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By Charles Bethea
On December 3, 2020, Jen Jordan, then a Georgia state senator, won a text message. “See you at the Capitol,” read one. Rudy Giuliani is here and he’s bad. “Upon arrival, he discovered the halls of the state Capitol building in downtown Atlanta filled with Republican lawmakers, Trump supporters and Trump lawyers, plus Jenna Ellis and Giuliani. “They were taking selfies like it was a game,” Jordan, a Democrat, recalled recently. The crowd temporarily moved to a courtroom on the fourth floor. When he took his seat, Jordan saw correspondents from far-right media outlets, including One America News Network, The Epoch Times, and Newsmax. “Alarm bells rang when Trump tweeted for other people to sing live at OAN,” Jordan said.
What followed at the state Capitol surprised Jordan. “Giuliani took what looked like a mini-trial,” he recalls. He claimed that the presidential election was stolen from Trump, in part because of voter fraud in Georgia. He cited “irrefutable” evidence of unsupervised vote counting and machines that transferred votes to Joe Biden — claims that Jordan, who as a lawyer had helped oversee the election locally, knew they were false. An attorney on Giuliani’s team then played surveillance video from Fulton County’s main polling processing center, which showed election staff moving boxes of polls around a well-lit room. “I saw 4 suitcases come out from under the table,” the lawyer told the audience. “What do those ads do, a component of the other ads?And why do they only count them when the stall is empty?He said the number of polls in the expected suitcases “could easily be, and probably is, beyond the margin of victory in this race. “One of the two alleged perpetrators, he added, “had Ruby’s call on his shirt. “
It was Ruthherh Freeman, a black woman in her sixties, working for elections. Freeman had been raised in South Georgia through his grandmother, who worked in the tobacco fields; For years he ran a traveling clothing store, which he called LaRuthrough’s Unique Treacertains. Her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye (Shaye) Moss, who was the other alleged culprit in the video: “the girl with the blonde braids,” as one Giuliani colleague described it. She had helped administer state elections after graduating from college. Recently, Moss had been assigned a supervisory role, which she likened to “winning the approved ticket. “In 2020, when Freeman’s business slowed, Moss encouraged her to run for office. effort. Neither had much interest in politics, beyond making sure voting went smoothly on Election Day. Freeman recently told me about his resolution to participate in 2020: “I said, ‘You know what?I’m going to approve Fulton County assistance. ” »
Jordan told me: “I felt unhealthy in my abdomen for women. I knew it was stupid, but I’m sitting here watching the video and I’m thinking, “I don’t have an answer to that question. ” » » Others had it. “These are just normal election staff just doing their jobs,” Gabriel Sterling, an official in Georgia’s Republican secretary of state’s office, told an Atlanta television station the next morning. He also tweeted a fact check on the false claims. All the ballots were in popular bins, and the ones that were scanned after the observers left were only the ones that had been opened in front of them. Sterling concluded that the video “shows the overall processing of the vote. ” But Giuliani continued. A week later, he insisted that Freeman and Moss were “obviously passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine. ” (They were mints. ) The “Strategic Communications Plan” of Giuliani’s Presidential Legal Defense Team, an organization of lawyers Giuliani assembled to challenge the election results, said Freeman was “under arrest” and was part of a “ coordinated effort. ” dedicate voter/electoral fraud. (The plan said, in parentheses, “Confirmation of arrest and evidence needed. “) Elsewhere, Giuliani compared Freeman and Moss’s moves to a “bank robbery” and said they were “the most transparent evidence of vote theft that he has ever seen. ” Training”
Georgia election officials investigated the allegations and ultimately cleared Freeman and Moss of any wrongdoing. Both men also testified about the lies before the investigating House Select Committee on January 6. But Trump had already echoed Giuliani’s narrative: In his call to Georgia’s secretary of state in January 2021, he described Freeman as “a pro-criminal and con artist. ” Countless Americans followed his example. “You deserve to go to jail, you useless whore,” read a card sent to Freeman’s home. A threatening email arrived from kkk@protonmail. com. One caller used the N-word and told Moss’ teenage son that he “should support” his mother. People showed up at Moss’ grandmother’s house to attempt a citizen’s arrest. Following the FBI’s advice, the women went into hiding. Freeman stayed with friends, then in motels and Airbnbs. Moss, for his part, was hiding at home; His treatment had not been revealed. They both replaced his hairstyle, while Freeman began to further obscure his face with a mask and sunglasses. They finally stopped communicating with their friends. Moss was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Freeman felt lost. “My life is screwed,” he says. “All because of someone who made me explode. “
Freeman hired a lawyer, although it was unclear what could actually be done. But in 2021, he reached out to the lawyer through a nonprofit called Protect Democracy. The organization was founded many years ago by former lawyers in the White House office during the Obama administration. Protect Democracy, which now has more than one hundred workers and a budget of thirty million dollars, aims to preserve the United States from authoritarianism; He has worked on a variety of litigation, legislative, investigative, communications and software projects (including VoteShield, a platform that now monitors the integrity of voter registration knowledge in two dozen states) and has effectively advocated for adjustments to the electoral laws. One of its founders, Ian Bassin, recently won a MacArthur “genius” grant. But the P. S. has pursued its objectives in innovative ways. It recently began employing defamation law, designed to protect against reputational damage rather than forcible authoritarian takeovers, to fight the avalanche of misinformation. If the organization prosecuted intelligent liars, its members believed, they could save it from spreading harmful lies. This strategy has involved some advocates of lax speech. But Bassin believes that targeted defamation attacks can “produce a systemic rebalancing of incentives to promote the truth. ” In late 2021, Protect Democracy sued Giuliani and a dozen others for defamation of Freeman and Moss. Freeman, who quotes the Bible, told me that she feels helpless in the struggle. “I think about David and his slingshot,” he said. “He had five fancy stones. “
Bassin is about forty years old, wears glasses and has a trimmed beard. His demeanor is erudite and empathetic, well suited to the political panels and TED speaking stages on which he has recently appeared. He grew up in New York and attended Yale Law School, where he became friends with Republican Senator Josh Hawley. Bassin recalls that they debated the ideological talents of recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. “I liked Josh back then,” Bassin told me. “I thought he was a pious and principled conservative with whom he could have interesting debates. ” (Hawley, now one of the Senate’s top conservative members, pumped his fist in the air on Jan. 6 before the storming of the U. S. Capitol and said he had no regrets. He declined to be interviewed about that story. ) Afterwards After law school and an internship, Bassin joined Obama’s crusade. In South Carolina, he watched the number one effects of 2008 arrive in a crab shack along with black crusade volunteers, some of whom were descended from former slaves. When we first spoke last winter, Bassin was in his home office. He wiped away tears as he told the anecdote and then apologized for the digression.
Bassin worked for Obama’s White House counsel, where he helped guard against abuses of government power. His “Bible” was a trio of dusty binders, dating back to the Eisenhower era, that described how control workers deserve to operate, he said, “with intelligent religious respect for traditions. ” After leaving the White House, he spent a few years collaborating with activists on democracy and civil rights issues in Syria and Afghanistan. In early 2016, believing that American policy was moving in the right direction, Bassin focused his attention on poverty in East Africa. On election night, as the presidential election approached, he became so angry that he kicked a box of folders and broke his foot. A few hours later, Bassin received an email from a former Obama administration colleague, wondering what they deserved to do. They shared the concerns of most Democrats that Trump would accelerate climate change, attack reproductive rights and destroy the social safety net. “But those armies were already on the ground,” Bassin told me; other people were already fighting those battles. Instead, he and a small organization from the former White House and the Department of Justice. lawyers. The lawyers focused on Trump’s evident preference for ignoring long-standing norms of the presidency, such as a personal security firm instead of the Secret Service, the regulatory state that must follow its critics and the legal responsibility of Muslims to register. in a database. “It wasn’t transparent what existing teams could do to prevent American democracy from sliding toward something authoritarian,” Bassin told me.
In one of the first strategy meetings, someone talked about Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, who had rolled back democratic criteria in that country. Bassin learned that American democracy has been eroding the same way he has for years, thanks to manipulation, the collapse of local news, the rise of for-profit social media and negative partisanship. An effective demagogue can provoke what Harvard’s Steven Levitsky has called “competitive authoritarianism,” in which an autocrat gains strength in multiparty elections and then dismantles democracy from within. This dismantling has occurred steadily in Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere: the expansion of executive power, the corruption of elections, the politicization of independent establishments like the courts and the military, the spread of disinformation. “We started organizing to mitigate those things,” Bassin told me. He and his colleagues chose the United to Protect Democracy call and pitched it with an initial investment from Women Donors Network and Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn. “I keep looking up the group’s mission and thinking it was a little overblown,” George Conway, the conservative lawyer and Trump critic, told me. “But no. It was premonitory.
Ultimately, Donald Trump embodies the broader authoritarian risk driving Protect Democracy’s work, but the nonprofit’s project is officially nonpartisan. The organization has hired former employees of Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, as well as veterans of Vanity Fair and the Department of Defense. “The greatest weapon of mass destruction is the risk to democracy itself,” said Alexandra Chandler, former head of the Department of Defense. The intelligence analyst told me that she joined the police. “And she came home. ” Stephanie Llanes, a teenage reggaeton artist in Puerto Rico before going to law school, remembers her first PD. off-site meeting. “I’m sitting across from a former Koch staffer,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that in any other context. But I learned that we were seeking to design what we need the country to be. John Paredes grew up in the Philippines, where in the 1980s his grandmother and his grandfather were sentenced to death by a military court for opposing dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (Their convictions were overturned when Marcos challenged). After completing his law studies in the United States, Paredes joined a giant firm. But then, he told me, “Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016” as president of the Philippines. “So Trump here. He knew what he had to do. He lately runs a police department. He is suing an organization of Trump supporters that, in 2020, surrounded a Biden-Harris crusade bus with dozens of trucks and obstructed its progress on a Texas highway.
P. S. is heavily involved in a high-stakes game of Whac-a-Mole. In early 2017, attention turned to Trump’s potential use of federal law enforcement to target his opponents. “Essentially, what Putin did to Alexei Navalny, still here,” Bassin told me. To protect themselves from the militarization of the D. O. J. , each and every one of the managers since Watergate has published a White House report-D. O. J. report. A policy of contacts to ensure, as Attorney General Jimmy Carter said in 1978, that “neither favor, nor tension, nor politics can influence the management of the law. “He had not yet revealed his policy for doing so. When Trump fired F. B. I. Director James Comey for investigating ties between Trump affiliates and Russian interference in the election, midway through Comey’s term, “that policy helped make it transparent that this is contrary to the precept of independent law enforcement,” Bassin told me.
In 2019, the P. D. convened a task force that compiled a short list of potential election crises, adding Election Day violence perpetrated through partisan outfits and officials who flagged false emergencies. (“A pandemic was one of the last cuts,” Chandler, the former Defense Department official, told me sadly. ) “This was about protecting the process, not a discussion about politics or party. ” Array Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security during the George administration. W. Bush and a member of the task force told me this. “This is a must when it comes to other people who are afraid of waste and are in a position to throw the garbage out with the bathwater rather than settle for defeat. ” One scenario the organization envisioned was that the General Services Administration would withhold the budget intended for a presidential transition; A few months later, the G. S. A. The appointee, Emily Murphy, attempted to do just that. Many of the task force’s recommendations were reflected in the Electoral Count Reform Act, which outlines how electoral votes are counted, to protect against electoral subversion.
filed legislative lawsuits alleging that in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump violated Washington, D. C. , law. which prohibits being complicit in attacks and assaults, as well as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, designed to prevent the political use of collective violence. and intimidation. In Florida, he attacked the partisan use of speech codes and e-book reading bans and, in Virginia, the disenfranchisement of others convicted of felonies. One of the group’s lawyers, Erica Newland, has long been dedicated to another type of project: imagining a second term for Trump. “There is Michael Flynn,” who worked as Trump’s national security adviser and publicly advocated for Trump to call for martial law and redo the 2020 election in key states, “heading the Department of Defense. and ending up in the army to calm and quell the protests,” Newland told me. “There’s Joe Arpaio,” the former Arizona sheriff, found in contempt of court following a judge’s order directing his branch to end its practice of racial profiling, “which runs the Marshals Service. We have not had any assassinations of judges yet, but as soon as that happens, the courts, which were a stronghold, begin to collapse. ” His request is that an internal document be published that tracks these possible long-term threats: “The book of the end of the world. ”
According to the organization, the biggest risk to democracy was disinformation. Efforts to conceal this fact fail. In 2020, for example, a nonpartisan organization called the Election Integrity Partnership began tracking online posts that appeared to violate the regulations of the platforms on which they appeared. But after the election, a hard-to-understand Trump administration official presented a crusade opposing the “censorship industry. “Missouri’s attorney general at the time, a MAGA Republican, began filing lawsuits alleging that government officials, employing the nonprofit’s findings, were intimidating social media corporations into banning conservative users. In July 2023, a Trump-Louisiana designated district rules on the governed that, unless in rare circumstances, the government simply does not work with non-governmental groups to control misinformation. The Supreme Court is not expected to rule on the matter until June. But, given the uncertainty surrounding the issue, media corporations have recently moved away from police lies on their platforms.
While this was unfolding, P. D. was applying what he called his “Law for Truth” strategy. “Maybe we’ll see the dominoes,” said ACLU member Rachel Goodman. A relatively small number of Americans and media outlets, he explained, are the most affected by election-like disinformation online. According to one study, more than a portion of the retweets of The Forty-Three Most Prominent False or Misleading Articles About Voting, before the 2020 election, came from three dozen users. Since 1964, popular coverage for defamation has been “real malice”: if you can prove that someone intentionally lied or recklessly spread lies and thus damage their reputation, you can simply hold them legally liable. “The concept of holding the other people defamed accountable as part of the big lie was really interesting,” Goodman said.
In early 2021, voting device company Smartmatic sued Fox News for more than $2 billion, alleging that conservative pundit Lou Dobbs spread lies about its voting systems. Fox canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” the next day. (Dobbs did not respond to a request for comment. The case is ongoing. ) More recently, Fox settled a similar defamation lawsuit brought through Dominion Voting Systems for $800 million. P. S. made the decision to attack the root of the problem, targeting smaller and more marginal establishments and individuals. “Once they’ve started lying, the mainstream media can magnify it in their news or opinion systems by warning it with ‘ArrayArray has been reported,’” Goodman told me. P. S. has taken in a dozen defamation clients. He sued the right-wing activist organization Project Veritas, which falsely accused an Erie, Pennsylvania, postmaster of ordering his workers to reverse mail-in ballots for Biden. He sued the makers of the discredited documentary “2000 Mules,” which accused, among others, a black voter in Georgia, who returned several ballots, of being a “voting mule. ” (In fact, when the government made a decision before the film’s release, he had voted for his family, which is legal in Georgia. The production company behind “2000 Mules” did not respond to a request for comment. )
The effort is in its early stages, but Protect Democracy has seen some success. In May 2022, OAN, which had allowed Giuliani and others to make false statements about Freeman and Moss on its shows, settled with the women for an undisclosed amount and the network issued an “updated report from Georgia officials “, in which she told viewers. , “There was no widespread voter fraud by poll workers. ” In February of this year, Project Veritas settled its case and provided a similar “update” to the public, acknowledging that it was now “unaware of any evidence or other allegations. ” Voter fraud had happened. In June of last year, P. D. was part of a lawsuit against Kari Lake, the right-wing Republican who narrowly lost her bid for governor of Arizona in 2022, and who is most recently running for the Senate, after impeaching an Arizona election. she official of tampering with printers and skewing the count on Election Day, in an effort to cause Lake to lose the race (the manager did not). In March, Lake admitted liability for defamation in the lawsuit and is now awaiting a ruling on how. how many damages she deserves to pay.
These encampments were located largely out of public view. But, last December, when the case against Giuliani came to court, P. D. with a scene. A few days before the trial began, I was sitting in a boardroom in Washington, D. C. , with Freeman, Moss, a handful of cops. attorneys and a communications officer. The women had come to Washington exactly three years ago because, as Freeman puts it, “it all happened. “They were “in their feelings,” he said. Moss, who was wearing glitter Ugg boots and white nails, cooled off with a fan. Goodman asked what they expected from the trial. Clarity,” Moss replied quietly. Just because you’re not famous, rich, tough, or don’t have a prestigious job doesn’t mean you’re nobody. And the others can’t do what they want with you.
Moss remembers learning to vote as a child. His grandmother reminded him that black people had long been prohibited from exercising their right to vote. “She’s very proud, very proud, and I wanted to give it to everyone,” Moss said. She wiped away her tears. She had spent about a decade with the Fulton County Elections Department, most recently as an absentee voting supervisor. She talked about providing detailed instructions, in her recent role, to seniors who wanted to vote but couldn’t drive. “I need to be remembered for that,” she told the lawyers. “Not because of what that guy did to me. ” A week later, a jury awarded former election officials one hundred and forty-eight million dollars in damages caused by Giuliani’s lies. It was bitterly cold outside the Washington courthouse, but the sky was brilliant blue. Freeguy called it “a smart day” in which “a jury witnessed what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable. “
Giuliani, who shook his head and took notes during the trial but did not testify, was a few hundred yards away, near a courthouse. He seemed to enjoy the attention of reporters and the boos who thronged around him: One woman held a sign calling him “RICH RUDY” and “RACIST PIG. “”The absurdity of this figure only highlights the absurdity of the whole proceeding,” Giuliani said of the damages. As for his defamatory comments, he added, before his spokesperson dragged him into an Uber, “they were bearable and are bearable today. “Days later, lawyers for Freeman and Moss filed a new lawsuit against Giuliani, seeking an injunction against any further defamation. (The lawsuit has lately been put on hold as Giuliani, who in April failed to get the judgment overturned, is headed for bankruptcy. It’s conceivable that women will see only a fraction of the money a jury awarded them. )
While there is lately a center-left consensus on the risks of democratic instability, this does not increase the PD’s use of defamation law. Part of the reluctance is due to considerations of lack of expression. “This type of litigation can make liars more careful,” Eugene Volokh, a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA, told me. “But the smart deterrent against lies and the bad deterrent against truths go hand in hand. ” In an era of burgeoning authoritarianism, it is especially vital that speech protections be broad, critics say, so that news organizations are not afraid to report what they say is true. Fox invoked relaxed speech in a recent countersuit opposing Smartmatic, saying its lawsuit is “designed to serve as a warning to others to think twice before exercising their own right to free speech. ” expression. ” In January, a ruling allowed Fox to pursue its claim. Nora Benavidez, a loose-speaking attorney in Atlanta, explained: “The fight against purveyors of incorrect information will have to be done with great caution so as not to expand the case law that final harms freedom of expression, which by its very nature includes lying.
Samantha Hamilton, an attorney at the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Georgia School of Law, told me that defamation law is a flawed tool for combating misinformation because the biggest lies, like “The election was stolen ” or “Vaccines don’t work. ” “They don’t work” sometimes do not cause damage to the reputation of a specific person. “Defamation has no role to play,” she said. -she declared. Bassin defends the effects of the project so far Ten days after OAN won the lawsuit, DirecTV informed OAN that it would not renew the network’s contract this spring. at stake, but he told me: “Our complaint was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Shortly after, Verizon also severed ties with OAN “as a result of our presentation there. “You have a clever explanation for why showing that OAN has lost access to a television for a quarter of American families,” Bassin said. (A DirecTV spokesperson told me his resolution was primarily financial. ) However, as Benavidez pointed out, even millions in damages may only have little long-term effect on giants like Fox. “It’s just the burden of doing business now,” he said.
Behavioral experts have also found that most people tend to forget or reframe new misinformation, such as legal verdicts, that don’t align with their trust system. This kind of cognitive bias complicates the problem of misinformation and potentially undermines attempts to address it. with him through verdicts. ” If we expect defamation law to do the heavy lifting to solve a complex challenge like misinformation, I think we’re waiting too long,” Hamilton said. During the Giuliani trial, I saw a member of the courtroom, a lawyer named Fletcher Thompson, who seemed upset. During a bathroom break, I walked up to him. After days of testimony, he was still convinced that Biden had stolen the election. “I can see what happened,” dijo. me said. I make my own deductions. I think there’s a plan to do that.
Law for Truth plans to file more lawsuits in the coming months. Ultimately, Bassin and his colleagues understand that the effect of P. D. it has limits. Democracy is not an herbal formula or easy to maintain. One of Bassin’s favorite musicians is Leonard Cohen, who died a day before Trump’s election in 2016, twenty-four years after releasing a song called “Democracy. “Bassin heard a ensayo. de the Lumineers, while driving home from the supermarket shopping for groceries last fall. He stopped and looked at the letter, which he then sent to a few colleagues. (P. D. staff members share music and other lighthearted pieces of interest in an organization text called “The Good Place. “) “It happens first in America,” Cohen sings in the fourth verse. The lyrics continue:
The cradle of the worst
This is the one they have the rank of.
and that of change
And this is where they had a religious thirst.
This is where the circle of relatives is broken.
And the loner says
That the center will have to open
In a sense
Democracy is coming to America
“Much of the war and democracy-building is taking place in the halls of legislatures and in oak-paneled courts,” Bassin told me. “And there’s not enough of it in the culture and in people’s emotional lives. . He spoke of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French sociologist and political scientist, who in the 19th century argued that “habits of the heart” are imperative to maintaining democracy in the United States. “We use the equipment of democracy to win wars. . . for the truth, for the law, and for violations of the law; however, they are wars,” Bassin continued. “At some point, we have to avoid fights and build bridges. Protect Democracy won the right to use Cohen’s “Democracy” lyrics ahead of the 2024 election; You have yet to figure out exactly how to deploy them. ♦
A previous edition of this article incorrectly indicated the call of the user to cover their face with a mask and sunglasses.
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