Maricopa County supervisor on rejecting calls from Trump allies: 'Whatever needed to be said, needed to be said in a courtroom'
CNN
A Republican official from a key Arizona county said Monday that he had rejected calls from President Donald Trump's White House in the weeks following the 2020 election because he believed "whatever needed to be said, needed to be said in a courtroom."
The calls made by individuals in Trump's White House to Clint Hickman, then-chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, appeared to be part of a pressure campaign led by Trump's then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward to convince members of the elected body that supervises elections in the county to announce that there had been voting irregularities in their county, as litigation related to the election continued in the state, according to records published last week by The Arizona Republic. "I got a phone call from the White House switchboard, and I have to say it: All of these people that called me, it wasn't stonewalling. We were in litigation at all these points. ... Whatever needed to be said, needed to be said in a courtroom in front of a judge or a jury," Hickman told CNN's Michael Smerconish on "Cuomo Prime Time," referring to a number of election-related lawsuits that were pending at the time of the White House calls.The US began pulling military equipment and additional personnel out of Niger on Friday after waiting months for the ruling military junta to approve US military flights into the country, two sources familiar with the matter said Saturday, ahead of a September 15 withdrawal deadline agreed to by the two countries.
The judge who oversaw Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York on Friday informed the former president’s defense team and prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office that a comment was posted on the New York State Unified Court Systems’ public Facebook page last week by a poster who claimed to be a cousin of a juror, saying that Trump would be convicted.