October 26, 2023

Thursday, October 26, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Breaking News.

Associated Press.

The four-year deal, which still has to be approved by 57,000 union members at the company, could bring a close to the union’s series of strikes at targeted factories run by Ford, General Motors and Jeep maker Stellantis.

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Updates on the Hamas-Israeli War.

From Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

■ Israel has agreed to hold off on a Gaza ground invasion amid U.S. pressure, the Wall Street Journal reported, until U.S. forces can better bolster their defenses across the Middle East. Iran-proxy fighters have launched more than a dozen strikes toward U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria over the past week.

■ The U.S. is planning on sending its entire Iron Dome stockpile – including two batteries and more than 300 interceptors owned by the U.S. Army – to Israel as part of its efforts to lend military assistance following the Hamas attack, a U.S. source told Haaretz.

Iran and Hamas are cozy, but was Hamas training in Iran specific preparation for the October 7th massacre?

Hamas Fighters Trained in Iran Before Oct. 7 Attack.

TEL AVIV—In the weeks leading up to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, hundreds of the Palestinian Islamist militant group’s fighters received specialized combat training in Iran, according to people familiar with intelligence related to the assault.

Roughly 500 militants from Hamas and an allied group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, participated in the exercises in September, which were led by officers of the Quds Force, the foreign-operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the people said.

Senior Palestinian officials and Iranian Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, the head of Quds Force, also attended, they said.

More than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed Oct. 7 by Hamas fighterswho poured across the border from the Gaza Strip. Scores of others were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza, where they are being held hostage.

Hamas attackers used aerial drones to disable Israeli observation posts and high-tech surveillance equipment. Some used paragliders to fly into Israel. Others rode on motorcycles, commonly used by Iranian paramilitary groups but not by Hamas until Oct. 7. 

U.S. officials said Iran has regularly trained militants in Iran and elsewhere, but they have no indications of a mass training right before the attack. U.S. officials and the people familiar with the intelligence said they had no information to suggest Iran conducted training specifically to prepare for the events of Oct. 7.

On Wednesday, Israel’s military offered some of its most blunt comments yet on Iran’s role in aiding Hamas and other militant groups.

“Before the war, Iran directly assisted Hamas with money, training and weapons and technological know-how,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman. “Even now, Iran is helping Hamas with intelligence.”

Since the Hamas attack, Israel has waged a major air campaign, striking thousands of targets in Gaza and has been preparing for a ground campaign. The country has said its aim is to dismantle Hamas, and end its rule in Gaza.

The conflict risks spilling over into a regional confrontation with Iran and the web of anti-Israel Islamist militant groups that it backs, which spreads from Yemen and Iraq to Syria and Lebanon. And the U.S. has moved forces, including two carrier battle groups, into the region.

Israel and the U.S. have sought to highlight Iran’s role in supporting Hamas and other groups hostile to Israel, including the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which has been engaging in sporadic exchanges of fire with Israeli troops on Israel’s northern border.

But, with the specter of a wider war looming, the U.S. has said it has no evidence that Iran was directly involved in planning or approving the Oct. 7 attack.

The Wall Street Journal, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, has reported that the Quds Force helped plan the attack and agreed that it could go ahead at a meeting in Beirut on Oct. 2 with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. An adviser to the Syrian government and a European official gave the same account of Iran’s involvement.

These accounts of the Oct. 2 meeting have been disputed by senior U.S. officials and others familiar with intelligence surrounding the attacks. Several U.S. officials said Washington has “compelling” intelligence indicating that Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas assault.

“The information that we have does not show a direct connection to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 as it relates to Iran. Again, that’s something that we’ll continue to look closely at,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said last week. 

Hamas officials have boasted of Iran’s support since the attacks. “Hezbollah and Iran supported us with weapons, expertise, and technology,” Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas official in Doha, said in an interview with Al Arabiya.

As the attack started on Oct. 7, according to Western and Egyptian officials, Hamas contacted IRGC and Hezbollah officials abroad to inform them that the assault had started.

Since then, the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas and other militias in the region say they have been in close contact to coordinate their activities. Quds Force commander Qaani was in recent days in Lebanon to consult with Hamas and Hezbollah officials, militant leaders and an IRGC adviser said.

The IRGC reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It operates independently of Iran’s elected government and its conventional military, with its own navy and business operations.

Hamas officials have boasted of Iran’s support since the attacks. “Hezbollah and Iran supported us with weapons, expertise, and technology,” Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas official in Doha, said in an interview with Al Arabiya.

As the attack started on Oct. 7, according to Western and Egyptian officials, Hamas contacted IRGC and Hezbollah officials abroad to inform them that the assault had started.

Since then, the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas and other militias in the region say they have been in close contact to coordinate their activities. Quds Force commander Qaani was in recent days in Lebanon to consult with Hamas and Hezbollah officials, militant leaders and an IRGC adviser said.

The IRGC reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It operates independently of Iran’s elected government and its conventional military, with its own navy and business operations.

“This sort of operation is very difficult to do without Hezbollah and IRGC support. Hamas does not have the capability to do that,” Golkar said.

Norman Roule, who was the top U.S. intelligence official for Iran from 2008-2017, said the IRGC has long been involved with training, funding and supporting groups in the region, but said that didn’t mean Iran directed the Oct. 7 attacks. “Rarely is it necessary for Iran to involve its personnel,” he said.

Hamas, an Islamist offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, has had an up and down relationship with Iran, a Shia Muslim theocracy.

The Revolutionary Guard backed Hamas as the Palestinian group emerged as an important militant organization fighting Israel in the 1980s, providing weapons and funding, European and Israeli officials have previously said.

The relationship broke down around 2012 when Hamas sided in the Syrian civil war against President Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian ally. The Islamic Republic cut all funding to Hamas.

In 2017, Hamas said it was receiving funding again from Tehran. At that stage, the IRGC expanded its military support, providing training and components that enabled Hamas to assemble its own drones and missiles to target Israel. (WSJ).

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Do the plea deals in Georgia help or hurt Fani Willis’ case against Trump?

3 very different opinions.

With Plea Deals in Georgia Trump Case, Fani Willis Is Building Momentum.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., is riding a wave of momentum from a string of guilty pleas in the election interference case that involves former President Donald J. Trump.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., had no shortage of doubters when she brought an ambitious racketeering case in August against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies. It was too broad, they said, and too complicated, with so many defendants and multiple, crisscrossing plot lines for jurors to follow.

But the power of Georgia’s racketeering statute in Ms. Willis’s hands has become apparent over the last six days. Her office is riding a wave of momentum that started with a guilty plea last Thursday from Sidney K. Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who had promised in November 2020 to “release the kraken” by exposing election fraud, but never did.

Then, in rapid succession, came two more guilty pleas — and promises to cooperate with the prosecution and testify — from other Trump-aligned lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis. While Ms. Powell pleaded guilty only to misdemeanor charges, both Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis accepted a felony charge as part of their plea agreements.

A fourth defendant, a Georgia bail bondsman named Scott Hall, pleaded guilty last month to five misdemeanor charges.

With Mr. Trump and 14 of his co-defendants still facing trial in the case, the question of the moment is who else will flip, and how soon. But the victories notched thus far by Ms. Willis and her team demonstrate the extraordinary legal danger that the Georgia case poses for the former president.

And the plea deals illustrate Ms. Willis’s methodology, wielding her state’s racketeering law to pressure smaller-fry defendants to roll over, take plea deals, and apply pressure to defendants higher up the pyramids of power.

The strategy is by no means unique to Ms. Willis. “This is how it works,” said Kay L. Levine, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to large-scale racketeering and conspiracy prosecutions. “People at the lower rungs are typically offered a good deal in order to help get the big fish at the top.”

But Ms. Willis, 52, is particularly well-versed in this aspect of the prosecutor’s art. She used the same strategy a decade ago, as the lead prosecutor in a high-profile racketeering case against Atlanta public school educators accused of cheating to improve their students’ standardized test scores.

In that case, 35 people were indicted, but more than 20 of them took plea deals.

A number of the educators who went to trial were convicted, although the most prominent defendant — Beverly Hall, who had been the Atlanta schools superintendent — died of breast cancer before her case was resolved.

Ms. Willis has been using a similar tactic in another attention-getting racketeering case, this one involving Jeffery Williams, the rapper who performs as Young Thug, and 27 others charged with gang activity. In that case, too, a number of lower-level defendants have entered plea deals to get out of jail, avoid a lengthy and costly trial, or both, though it remains to be seen whether Ms. Willis will win any convictions at trial.

The election case lays out a number of ways that prosecutors say Mr. Trump and his co-defendants sought to overturn his narrow loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Georgia in 2020. The spate of deals are bad news for Mr. Trump, giving the prosecution access to witnesses who plotted and carried out key aspects of his legal and public relations strategies as he tried to cling to power.

The deals will also likely prove harmful to the cases of other major defendants, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was the most prominent lawyer working on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the election. At the time, he often appeared with Ms. Ellis and Ms. Powell at his side. (Notably, Mr. Giuliani, who made his name as a federal prosecutor by successfully using racketeering laws, has derided the case as “a ridiculous application of the racketeering statute.”)

Another lawyer-defendant, John Eastman, worked with Mr. Chesebro on a plan to deploy fake Trump electors in swing states.

On Tuesday, Steven H. Sadow, the lead lawyer for Mr. Trump in the Georgia case, tried to put the best face on the latest plea deal.

“For the fourth time, Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed the RICO charge in return for a plea to probation,” he said in a statement. “What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for D.A. Willis.”

Persuading a jury of 12 people to convict Mr. Trump, a leading 2024 presidential candidate and the most polarizing figure in American politics, is a far different challenge than securing plea agreements, especially ones like the four so far that do not involve jail time.

Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer for Mr. Eastman, has said that prosecutors will be hard pressed to get a dozen jurors “to convict anybody, because I think in any jurisdiction, even Washington D.C., you will have at least one holdout.”

That prediction may apply only to Mr. Trump, as a report drafted by a special grand jury that heard testimony in the case last year foreshadowed.

In many of the panel’s votes on whether to recommend charges in the case — particularly regarding Mr. Trump — a single juror voted no. Ms. Willis will need a unanimous jury verdict to get a conviction in court. (While there were typically 21 jurors voting in the special grand jury meetings, there was no defense to argue the other side.)

Ms. Willis’s charging strategy — to cast a wide net and seek the indictment of not only Mr. Trump, but also of allies of his ranging from obscure figures to political celebrities — stands in marked difference to that of Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who has brought federal charges against Mr. Trump for his efforts to retain power after the 2020 election.

The Georgia case was bound to be more unwieldy. But the succession of plea deals in recent days underscores the logic behind indicting so many others, Ms. Levine said, “because it helps light a fire under their decision about whether to cooperate.”

She added: “I think there was clearly a lot of thought that went into, ‘What would it take to get these people who were part of the entourage — part of the, you know, the set of allies of the Trump loyalist team, to get them to cooperate?’”

Though Ms. Willis charged 19 people, a smaller number of core defendants may be less likely to get enticing plea deal offers. Those include Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, who each face 13 charges, as well as Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and David Shafer, the former head of the Georgia Republican Party.

Mr. Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, a defendant who was a senior Justice Department official, are also seen as among the higher-value defendants.

For others, it is unclear what kind of deals might materialize.

David Shestokas, a lawyer for Stephen Lee, an Illinois pastor charged with helping to intimidate a Fulton County election worker and pressure her to falsely confess to ballot fraud, said on Tuesday that his client would consider any deal offered to him. But he added that Mr. Lee “remains steadfast in having done nothing wrong.”

The deal taken by Ms. Powell was a blow to her reputation, Mr. Shestokas said, and “a horrible, horrible outcome.” (By Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, New York Times).

Trump’s Lawyers Are Going Down. Is He?

Fulton County Courthouse, Georgia.

On Tuesday morning, Jenna Ellis became the third Donald Trump-allied lawyer to plead guilty in Fulton County, Ga., to state criminal charges related to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. She joins Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro in similar pleas, with each of them receiving probation and paying a small fine, and each of them cooperating with the prosecution in its remaining cases against Trump and his numerous co-defendants.

The Ellis, Powell and Chesebro guilty pleas represent an advance for both the state election prosecution in Georgia and the federal election prosecution in Washington. While their guilty pleas came in the Georgia case (they’re not charged in the federal prosecution, though Powell and Chesebro have been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case), the information they disclose could be highly relevant to Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump.

Perhaps as important, or even more important, the three attorneys’ admissions may prove culturally and politically helpful to those of us who are attempting to break the fever of conspiracy theories that surround the 2020 election and continue to empower Trump today. At the same time, however, it’s far too soon to tell whether the prosecution has made real progress on Trump himself. The ultimate importance of the plea deals depends on the nature of the testimony from the lawyers, and we don’t yet know what they have said — or will say.

To understand the potential significance of these plea agreements, it’s necessary to understand the importance of Trump’s legal team to Trump’s criminal defense. As I’ve explained in various pieces, and as the former federal prosecutor Ken White explained to me when I guest-hosted Ezra Klein’s podcast, proof of criminal intent is indispensable to the criminal cases against Trump, both in Georgia and in the federal election case. While the specific intent varies depending on the charge, each key claim requires proof of conscious wrongdoing — such as an intent to lie or the “intent to have false votes cast.”

One potential element of Trump’s intent defense in the federal case is that he was merely following the advice of lawyers. In other words, how could he possess criminal intent when he simply did what his lawyers told him to do? He’s not the one who is expected to know election laws. They are.

According to court precedent that governs the federal case, a defendant can use advice of counsel as a defense against claims of criminal intent if he can show that he “made full disclosure of all material facts to his attorney” before he received the advice, and that “he relied in good faith on the counsel’s advice that his course of conduct was legal.”

There is a price, though, for presenting an advice-of-counsel defense. The defendant waives attorney-client privilege, opening up both his oral and written communications with his lawyers to scrutiny by a judge and a jury. There is no question that a swarm of MAGA lawyers surrounded Trump at each step of the process, much like a cloud of dirt surrounds the character Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons, but if the lawyers themselves have admitted to engaging in criminal conduct, then that weakens his legal defense. This was no normal legal team, and their conduct was far outside the bounds of normal legal representation.

Apart from the implications of the advice-of-counsel defense, their criminal pleas, combined with their agreements to cooperate, may grant us greater visibility into Trump’s state of mind during the effort to overturn the election. The crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege prevents a criminal defendant from shielding his communications with his lawyers when those communications were in furtherance of a criminal scheme. If Ellis, Powell or Chesebro can testify that the lawyers were operating at Trump’s direction — as opposed to Trump following their advice — then that testimony could help rebut Trump’s intent defense.

At the same time, I use words like “potential,” “if,” “may” and “could” intentionally. We do not yet know the full story that any of these attorneys will tell. We only have hints. Ellis said in court on Tuesday, for example, that she “relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” Indeed, Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has indicted two other attorneys with “many more years of experience” — Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. If Ellis’s court statement is any indication, it’s an ominous indicator for both men.

If you think it’s crystal clear that the guilty pleas are terrible news for Trump — or represent that elusive “we have him now” moment that many Trump opponents have looked for since his moral corruption became clear — then it’s important to know that there’s a contrary view. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a respected former federal prosecutor, argued that Powell’s guilty plea, for example, was evidence that Willis’s case was “faltering” and that her RICO indictment “is a dud.”

“When prosecutors cut plea deals with cooperators early in the proceedings,” McCarthy writes, “they generally want the pleading defendants to admit guilt to the major charges in the indictment.” Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. Ellis and Chesebro both pleaded to a single felony charge, but they received punishment similar to Powell’s. McCarthy argues that Willis allowed Powell to plead guilty to a minor infraction “because minor infractions are all she’s got.” And in a piece published Tuesday afternoon, McCarthy argued that the Ellis guilty plea is more of a sign of the “absurdity” of Willis’s RICO charge than a sign that Willis is closing in on Trump, a notion he called “wishful thinking.”

There’s also another theory regarding the light sentences for the three lawyers. When Powell and Chesebro sought speedy trials, they put the prosecution under pressure. As Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia defense attorney, wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, it was “extremely smart” to seek a quick trial. “They got the best deal,” Fleischman said, “because their lawyers picked the best strategy.”

As a general rule, when evaluating complex litigation, it is best not to think in terms of legal breakthroughs (though breakthroughs can certainly occur) but rather in terms of legal trench warfare. Think of seizing ground from your opponent yard by yard rather than mile by mile, and the question at each stage isn’t so much who won and who lost but rather who advanced and who retreated. Willis has advanced, but it’s too soon to tell how far.

The guilty pleas have a potential legal effect, certainly, but they can have a cultural and political effect as well. When MAGA lawyers admit to their misdeeds, it should send a message to the Republican rank and file that the entire effort to steal the election was built on a mountain of lies. In August, a CNN poll found that a majority of Republicans still question Joe Biden’s election victory, and their doubts about 2020 are a cornerstone of Trump’s continued political viability.

Again, we can’t expect any single thing to break through to Republican voters, but just as prosecutors advance one yard at a time, opposing candidates and concerned citizens advance their cultural and political cases the same way. It’s a slow, painful process of trying to wean Republicans from conspiracy theories, and these guilty pleas are an important element in service of that indispensable cause. They represent a series of confessions from the inner circle and not a heated external critique.

Amid this cloud of uncertainty, there is one thing we do know: With each guilty plea, we receive further legal confirmation of a reality that should have been plainly obvious to each of us, even in the days and weeks immediately following the election. Trump’s effort to overturn the election wasn’t empowered by conventional counsel providing sound legal advice. It was a corrupt scheme empowered by an admitted criminal cabal.(By David French, New York Times).

Jenna Ellis Guilty Plea Underscores the Absurdity of DA Fani Willis’s RICO Case.

Willis wildly overcharged the election-interference case and is now picking off some defendants on minor charges.

Former Trump 2020 campaign attorney Jenna Ellis pled guilty this morning in the Georgia election-interference case to a minor offense — aiding and abetting the provision of false information to the state — for which she will receive no jail time.

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has hyped her prosecution of Donald Trump, Ellis, and 17 others affiliated with the Trump campaign as a racketeering-conspiracy case, depicting the former president as the head of an organized-crime enterprise. I have contended that Willis does not have a RICO case under Georgia’s analogue to the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971. The throng Willis has indicted did not function as an identifiable criminal “enterprise” as defined in RICO, and she lacks a single criminal objective as to which she can say all 19 defendants agreed. (It is not a crime to seek to reverse an election result — indeed, Georgia law provides for legal challenges to election outcomes.)

What Willis has, instead, is evidence that some state criminal offenses — minor in comparison to those at issue in the typical RICO case — were committed in the course of the campaign’s schemes to overturn the 2020 election. Consistent with that, Ellis is now the fourth defendant to plead guilty in recent days. None has pled guilty to the RICO conspiracy that Willis alleged in Count One — the overarching “offense” that frames her prosecution.

Because all four guilty-plea defendants are now cooperating with the state, the lack of a RICO plea is telling: Ordinarily, prosecutors require the first cooperators in a major case to plead guilty to the major charges, offering them sentencing leniency in exchange for their testimony against other defendants. Those kinds of pleas convince the public that there is a strong case and put pressure on other defendants to plead guilty. But not only have none of Willis’s cooperators conceded that there was a RICO conspiracy, much less pled guilty to it; none of them faces even a single day of imprisonment.

After the indictment, I argued that the case against Ellis should be dismissed. Besides the deeply flawed RICO allegation, she was charged only with the Georgia crime of soliciting the commission of a crime. As Willis has pled it, I believe this charge (Count Two of the indictment) is constitutionally infirm. Willis’s theory is that Ellis and several others (Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Ray Smith) committed it by petitioning the Georgia state senate, at a subcommittee hearing on December 3, 2020, to appoint a Trump slate of electors (as an alternative to the Biden electors whom the state did certify after Biden narrowly won the popular vote in Georgia’s presidential election). The solicitation charge is untenable because (a) the Constitution guarantees the right of Americans to petition government, and (b) even if Georgia legislators had wrongly appointed an alternative slate of electors, which they didn’t, it would not have been a prosecutable crime.

As I noted in connection with Powell’s plea last week, she may have relevant testimony regarding Trump, but it’s not necessarily incriminating (in fact, at a White House meeting in mid-December 2020, Powell reportedly made a lunatic proposal that Trump seize state voting machines, which Trump actually rejected). Ellis, like Cheseboro, had direct communications with Giuliani; that may implicate the former New York mayor more deeply in the alleged provision of false information to state officials and the so-called fake electors scheme, but it does not necessarily implicate Trump. The former president appears to have dealt directly with Giuliani much more than with the other lawyers; he will undoubtedly claim that he was relying on his lawyers — such as Giuliani, Eastman, Powell, Cheseboro, and Ellis — to ensure the accuracy of information on which the campaign was relying.

Of course, if Ellis were to testify that she and the other lawyers knew the information they were peddling was false, that would be damaging to those lawyers — at least on a false-statements charge. As I detailed back in March, when Ellis was censured by the state supreme court in Colorado (where she is licensed to practice law), she admitted to making various public misrepresentations in claiming election irregularities on Twitter and various news programs.

The recent spate of pleas is being presented by DA Willis’s office and her champions in the press as a sign of prosecutorial momentum. But it would be more accurate to say that Willis wildly overcharged the case and is now picking off some defendants on minor charges — with no-incarceration sentences that hardly befit a grand conspiracy capable of bringing American democracy to the brink of destruction. (By Andrew McCarthy, National Review).

One more thing.

Fulton County D.A. has discussed plea deals with at least 6 more co-defendants.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks at a news conference at the Fulton County Government building on August 14, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia.

(CNN) – Fulton County prosecutors have discussed potential plea deals with at least six additional co-defendants charged alongside Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election, multiple sources tell CNN.

The strategy by District Attorney Fani Willis’ office is clear: get as many co-defendants as possible to flip on the former president, leaving Trump and perhaps a few close allies on the hot seat.

Pro-Trump lawyer Robert Cheeley is among those who have been offered a plea deal in the Georgia case but, according to his lawyer, turned it down.

“To say that we are currently in discussions with the DA’s office would be an inaccurate representation of what is going on. They made us an offer some time ago and we declined it,” Cheeley’s attorney Richard Rice said.

Former Coffee County, Georgia, elections supervisor Misty Hampton and former Trump campaign official Mike Roman have also been in contact with the DA’s office about a possible deal, multiple sources said.

CNN has confirmed that three other defendants have also discussed a potential plea deal with Fulton County prosecutors but agreed not to name them after sources expressed concerns about speaking about the case at this phase.

A source with knowledge of the Fulton County DA’s strategy tells CNN that it would be open to discussing plea deals with anyone, but there is little room for compromise when it comes to the charges against Trump.

To be clear, there is no indication that prosecutors or Trump’s legal team are interested in discussing a plea deal. That’s largely because any hypothetical proposal would be completely on Willis’ terms and would require him to plead guilty to all the charges he faces, effectively taking the prospect of meaningful negotiations off the table, the source with knowledge of the DA’s strategy told CNN. Trump has pleaded not guilty, denied any wrongdoing and continues to insist he won the election.

So far, four of the 19 defendants in the Fulton County case, including three attorneys directly involved in Trump’s bid to overturn the election results in Georgia, have already accepted a deal – in some cases pleading guilty to felony charges in exchange for a more lenient sentencing recommendation.

A consistent theme of those deals has been requiring defendants to write a letter of apology to the citizens of Georgia for their role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results but the content of those letters have demonstrated varying levels of remorse.

Former Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis presented her tearful apology during Tuesday’s plea hearing, reading her letter disavowing Trump’s efforts to upend the 2020 election results out loud in open court.

That stands in stark contrast to the written apology submitted by former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, whose letter only consisted of a single sentence, said a source who has seen the document, which has not been publicly released.

To date, prosecutors have not extended a plea deal to Rudy Giuliani, a key co-defendant in the case and one of Trump’s most outspoken attorneys in 2020, according to the first source with knowledge of the prosecution strategy. At this stage, prosecutors are unlikely to do so. Giuliani has long been considered as a top tier of Trump co-defendants due to his alleged role in orchestrating the sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and beyond.

Giuliani recently lost two his Georgia-based lawyers. CNN has reached out to a New York attorney who is still representing him.

As of now, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has also not been offered a plea deal in the Georgia case, a separate source with knowledge of his specific case in Georgia told CNN.

Meadows testified to the grand jury and spoke to investigators in the federal investigation by special counsel Jack Smith. He is also still trying to move his state charges in Georgia to federal court with the hope it may improve his chances in the case.

John Eastman, who is also considered one of Trump’s most high-profile co-defendants, has not been offered a plea deal either, his lawyer told CNN. Eastman urged Georgia state lawmakers to appoint a group of alternate GOP electors to replace the legitimate slate of Democratic electors.

Willis’ strategy centers around focusing on co-defendants listed at the top of the indictment and securing cooperation from those considered less important in the broader case, as she did in a 2014 RICO case when she successfully convicted significant participants in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Robert James, former district attorney in Georgia’s Dekalb County who has followed the 2020 election racketeering case closely, says this may be the beginning of a run of plea deals in Fulton County, as prosecutors aim to have defendants on board “as witnesses as opposed to adversaries.”

“It makes the prosecutors case stronger because you have witnesses and direct evidence, but it also gives co-defendants certainty and a certain level of safety knowing that they aren’t going to prison,” James said.

One source familiar with the strategy said it can be summed up by an adage used by prosecutors in Fulton County RICO cases:

“The first to squeal gets the deal.” (CNN).

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Trump fined again for violating gag order in New York State fraud case.

Here is the whole Tweet.

BREAKING: Donald Trump is dealt a humiliating blow in court as he's sworn in as a witness to answer for violating his gag order — immediately falls flat on his face — and gets slapped with a $10,000 fine.

This is just too good...

Trump was sworn in as a witness to respond to the obviously true allegations that he violated the gag order that prevents him from talking about court staff in his civil fraud case.

The disgraced former president took to the stand, straightened his wrinkled jacket, and sat down. He took the oath and then faced Judge Arthur Engoron.

The judge asked Trump if he had indeed said that he is a "very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him, perhaps even more partisan than he is."

"Yes," said Trump with a nod.

"To whom were you referring?" Engoron asked.

“You and Cohen,” Trump replied.

"Are you sure that you didn’t mean the person on the other side, my principal law clerk?" Engoron asked.

"Yes I’m sure," Trump said.

Trump left the stand after testifying for a brief three minutes. The judge, unconvinced, then slapped him with a $10,000 fine.

NBC News: A short time after Trump was fined in his civil fraud trial, he got up and stormed out of the courtroom with Secret Service agents chasing after him.

The move was not expected and appeared to surprise even his attorneys. Gasps could be heard within the courtroom.

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The Republicans finally elect a Speaker.

Here’s some background too.

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries handed Mike Johnson of Louisiana the Speaker’s Gavel. Johnson is now 2nd in line to the Presidency.

Republicans have elected Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., to be speaker of the House, ending a three-week vacancy that brought legislative work to a halt and plunged the conference into disarray.

Johnson was the first of four Republican nominees who could secure enough support from within his party to win a majority of votes on the House floor.

Johnson will take office with just over three weeks before government funding expires on Nov. 17, and a week after President Biden requested a $106 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine, border security funding and other foreign policy goals. He will face the same challenge that ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., did ahead of an earlier funding deadline: how to govern a fractious conference that includes conservative hardliners and members in swing seats with a razor-thin majority. The Supreme Court ultimately said Texas had no legal standing to sue.

Who is Mike Johnson?

Johnson is currently the vice chair of the House Republican Conference. It is a lower-tier elected leadership position. Johnson is also known within the conference as the former chair of the Republican Study Committee, a large group of fiscal conservatives.

He also served on the team that defended Former President Donald Trump in his first impeachment inquiry. Johnson voted against certifying the 2020 election results, and was one of the members of Congress who filed an amicus brief in 2020 in support of a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in four key swing states that helped Joe Biden win. The lawsuit cited widespread fraud, which did not occur.

How did we get here?

Johnson was nominated by House Republicans late Tuesday after another chaotic day on Capitol Hill. Earlier Tuesday, Republicans had selected Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., to be their nominee, but Emmer withdrew from the race hours later after failing to win 217 votes within the conference. Emmer struggled to win the support of conservative hardliners, who favored Rep. Jim Jordan, the conference's previous pick. His bid was essentially doomed after former President Trump called him a "RINO" on his social media platform, Truth Social, writing that Emmer was "totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters," and supporting him would be a "tragic mistake." Trump ally Steve Bannon also attacked Emmer on his podcast Tuesday, calling him "essentially a Democrat."

The mood around Johnson's nomination was far lighter than previous ones. Republicans held a brief, celebratory press conference in the room where lawmakers had huddled for their closed-door, secret ballot nominations. Members chanted "Mike" as reporters tried to ask questions.

Johnson was able to thread a needle that previous speaker candidates could not: The initial nominee, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., could not win support of conservative hardliners that preferred Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. Then Jordan, the party's second nominee, could not win over a bloc of members opposed to his candidacy – a mix of veteran appropriators concerned about his record on government spending bills, members from districts Biden won in 2020, and allies of Scalise and McCarthy upset over how they were treated.

Johnson, a Christian conservative, had the bonafides to win over the hardliners, without the baggage that tanked Jordan's candidacy. Jordan is one of the most fervently far-right members of the House Republican conference, and was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus. He gained a national profile as one of former President Trump's biggest defenders during his two impeachments. He has voted against government spending deals, bipartisan farm bills, and emergency aid packages, and was part of a group of Republicans pushing to defund Obamacare back in 2013 in a fight that led to a government shutdown.

Johnson shares Jordan's conservative views and allegiance to former President Trump, but has a less combative persona and more allies across the ideological spectrum.

Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., who voted to oust McCarthy and opposed Jordan's candidacy, predicted ahead of the vote that Johnson would be able to succeed because he "has the least enemies in this conference."

"In addition to being abundantly qualified, he just is one of those nice people that builds coalitions and doesn't make people unnecessarily mad," Buck said.

An immediate test for the new speaker

Johnson will immediately face an intense test of his leadership. The federal government will run out of money on Nov. 17 — just over three weeks from now. Kevin McCarthy's decision to work with Democrats to pass a short-term spending bill and avert a shutdown is what triggered the push to oust him from the speakership in the first place.

Congress is also set to consider supplemental funding for national security concerns, including border security funding and assistance for Ukraine and Israel. In the past, Johnson has opposed money for Ukraine.

In a letter to his colleagues announcing his candidacy for speaker, Johnson cited the attacks on Israel and emboldened adversaries as two major challenges facing the congress, but did not provide specifics on what he would or would not bring to the floor. He also cited border security and the national debt as urgent issues to be addressed.(NPR).

Here's who House Republicans elected:

- Johnson is the cosponsor of at least three bills that would ban abortion nationwide.

- He actually argued that if women just gave birth to more “able-bodied workers,” Republicans wouldn't have to try cutting Social Security and Medicare.

- He's an election denier who was against certification of Electoral College votes in one or more states.

- He voted against the January 6th Commission. He thinks Jan. 6th was a "legitimate protest."

- He supports Putin with his opposition to supporting Ukraine.

- He opposes same sex marriage.

- He says climate change is a hoax

Sample Mike Johnson tweet.

Touch 👇 to watch Democratic Virgin Islands Del. Stacey Plaskett toss a document at Mike Johnson at a House Judiciary Meeting in March 2023.

Touch 👇 to watch the new Speaker in further action.

Touch 👇 one more time.

Here 👇 is Speaker Johnson in 2016, saying we don’t live in a Democracy but a “Biblical Republic.” Touch to watch.

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Happening at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.

The Exhibition Making the Case for Art Without Men.

Loved in her day, the French painter Marie Laurencin depicted a dreamy vision of a world of women. What does she have to say to audiences now?

Marie Laurencin’s “Women With Dove,” 1919.

“If you want what is commonly accepted as ‘a straight answer to a straight question,’ don’t go to Marie Laurencin to get it,” Dorothy Todd, the British magazine editor, wrote in 1928. If answers from Laurencin — one of the most notable female painters in interwar France — were anything like her work, of course they wouldn’t be straight, but coy, queer, covert and very pretty.

“Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris,” a new exhibition that puts all of the artist’s coded qualities on full display, opened this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Born in 1883 in Paris, Laurencin became a central member of the artistic avant-garde, ruled by her friend Picasso, in early 1900s Paris. By the 1910s, she had broken free of the Cubist grip to create a distinctive, immediately recognizable aesthetic all her own, in macaron tints that collectors couldn’t get enough of. After her death, in 1956, her work fell into relative obscurity.

The Barnes show is the first major solo Laurencin exhibition in the United States in three decades, and the first exhibition of her work to highlight the obvious: Laurencin’s art is unavoidably queer, and noticeably lacking in men.

“Marie Laurencin is of the ‘lipstick lesbian’ variety: She constructs this very soft, feminine world that really spoke to viewers at the time,” said Libby Otto, an art history professor at the University at Buffalo. “And if you realize that, in her soft way, she’s constructing a world without men, of female harmony, there’s something pretty revolutionary in there as well.”

“Marie Laurencin,” a 1925 photograph by Man Ray.

Jenni Sorkin, a professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called Laurencin “a separatist,” describing the artist’s intentional and coded scenes. This show emphasizes Laurencin’s vision of a Sapphic world without men, which, Professor Sorkin noted, makes it the first of its kind in a major institution.

Of the dozens of faces featured in the Barnes exhibition, only two are male. One of her lovers, the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, makes the cut, as does Laurencin’s longtime art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Outside of portraiture (Laurencin reportedly charged more to paint both men and brunettes), male faces almost never appear in the hundreds of paintings that she created over the course of her 50-year career.

This is a central Laurencin paradox: She thrived in an art world that was almost entirely male by painting a world filled almost exclusively by women. When Laurencin pursued the French tradition of the 16th-century fête galante painting — pastoral scenes of courtship, flirtation and romantic intrigue epitomized by the work of Antoine Watteau — she excised all the men. There are animals and feminine mystique only, figures with her signature wide-set eyes with eerie hollow gazes, drenched in a creamy pastel palette.

“We’re always saying it’s diaphanous, because there’s a gauzy transparency to these paintings and everything is kind of floating,” said Cindy Kang, a curator at the Barnes. “This is an alternative world she draws you into that’s very dreamy.”

Simonetta Fraquelli, who curated the show with Dr. Kang, said that Laurencin wanted to create an alternative world for women. “But at the same time, she was very conscious of the male-dominated market,” she said. Laurencin made work that appealed to wealthy male buyers who might not interpret women embracing, kissing, and dancing as lesbian activities.

“She was adept at exploiting all the different constituents for her success,” Ms. Fraquelli added, invoking the “Barbie” movie, which similarly has no shame about either its sweet, girlie aesthetic or its profit-seeking ambitions.

“Perhaps we finally arrived at a moment that we can read Marie Laurencin in an interesting and robust way that we haven’t been able to in the past, due to her high femme style,” said Kenneth E. Silver, a professor of art history at New York University and the author of “Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925.”

“Portrait of Mademoiselle Chanel,” a 1923 oil on canvas by Laurencin.

According to Dr. Kang, part of the reason Laurencin is once again enticing the wider art world is that “there is clearly more of an openness to taking that femininity seriously.”

“One issue that Laurencin did have with being taken seriously by, say, feminist art historians in the ’90s is that she was so feminine,” she said. “They just couldn’t get it.” After Laurencin’s death, her work fell into an especially peculiar trap: It was dismissed for its femininity and criticized for its supposed lack of feminist sensibility.

The intentional absence of men should speak volumes about her priorities, but Laurencin’s paintings aren’t shouters. Their figures whisper; they operate in secrets. “They’re very private works,” said Katy Hessel, an art historian and the author of “The Story of Art Without Men.” “Her figures share some intimacy. You’re actually looking at someone’s private world, someone’s interior world.”

“It feels like this incredible utopian world,” she said.

Professor Otto noted Laurencin’s ambition to find “a new visual language for feminine beauty that’s not the same as it was in the 19th century or with the Impressionists.” “She’s really striving to come up with a new aesthetic language to express female modernity and embrace the feminine from the inside,” the professor said.

Dr. Kang and other scholars argue that Laurencin’s Sapphic themes were ignored or overlooked for so long precisely because of their femininity. One scholar, Milo Wippermann, calls the neglect of Laurencin’s queerness a matter of “femme invisibility.”

“To see her from the queer feminine perspective, you see a type of queer feminine gender performance and you start to see what Laurencin was actually doing,” Dr. Kang said. A male collector like Albert C. Barnes, who created the Barnes Foundation in 1922 and acquired five of Laurencin’s works, “could think of her as easily feminine, but there’s a surrealist edge. And I think we’re now positioned to start to see that out, as opposed to ignoring it.”

Laurencin’s fantasy visions were not restrained to the canvas. She designed sets and costumes for theater and ballet; she illustrated books; she created decorative plates and wallpaper (Gertrude Stein bought several rolls).

And in each medium, Laurencin’s weightless, floaty, femme aesthetic never wavers. Laurencin was so firm about her style that she declined to repaint a commissioned portrait of Coco Chanel, after Chanel complained it didn’t look enough like her. But Laurencin had no interest in adhering to straightforward likenesses. She was interested only in creating an entirely new world. (New York Times).

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