Allies of former President Donald J. Trump, who was indicted Friday in a sweeping election trial in Arizona, have begun what are expected to be filing a series of legal challenges, drawing on a new state law aimed at curbing litigation and prosecutions of political activists Contain personalities.
The law was originally drafted by Kory Langhofer, a Phoenix lawyer who worked for the Trump campaign during the 2020 election but later fell out of favor with the former president. He said the intent of the 2022 law is to limit politically motivated prosecutions on both sides of the aisle.
Given the deadlines for decisions and appeals, the new challenges could cause Arizona’s election process to be delayed by several months. The case was filed in April by Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat.
The 18 defendants were each charged with nine counts of fraud, forgery and conspiracy. The indictment lays out a series of attempts by the defendants to overturn the election results in Arizona, from the plan to use fake voters on Mr. Trump’s behalf despite his election loss to the steps some took to pressure him “responsible officials” exercise confirmation of the election results.”
The defendants include seven Trump advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Eleven Republican Trump supporters who claimed to be the state’s electors even though President Biden had already been certified as the winner by state officials in Arizona were also charged.
The law that cleared the Republican-dominated Legislature and was signed by then-Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was an expansion of a law that mirrors laws in many other states and is aimed at preventing a legal maneuver known as a “strategic lawsuit” against the Public participation.”
These so-called “anti-SLAPP” laws aim to prevent baseless defamation suits by companies or government officials against members of the public who speak out against them.
But Arizona’s 2022 expansion allowed the law to be applied even more broadly, including in cases involving challenges to criminal prosecutions.
The new legal filings argue that the government’s case against Trump allies amounts to a SLAPP case and should be dismissed.
The first motion using the law was filed Friday by John Eastman, a lawyer who was one of the architects of the plan to plant fake voters in swing states.
“Arizona’s 2022 changes adding criminal procedure to state law are clearly aimed at preventing officials from using criminal procedure as a weapon to punish and discourage speech on political issues,” wrote Ashley Adams, Mr. Eastman’s attorney on the file.
She continued, “Public officials have the right guaranteed by the First Amendment to express their differences through open discourse, but they should not use criminal charges to silence their opponents, as the attorney general has attempted to do here.”
Defense attorneys for others of the 18 people charged in the case have said they plan to file many similar motions.
Arizona’s law has already been used in court. Kari Lake, the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate who has spread falsehoods about election misconduct, sought to use the strengthened anti-SLAPP law as a legal defense after being sued for defamation by a top election official in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix became. She was unsuccessful and when she later refused to defend the defamation case, a default judgment was entered.
In February, a man charged with disorderly conduct after an argument at a mobile home park in Cottonwood, Arizona, successfully used the new law to get some of the charges dismissed.
Mr. Langhofer represented the Trump campaign after the 2020 election, but angered Mr. Trump by not accepting his baseless claims of voter fraud. In an interview, Mr. Langhofer said he drafted the law because he was dismayed by the increasing hostility and danger faced by people working in politics and was considering leaving the country as a result.
“I was very afraid that this trend of political prosecution would get out of control, and once it increases, it’s really hard to stop it,” he said in an interview. “Once you get on the train, there is no station to stop at.”
He said a friend persuaded him to draft a legislative measure to address the problem, and he focused on the anti-SLAPP law. (A court found that Mr. Langhofer himself had filed a frivolous lawsuit, but he denied this.)
He brought his proposal to State Representative Ben Toma, a conservative from the Phoenix suburbs who was then majority leader and is now speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and a congressional candidate. Mr. Toma said at the time that the bill he introduced “was intended to ensure that no one who exercises their First Amendment rights is sued simply because they do so.”
The law gives people 60 days after service of procedural notices to challenge lawsuits and prosecutions in court, but they must demonstrate that they are victims of political retaliation.
Mr. Langhofer said election tracking was a good test case.
“This is the first case in Arizona that I think is a very strong contender for the relief provided in the law,” he said. On election tracking, he said: “Two things can be true at the same time. The defendants behaved very badly and said things that were not true, and they are victims of a politically motivated prosecution. Both can be true, and that’s exactly what seems to be happening.”
The office of Ms. Mayes, the attorney general, had no comment on the new filing.
Arizona is one of five states that have filed criminal cases related to the Trump campaign’s handling of the 2020 election. Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, has also filed charges against Mr. Trump over allegations of election interference.
On Friday, a judge in Nevada dismissed that state’s lawsuit against the six Republicans who acted as sham voters there, saying prosecutors had chosen the wrong place to file the lawsuit. Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford’s office said it would appeal.
While many other states have anti-SLAPP laws, they also apply to civil cases. When the Arizona measure passed in 2022, it received relatively little attention. Some First Amendment advocates in the state, who have unsuccessfully pushed Arizona lawmakers for years to pass stronger protections against retaliation for free speech, said they were caught off guard by the law.
Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at Arizona State University, said the law “really came out of nowhere” and that press freedom groups like his were not consulted.
Arizona Democrats said there was initially bipartisan support for the measure because, following the crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters, some Democrats believed it could protect anti-police demonstrators from retaliation. But as the bill moved through the Legislature and was amended by amendments, they expressed some reservations about the need for the law and ultimately voted mostly against it.
“It sounded very fishy,” said Martín Quezada, a former Democratic senator who voted against the measure. “It was a complicated matter and not many people understood what they were trying to achieve. People had invested much of their mental energy into many other big things. So it kind of slipped through.”
Lawmakers said the anti-SLAPP bill seemed almost like an afterthought at the time compared to the political battles at the center over Republican proposals to overhaul Arizona’s election system by requiring a hand count of ballots and tightening voter identification requirements introduced or the legislature is given the power to reject election results. When the bill was finally voted on, it was passed without a single MP speaking for or against it.
“There were hundreds of bills going through the Legislature at that time,” said Domingo DeGrazia, a former Democratic state lawmaker who voted against the measure in a House committee hearing after questioning whether it was necessary. “It was the usual flood.”
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2024-06-22 00:20:05
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