Arizona prosecutors pressing the case against Republicans who are accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in President Donald Trump’s favor were dealt a setback when a judge ordered the case be sent back to a grand jury.
Arizona’s fake elector case remains alive after Friday’s ruling by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers, but it’s being sent back to the grand jurors to determine whether there’s probable cause that the defendants committed the crimes.
The decision, first reported by the Washington Post, centered on the Electoral Count Act, a law that governs the certification of a presidential contest and was part of the defendants’ claims they were acting lawfully.
While the law was discussed when the case was presented to the grand jury and the panel asked a witness about the law’s requirements, prosecutors didn’t show the statute’s language to the grand jury, Myers wrote. The judge said a prosecutor has a duty to tell grand jurors all the applicable law and concluded the defendants were denied “a substantial procedural right as guaranteed by Arizona law.”
Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat whose office is pressing the case in court, said in a statement that prosecutors will appeal the decision. “We vehemently disagree with the court,” Taylor said.
Mel McDonald, a former county judge in metro Phoenix and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, said courts send cases back to grand juries when prosecutors present misleading or incomplete evidence or didn’t properly instruct panel members on the law.
“They get granted at times. It’s not often,” said McDonald, who isn’t involved in the case.
In all, 18 Republicans were charged with forgery, fraud and conspiracy. The defendants consist of 11 Republicans who submitted a document falsely claiming Trump won Arizona, two former Trump aides and five lawyers connected to the former president, including Rudy Giuliani.
Two defendants have already resolved their cases, while the others have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Trump wasn’t charged in Arizona, but the indictment refers to him as an unindicted coconspirator.
Most of the defendants in the case also are trying to get a court to dismiss their charges under an Arizona law that bars using baseless legal actions in a bid to silence critics.
They argued Mayes tried to use the charges to silence them for their constitutionally protected speech about the 2020 election and actions taken in response to the race’s outcome. Prosecutors said the defendants didn’t have evidence to back up their retaliation claim and that they crossed the line from protected speech to fraud.
Eleven people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried the state in the 2020 election.
President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document later was sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is pushing forward with her efforts to force Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson to drop a longtime policy that generally prohibits deputies from directly engaging in federal immigration enforcement within the city’s jail.
In legal filings, Murrill claims that the policy — which the state characterizes as a so-called “sanctuary city” policy — is in direct conflict with a newly passed state law that requires state and local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration agencies.
“The consent decree now sits fundamentally at odds with state law as applicable to immigration detainers,” Murrill said in court documents filed Friday.
A federal court will now determine whether to allow the state of Louisiana to join a 2011 federal suit that resulted in the policy and whether to throw out the policy altogether. A hearing has been set for April 30.
The state’s campaign against “sanctuary” policies comes as President Donald Trump is pushing local law enforcement agencies to join the federal government in his promised immigration crackdown. Since his inauguration, Trump has ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to push for more partnerships between local law enforcement units and federal immigration agencies. A few have already signed up. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a longtime immigration hardliner and Trump ally, has worked with Republican lawmakers in the state to enact laws that encourage those collaborations.
As attorney general, Landry criticized a policy adopted by the New Orleans Police Department, under a long-running federal consent decree that blocks officers from enforcing immigration laws.
Neither Murrill’s office nor representatives for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to requests for comment.
In court filings, Murrill said Hutson “does not oppose the (state’s) intervention” in the case.” But a spokesperson for Hutson said that’s not exactly true. “It’s more accurate that we take no position regarding the state intervention,” a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
While she has not taken a position for or against increased collaboration with ICE, in an interview with Fox 8 in December, Hutson noted that the jail’s resources were far too stretched to take on immigration enforcement.
The sheriff’s policy stems from a 2013 federal court settlement in a civil rights case involving two New Orleans construction workers picked up on minor charges in 2009 and 2010. Mario Cacho and Antonio Ocampo sued after they were allegedly illegally held in the city’s jail past the completion of their sentences. The two were held at the request of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency issues such “detainer” requests to local law enforcement agencies, asking them to hold onto arrestees who are suspected of immigration violations. Local agencies are only supposed to honor the hold requests for 48 hours, after which they should let detainees free. But in 2009 and 2010, then-Sheriff Marlin Gusman detained Cacho and Ocampo for months, according to legal filings in their case against the office.
Ocampo and Cacho settled the case with the Sheriff’s Office in 2013, and Gusman agreed to adopt a new policy on immigration investigations. The resulting policy blocks the agency from investigating immigration violations and from detaining immigrants for ICE without a court order, except in certain cases where they are facing charges for a small number of serious violent crimes.
A former Conservative lawmaker and 14 others have been charged with cheating when placing bets on the timing of Britain’s general election last year, the Gambling Commission said Monday.
Craig Williams was one of several people who had been investigated for cashing in on insider knowledge on the date then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would call the election. Other members of the Conservative Party that controlled government at the time and a police officer were among those facing charges that carry a potential two-year prison term, if convicted.
It’s legal for politicians to wager on elections, but the investigation was about whether they used inside information to gain an unfair advantage. One of the popular bets at the time was to wager on the date the prime minister would call an election.
At the time, the conventional wisdom was that Sunak would call an election in the fall, but he surprised people in May when he set the election date for July 4th. The announcement was a disaster as Sunak was drenched in pouring rain outside his residence and word quickly spread that a handful of people with connections to the party had placed suspiciously timed bets.
The vote six weeks later ended up being a bloodbath for Conservatives, as the Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, swept them out of office for the first time in 14 years.
Williams, who was Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary and running for reelection, had disclosed he placed a 100-pound ($131) bet on a July election days before the date had been announced.
“I committed an error of judgment, not an offense, and I want to reiterate my apology directly to you,” he said in a video posted on social media in June.
In the election, Williams lost his seat representing an area of Wales, finishing third.
Others facing charges included Russell George, a Conservative in the Welsh parliament, Nick Mason, a former chief data officer for the Tories and Thomas James, the director of the Welsh Conservatives.
Anthony Lee, a former Conservative campaign director, was also charged alongside his wife, Laura Saunders, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Parliament representing an area of southwest England.
George was suspended by the Conservative Party after news of the criminal case.
A court formally arrested the mayor of Istanbul, a key rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Sunday and ordered him jailed pending the outcome of a trial on corruption charges.
Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was detained following a raid on his residence earlier this week, sparking the largest wave of street demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade. It also deepened concerns over democracy and rule of law in Turkey.
His imprisonment is widely regarded as a political move to remove a major contender from the next presidential race, currently scheduled for 2028. Government officials reject the accusations and insist that Turkey’s courts operate independently.
The prosecutor’s office said the court decided to jail Imamoglu on suspicion of running a criminal organization, accepting bribes, extortion, illegally recording personal data and bid-rigging. A request for him to be imprisoned on terror-related charges was rejected although he still faces prosecution. Following the court’s ruling, Imamoglu was transferred to Silivri prison, west of Istanbul.
The Interior Ministry later announced that Imamoglu had been suspended from duty as a “temporary measure.” The municipality had previously appointed an acting mayor from its governing council.
Alongside Imamoglu, 47 other people were also jailed pending trial, including a key aide and two district mayors from Istanbul, one of whom was replaced with a government appointee. A further 44 suspects were released under judicial control.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said Sunday that 323 people were detained the previous evening over disturbances at protests.
Largely peaceful protests across Turkey have seen hundreds of thousands come out in support of Imamoglu. However, there has been some violence, with police deploying water cannons, tear gas, pepper spray and firing plastic pellets at protesters in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, some of whom hurled stones, fireworks and other missiles at riot police.
The formal arrest came as more than 1.5 million members of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, began holding a primary presidential election to endorse Imamoglu, the sole candidate.
The party has also set up symbolic ballot boxes nationwide to allow people who are not party members to express their support for the mayor. Large crowds gathered early Sunday to cast a “solidarity ballot.”
“This is no longer just a problem of the Republican People’s Party, but a problem of Turkish democracy,” Fusun Erben, 69, said at a polling station in Istanbul’s Kadikoy district. “We do not accept our rights being so easily usurped. We will fight until the end.”
Speaking at a polling station in Bodrum, western Turkey, engineer Mehmet Dayanc, 38, said he feared that “in the end we’ll be like Russia, a country without an opposition, where only a single man participates in elections.”
In a message posted on social media, Imamoglu called on people to show “their struggle for democracy and justice to the entire world” at the ballot box. He warned Erdogan that he would be defeated by “our righteousness, our courage, our humility, our smiling face.”
“Honestly, we are embarrassed in the name of our legal system,” Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavas, a fellow member of Imamoglu’s CHP, told reporters after casting his vote, criticizing the lack of confidentiality in the proceedings.
CHP leader Ozgur Ozel said Imamoglu’s imprisonment was reminiscent of “Italian mafia methods.” Speaking at Istanbul City Hall, he added: “Imamoglu is on the one hand in prison and on the other hand on the way to the presidency.”
The Council of Europe, which focuses on promoting human rights and democracy, slammed the decision and demanded Imamoglu’s immediate release.
A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for environmental regulators to limit water pollution, ruling for San Francisco in a case about the discharge of raw sewage that sometimes occurs during heavy rains.
By a 5-4 vote, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority under the Clean Water Act with water pollution permits that contain vague requirements for maintaining water quality.
The decision is the latest in which conservative justices have reined in pollution control efforts.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that EPA can set specific limits that tell cities and counties what can be discharged. But the agency lacks the authority “to include ‘end-result’ provisions,” Alito wrote, that make cities and counties responsible for maintaining the quality of the water, the Pacific Ocean in this case, into which wastewater is discharged.
“When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards,” he wrote.
One conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, joined the court’s three liberals in dissent. Limits on discharges sometimes still don’t insure water quality standards are met, Barrett wrote.
“The concern that the technology-based effluent limitations may fall short is on display in this case,” Barrett wrote, adding that “discharges from components of San Francisco’s sewer system have allegedly led to serious breaches of the water quality standards, such as ‘discoloration, scum, and floating material, including toilet paper, in Mission Creek.’”
The case produced an unusual alliance of the liberal northern California city, energy companies and business groups.
The EPA has issued thousands of the permits, known as narrative permits, over several decades, former acting general counsel Kevin Minoli said.
The narrative permits have operated almost as a backstop in case permits that quantify what can be discharged still result in unacceptable water quality, Minoli said.
With the new restrictions imposed by the court, “the question is what comes in place of those limits,” Minoli said.
Alito downplayed the impact of the decision, writing that the agency has “the tools needed” to insure water quality standards are met.
Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court on Monday weighed in on a flashpoint amid ongoing vote counting in the U.S. Senate election between Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican David McCormick, ordering counties not to count mail-in ballots that lack a correct handwritten date on the return envelope.
The order is a win for McCormick and a loss for Casey as the campaigns prepare for a statewide recount and press counties for favorable ballot-counting decisions while election workers are sorting through thousands of provisional ballots.
McCormick’s campaign called it a “massive setback” for Casey.
The Democratic-majority high court’s order reiterates the position it took previously that the ballots shouldn’t be counted in the election, a decision that Republicans say several Democratic-controlled counties nevertheless challenged.
In a statement, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said a lack of legal clarity had surrounded the ballots, putting county officials in a position where they were “damned if they did and damned if they didn’t — likely facing legal action no matter which decision they made on counting.”
It comes amid a gust of fresh litigation in recent days filed by both campaigns, contesting the decisions of about a dozen counties over whether or not to count thousands of provisional ballots.
Casey’s campaign says the provisional ballots shouldn’t be rejected for garden-variety errors, like a polling place worker forgetting to sign it. Republicans say the law is clear that the ballots must be discarded.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick last week, concluding that not enough ballots remained to be counted in areas Casey was winning for him to take the lead.
As of Monday, McCormick led by about 17,000 votes out of almost 7 million ballots counted — inside the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law.
Statewide, the number of mail-in ballots with wrong or missing dates on the return envelope could be in the thousands.
Republicans last week asked the court to bar counties from counting the ballots, saying those decisions violate both the court’s recent orders and its precedent in upholding the requirement in state law that a voter write the date on their mail-in ballot’s return envelope.
Republicans have taken control of the U.S. Senate and are fighting to keep their majority in the U.S. House, which would produce a full sweep of GOP power in Congress alongside President-elect Donald Trump in the White House.
A unified Republican grip on Washington would set the course for Trump’s agenda. Or if Democrats wrest control of the House, it would provide an almost certain backstop, with veto power over the White House.
Trump, speaking early Wednesday at his election night party in Florida, said the results delivered an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” for Republicans.
He called the Senate rout “incredible.” And he praised House Speaker Mike Johnson, who dashed from his own party in Louisiana to join Trump. “He’s doing a terrific job,” Trump said.
From the U.S. Capitol, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, privately a harsh Trump critic, called it a “hell of a good day.”
Vote counting in some races could go on for days, and control of the House is too early to call.
The rally for Republicans started early on election night in West Virginia, when Jim Justice, the state’s wealthy governor, flipped the seat held by retiring Sen. Joe Manchin. From there, the Republicans marched alongside Trump across the Senate map.
Republicans toppled Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, the first incumbent senator to fall, with GOP luxury car dealer and blockchain entrepreneur Bernie Moreno. They chased Democrats in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Vice President Kamala Harris strained to carry the party forward, though Democrats avoided a total wipeout as Elissa Slotkin won an open Senate seat in Michigan and Sen. Tammy Baldwin was reelected in Wisconsin.
Democratic efforts to oust firebrand Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida collapsed. The unexpected battleground of Nebraska pushed Republicans over the top. Incumbent GOP Sen. Deb Fischer brushed back a surprisingly strong challenge from independent newcomer Dan Osborn.
In one of the most-watched Senate races, in Montana, Democrat Jon Tester, a popular three-term senator and “dirt farmer” in the fight of his political career, lost to Trump-backed Tim Sheehy, a wealthy former Navy SEAL, who made derogatory comments about Native Americans, a key Western state constituency.
All told, Senate Republicans have a chance to scoop up a few more seats, potentially delivering their most robust majority in years — a coda to outgoing GOP Leader McConnell, who made a career charting a path to power, this time by recruiting high-wealth Republicans aligned with Trump.
He told reporters at a Capitol news conference that a Senate under Republican control would “control the guardrails” and prevent changes in Senate rules that would end the filibuster.
McConnell declined to answer questions about his past stark criticism of Trump or about the prospects of potential nominees in a new administration. He also said he viewed the election results as a referendum on the Biden administration.
“People were just not happy with this administration and the Democratic nominee was a part of it,” McConnell said. Ohio Republicans have tightened their grip on the Ohio Supreme Court from 4-3 to 6-1 by ousting two incumbent Democratic justices and winning a third, open seat, the Associated Press projects based on unofficial results. Results remain unofficial until they are certified by local county boards of elections and the Ohio Secretary of State.
The Ohio Supreme Court will rule on a variety of issues that affect the daily lives of Ohioans ranging from education and environmental issues to gerrymandering and elections to civil and reproductive rights.
The state’s highest court has been under Republican control since 1986 and Republicans currently have a 4-3 majority that will increase to 6-1 starting in 2025.
Republican Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas Judge Megan Shanahan defeated incumbent Democratic Justice Michael P. Donnelly, according to unofficial results.
“I’m honored and grateful to the millions of Ohioans who have put their trust in me to be their Ohio Supreme Court Justice,” Shanahan posted on her campaign Facebook page. “I’ll be true to what I campaigned on and will be a Supreme Court Justice who knows that my job is to interpret the law, not to make it. I’ll go to work each day and focus on protecting Ohio’s citizens, communities, and constitution.”
Incumbent Republican Justice Joseph Deters defeated incumbent Democratic Justice Melody Stewart — ousting her from the court, unofficial results show.
Deters decided not to run for his current seat and won a full six-year term. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Deters, a former prosecutor, to a vacant seat in January 2023, even though he had no prior experience as a judge.
In the race for an open seat, Republican Judge Dan Hawkins defeated Democratic Judge Lisa Forbes, the AP projected.
This race was for Deters’ open seat, a term that expires on Dec. 31, 2026. Hawkins currently serves on the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas and Forbes is on the 8th District Court of Appeals. Hawkins will face reelection for a full six-year term in 2026.
In 2021, Republican state lawmakers added party labels to the Ohio Supreme Court races, which were previously nonpartisan.
Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner’s seat will be up in 2026. The seats of Republican Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy, Republican Justice Pat DeWine, and Republican Justice Pat Fischer will be up in 2028. The fight for control of the House became a state-by-state slog, much of which unfolded far from the presidential race.
House races are focused in New York and California, where Democrats are trying to claw back some of the 10 or so seats where Republicans have made surprising gains in recent years.
Other House races are scattered around the country, with some of the most contentious in Maine, the “blue dot” around Omaha, Nebraska, and in Alaska.
Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the House “remains very much in play.”
To gain control of the House, Democrats need to flip four seats from Republicans, while holding all of their own, a tall task especially in congressional districts where Trump has won.
