Special counsel files sealed court brief supporting his Jan. 6 case against Trump
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(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith’s lengthy court brief seeking to justify his latest superseding indictment against former President Donald Trump on charges that he sought to subvert the 2020 election has been filed under seal with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, a spokesperson for Smith’s office confirmed to ABC News Thursday.
“We have complied with the court’s order,” spokesperson Peter Carr said.
The brief presents Smith’s argument on how the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity applies to the former president’s criminal case.
Whether any portions of the filing will be made public now rest in Judge Chutkan’s hands.
Smith has also filed a proposed redacted version of the filing that his office determined would be appropriate for public release.
Trump’s defense attorneys will have a chance to make their own counterarguments objecting to the release of information in the brief.
Chutkan on Tuesday granted Smith’s request to file an oversized 180-page brief, exceeding the standard 45-page limit.
In July, the Supreme Court ruled in blockbuster decision that Trump is entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undertaken while in office — effectively sending the case back to Chutkan to sort out which charges against Trump can stand.
Smith then charged Trump, in a superseding indictment, with the same election interference offenses in the original indictment, but pared down and adjusted to the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Chutkan subsequently ruled that Smith could file a comprehensive brief supporting his presidential immunity arguments.
(NEW YORK) — Attorneys for former President Donald Trump will return to court Thursday, seeking to reverse the ruling from a New York judge that held him liable for business fraud and ordered him to pay $454 million.
Lawyers will present oral arguments before an intermediate appeals court in New York, following a February ruling from Judge Arthur Engoron that found Trump liable for frauds that Engoron said “shock the conscience.”
Trump, his eldest sons, and two top Trump Organization executives exaggerated Trump’s wealth to secure better terms from lenders, Engoron found during an 11-week trial in Lower Manhattan.
In a written submission to the New York Appellate Division’s First Department prior to Thursday’s hearing, Trump’s attorneys pressed many of the same arguments they made during the trial, insisting that New York Attorney General Letitia James misused the law to bring a political case, and arguing that Trump undervalued, not overvalued, his assets.
“President Trump stands among the most visionary and iconic real estate developers in American history,” the defense filing said. “As trial evidence highlighted, banks and lenders vied eagerly for his business. They acknowledged his unique ‘vision’ and unparalleled ‘expertise,’ and they recognized that dealing with him would deliver ‘tremendous’ value.”
The attorney general’s office said it was not required to prove any lender was harmed.
“Indeed, one of [the law’s] core remedial purposes is to protect the honesty and integrity of commercial marketplaces in New York by stopping fraudulent and illegal practices before they cause financial losses to market participants or broader harms to the public,” the office wrote in a submission to the appellate court.
The attorney general’s office argued that Engoron correctly decided Trump and his codefendants “used a variety of deceptive strategies to vastly misrepresent the values of nearly all the assets and asset categories,” inflating his net worth by as much as $2.2 billion.
Engoron, in his ruling, determined that Trump valued his apartment as if its square footage was triple its actual size; that he valued rent regulated apartments as if they were unregulated; and that he valued his Mar-a-Lago estate as if deed restrictions did not exist.
Trump, following the ruling, secured a $175 million bond while he appeals the judgment.
(ATLANTA) — A comprehensive audit of Georgia’s voter rolls found that just 20 noncitizens were registered to vote on a registration list of over 8 million, according to an announcement Wednesday from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
All 20 of those registrations have been canceled and referred to the authorities for investigation and potential prosecution, Raffensperger said.
An additional 156 registrations were flagged for a “human investigation” that is now underway.
“Georgia has the cleanest voter list in the entire country,” Raffensperger, a Republican, said of the audit. “Georgia can trust in their elections.”
The result of the audit stands in stark contrast to claims being pushed by some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, that large numbers of noncitizens are going to vote in the 2024 election.
“Our elections are bad,” Trump said at last month’s ABC News presidential debate as part of his criticism of Democrats. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English, they don’t know even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
Gabriel Sterling, the COO for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, pushed back on people promoting those claims.
“One of the reasons the secretary ordered this noncitizenship audit is to prove to people that — while there are ways that some can potentially get on — it is increasingly rare,” Sterling said Wednesday. “There is no proof that there is this overwhelming number of noncitizens on the rolls.”
The 20 noncitizens found on the voter rolls were located across seven different counties, Sterling said. They were found in part because they had signed affidavits attesting that they were not citizens in order to get out of jury duty.
Sterling said the 20 have been referred to local prosecutors, and that there are some instances “where they probably should be prosecuted, but that’s not our call.”
Sterling also forcefully pushed back on anyone claiming that voting machines are generating fraud in the election, saying there is “zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote.”
Sterling said they have seen situations where there are “elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly, and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it.”
He directly called out anyone suggesting otherwise, saying, “There is literally zero — and I’m saying this to certain congresspeople in the state — zero evidence of machines flipping votes. And that claim was a lie to 2020 election and it’s a lie now.”
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — Inflation has fallen over the final months of the presidential campaign, carrying potential implications for a tight race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
More than half of adults list inflation as a top issue for the country, making it the highest-ranking concern by a wide margin over issues like immigration, crime and abortion, according to an Ipsos poll conducted late last month.
Price increases nationwide have largely returned to normal. However, the presidential race is widely expected to hinge on the results in seven closely contested battleground states, placing importance on where inflation stands in those key locations.
An analysis by ABC News found that inflation rates vary significantly across four major cities situated in battleground states: Detroit, Michigan; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In each of those states, the average polling margin between the two candidates is no more than two percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Here’s what to know about what inflation looks like in swing-state cities and what that means for the election:
Detroit, Michigan
Consumer prices rose 3.5% in Detroit over the year ending in August, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That figure stands a percentage point above the national average and marks the highest inflation rate of the four cities examined by ABC News.
The surge in prices has stemmed in large part from rapidly rising housing costs, Gabriel Ehrlich, an economist at the University of Michigan, told ABC News. The trend marks a recent turnabout from sluggish housing prices that had taken hold in the city in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession.
Back then, a crisis in the auto industry caused rising unemployment, an exodus from Detroit and diminishing demand for homes. As Detroit has since improved its economic performance, however, the population has begun to grow and housing prices have started to soar. Housing costs climbed 6.2% in Detroit over the year ending in August, which stands more than a percentage point higher than the national average.
Even if the improved economic performance has contributed to the rise in housing prices, that silver lining offers little solace for city residents paying high costs, Ehrlich said.
“That’s a hard sell,” he added.
Phoenix, Arizona
In Phoenix, the inflation rate clocks in at 2.3%, according to BLS data for August, the most recent month on record. That pace of price increases is slightly lower than the national average.
Like Detroit, housing prices play a significant role in the dynamic behind costs in Phoenix – but it’s for the opposite reason. Housing prices there are rising at a pace of 3.5%, well below the national average of more than 6%.
The moderate pace of current housing price increases in Phoenix marks welcome relief after a bruising stretch of skyrocketing costs, Lee McPheters, director of the JPMorgan Chase Economic Outlook Center at Arizona State University, told ABC News. Since 2017, housing prices in the Phoenix area have doubled, he added.
The price increases have slowed, however, as Phoenix has made a concerted effort to ramp up home construction and address its dearth of supply.
Phoenix is expected to build roughly 20,000 apartments in 2024, granting it the fourth-highest apartment construction rate of any U.S. city, a RentCafe study in August found. That total would amount to a 88% increase from the apartment construction rate achieved two years prior, according to the Maricopa Association of Governments.
“There’s of course been the same housing shortage issues in Phoenix that you see across the country,” McPheters said. “The difference here is that Arizona responded.”
Atlanta, Georgia
As of August, the inflation rate in Atlanta stands at 1.7%, which clocks in nearly a percentage point lower than the national average and is the lowest pace for any of the swing-state cities examined by ABC News.
Prices in Atlanta have risen at a slower pace than the national average for a range of essential products, including housing, meat, poultry, fish and eggs.
Gasoline prices have dropped nationwide over the past year but they’ve fallen even more in Atlanta. The same trend applies to the price of new and used cars, the latter of which has fallen a staggering 11% over the past year.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Consumer prices in the Philadelphia area climbed 3.4% over the year ending in August, BLS data showed. The city’s inflation rate registers nearly a percentage point higher than the national average.
In Philadelphia, prices for many food and beverage products are rising faster than the national average. Over the past year, prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs have climbed at more than twice the national average pace. Cereal and bakery products have surged 2.5% over the past year in Philadelphia, even though prices for such goods have fallen by 1% nationwide.
The prices for nonalcoholic beverages in Philadelphia have climbed more than six times faster than the national average over the past year.
Erasmus Kersting, a professor of economics at Villanova University, said the sharp increase in prices for some food items may owed to a lack of competition among grocery stores in Philadelphia. In the absence of fierce competition, grocery stores retain the latitude to raise prices without fear of a rival offering a better deal on comparable products, Kersting explained.
Two supermarket chains, Giant and ShopRite, accounted for 56% of the local grocery market in 2022, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal.
“Grocery store prices have gone up a lot,” Kersting told ABC News. “Some of this has to do with market structure. How many competitors do grocery stores have?”
