Shugerman, a Boston University professor, also pointed out that "Alito picks back up on Mitchell's argument that Colorado is impermissibly adding a qualification for office. The exchange isn't illuminating. It seems clear enough from the text of Section 3 that it's a disqualification from office, i.e. a new qualification."
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday schooled an MSNBC panelist who tried to argue too much attention is being paid to the Supreme Court hearing on Donald Trump's court battle to appear on the 2024 general election ballots.
Writer Anand Giridharadas suggested voters pinning their hopes on Trump's eligibility being denied under 14th Amendment's insurrectionist ban would be better off focusing on campaign efforts outside the courtroom.
"I think there has been, since 2015, a fantasy of getting rid of Trump through kind of investigations and inquests and criminal proceedings and this and that," Giridharadas said. "It is now nine years on and none of those have actually shown the ability to protect American democracy from him."
Giridharadas argued that voters should stop waiting for institutions "to save us" from another Trump presidency and warned his various court cases could serve as a distraction.
"We turn on the news and we're always talking about these investigations," Giridharadas said. "What we're not talking about is organizing that's happening in communities to actually try to build a coalition to defeat American fascism and the Big Lie. I think we are lulled into being like passive consumers of legal cases winding on, over which we have no control, instead of doing the thing over which we have immense control."
Given a chance to respond, Psaki argued that the Supreme Court arguments served as more than a distraction to Americans whose voices have historically been suppressed.
"It's important to remember the origin of the 14th Amendment; and Sherrilyn Ifill [president of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund] wrote a brief where they outlined this as a reminder that it was to protect the voices of those who are often suppressed, including the African-American community," said Psaki.
"It's important to talk about these cases, because it's important to remind voters out there in the country what Donald Trump tried to do which was to suppress exactly those kinds of voters."
Psaki concluded that the judicial system should rise above the politics Giridharadas would have Americans focus on, and ultimately ignore it.
"So the job of any legal system, the judicial system, is actually not to contemplate the politics, not that anyone here is suggesting that, it's to ignore that and apply the law," she said. "If you look at Donald Trump's argument, what they're arguing is that the insurrection didn't even happen, that he didn't participate in it, that it was three hours long and not that many people were armed and, therefore, it didn't happen. That's ludicrous on its face."
