On December 3, 2020, Jen Jordan, then a state senator in Georgia, received a text message. “Get over to the capitol,” it read. “Rudy Giuliani is there and it’s bad.” When she arrived, she found the halls of the state capitol building, in downtown Atlanta, packed with Republican legislators, Donald Trump supporters, and Trump attorneys, including Jenna Ellis and Giuliani. “They were taking selfies like it was a party,” Jordan, a Democrat, recalled recently. The crowd soon moved to a fourth-floor hearing room. Taking a seat, Jordan saw correspondents for far-right media outlets including One America News Network, the Epoch Times, and Newsmax. “The alarm bells really went off when Trump tweeted for people to tune in live to OAN,” Jordan said.
What followed at the state capitol astounded Jordan. “Giuliani took control of what felt like a mini-trial,” she recalled. He claimed that the Presidential election had been stolen from Trump, in part through election fraud in Georgia. He referred to “smoking gun” evidence of unmonitored vote counting, and of machines switching votes to Joe Biden—claims that Jordan, who as an an attorney had helped oversee the election locally, knew were bogus. Then a lawyer on Giuliani’s team played surveillance video from Fulton County’s main ballot-processing center, which showed election workers moving ballot containers around a brightly lit room. “I saw four suitcases come out from underneath the table,” the lawyer told those assembled. “What are these ballots doing there, separate from the other ballots? And why are they only counting them when the place is cleared out?” She said that the number of ballots in the supposed suitcases “could easily be and probably is certainly beyond the margin of victory in this race.” One of the two alleged perpetrators, she added, “had the name Ruby across her shirt.”
This was Ruby Freeman, a Black woman in her early sixties, who was working the election. Freeman had been raised in south Georgia by her grandmother, who worked in the tobacco fields; for years, she’d run a travelling clothing boutique, which she called LaRuby’s Unique Treasures. Her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye (Shaye) Moss, who was the other supposed perpetrator in the video—“the lady with the blond braids,” as Giuliani’s colleague described her—had helped administer the state’s elections after graduating college. Moss had recently been given a supervisory role, which she likened to “winning the golden ticket.” In 2020, when Freeman’s business slowed, Moss encouraged her to join the election effort. Neither had much interest in politics beyond insuring that voting went smoothly on Election Day. Freeman told me recently, of her decision to participate in 2020, “I said, ‘You know what, I’m gonna go and help Fulton County out.’ ”
Jordan told me, “I felt sick to my stomach for those women. I knew it was B.S., but I’m sitting here watching the video, like, ‘I don’t have an answer for this.’ ” Others did. “These are just typical everyday election workers who are just doing their jobs,” Gabriel Sterling, an official in the office of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told an Atlanta TV station the next morning. He also tweeted a fact check of the false claims. The ballots were all in standard containers, and those which were scanned after observers left were only those which had been opened in front of them. Sterling concluded that the video “shows normal ballot processing.” But Giuliani pressed on. A week later, he insisted that Freeman and Moss had been “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.” (They were ginger mints.) The “Strategic Communications Plan” of the Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team, a group of lawyers which Giuliani put together to contest the election results, stated that Freeman was “under arrest” and part of a “coordinated effort to commit voter / election fraud.” (The plan noted, parenthetically, “Need confirmation of arrest and evidence.”) Elsewhere, Giuliani compared Freeman and Moss’s actions to a “bank heist” and said that they were “about as clear evidence of stealing votes as I’ve ever seen.”
Georgia election officials investigated the allegations and eventually cleared Freeman and Moss of any wrongdoing. The pair also testified about the lies before the House select committee investigating January 6th. But Trump had already taken up Giuliani’s narrative: in his call to Georgia’s secretary of state, in January, 2021, he described Freeman as “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.” Countless Americans followed suit. “You deserve to go to jail, you worthless piece of shit whore,” a card sent to Freeman’s home read. A threatening e-mail arrived from [email protected]. A caller used the N-word and told Moss’s teen-age son that he “should hang alongside” his mother. People showed up at Moss’s grandmother’s house to attempt a citizen’s arrest. At the F.B.I.’s recommendation, the women went into hiding. Freeman stayed with friends, and then at motels and Airbnbs. Moss, meanwhile, holed up at home; her address had not been revealed. Both changed their hair styles, while Freeman began further obscuring her face with masks and sunglasses. They eventually stopped communicating with friends. Moss was diagnosed as having depression and anxiety. Freeman felt lost. “My life is just messed up,” she said. “All because of somebody putting me out there on blast.”
Freeman hired a lawyer, though it wasn’t clear what could actually be done. But, in 2021, the lawyer was approached by a nonprofit called Protect Democracy. The group had been founded a few years earlier by former lawyers in the office of the White House counsel during the Obama Administration. Protect Democracy, which now has more than a hundred employees and a budget of thirty million dollars, aims to defend America from authoritarianism; it has worked on a range of litigation, legislation, research, communications, and software projects—including VoteShield, a platform now monitoring the integrity of voter-registration data in two dozen states—and has successfully advocated for changes to election laws. One of its founders, Ian Bassin, was recently given a MacArthur “genius” grant. But P.D. has often pursued its goals in novel ways. It has recently begun to use defamation law—which was designed to protect against reputational damage rather than authoritarian takeover—to fight against the flood of disinformation. If the group sued the right liars, its members believed, they could stop dangerous lies from spreading. The strategy has concerned some free-speech advocates. But Bassin believes that targeted defamation suits can “produce a systemic rebalancing of incentives to advance truth.” In late 2021, Protect Democracy sued Giuliani, and a half dozen others, for defamation of Freeman and Moss. Freeman, who often quotes from the Bible, told me that she felt like an underdog in the fight. “I think about David and his slingshot,” she said. “He had five smooth stones.”
Bassin is in his late forties, with glasses and a trimmed beard. His manner is equal parts erudite and empathetic, well-suited for the policy panels and TED-talk stages on which he has lately appeared. He grew up in New York, and attended Yale Law School, where he was friendly with the future Republican senator Josh Hawley. Bassin recalls that they debated the ideological fitness of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who had been appointed recently. “I liked Josh at the time,” Bassin told me. “I thought he was a principled, pious conservative with whom I could have really interesting debates.” (Hawley, who is now among the most conservative members of the Senate, pumped his fist in the air on January 6th prior to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, and has said he doesn’t regret it. He declined to be interviewed for this story.) After law school, and a clerkship, Bassin joined Obama’s campaign. In South Carolina, he watched the 2008 primary results come in at a crab shack alongside Black campaign volunteers, some of whom were descended from formerly enslaved people. When we first spoke, last winter, Bassin was in his home office. He wiped away tears as he shared the anecdote, 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 outlined how executive-branch employees should operate, he said, “in good-faith adherence to traditions.” After leaving the White House, he spent a few years working with activists on democracy and civil-rights issues in Syria and Afghanistan. In early 2016, thinking that American politics was headed in the right direction, Bassin turned his attention to poverty in East Africa. On Election Night, as the Presidential returns came in, he got so angry that he kicked a box of files and broke his foot. Hours later, Bassin received an e-mail from a fellow Obama Administration alum, wondering what they should do. They shared most Democrats’ concerns that Trump would hasten climate change, attack reproductive rights, and gut the social safety net. “But those armies were already in the field,” Bassin told me—people were already fighting those fights. Instead, he and a small group of former White House counsel and D.O.J. lawyers homed in on Trump’s apparent desire to flout long-standing norms of the Presidency, such as using a private security firm instead of the Secret Service, enlisting the regulatory state to go after his critics, and requiring Muslims to register in a database. “It wasn’t clear what existing groups could do to push back against American democracy sliding into something authoritarian,” Bassin told me.
At one early strategy meeting, someone mentioned Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who had rolled back democratic norms there. American democracy, Bassin learned, had arguably been eroding in a similar manner for years, thanks to gerrymandering, the collapse of local news and rise of for-profit social media, and negative partisanship. An effective demagogue could set off what Harvard’s Steven Levitsky called “competitive authoritarianism,” in which an autocrat comes to power in multiparty elections, then dismantles democracy from within. There was a pattern to how this dismantling had unfolded in Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere: the expansion of executive power, the corrupting of elections, the politicization of independent institutions such as courts and the military, the spread of disinformation. “We began organizing how to blunt these things,” Bassin told me. He and his colleagues chose the name United to Protect Democracy, and launched with seed money from the Women Donors Network and Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn. “I remember looking at the group’s mission statement and thinking it’s a little overwrought,” George Conway, the conservative lawyer and Trump critic, told me. “But no. It was prescient.”
Donald Trump currently personifies the wider authoritarian threat animating Protect Democracy’s work, but the nonprofit’s mission is formally nonpartisan. The organization has hired former staffers for Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, and veterans of Vanity Fair and the Department of Defense. “The biggest weapon of mass destruction was the threat to democracy itself,” Alexandra Chandler, a former D.O.D. intelligence analyst who joined P.D., told me. “And it was at home.” Stephanie Llanes, who was a teen-age reggaetón performer in Puerto Rico before going to law school, recalled her first P.D. off-site meeting. “I was sitting across the room from a former Koch staffer,” she said. “I would not do that in any other setting. But I realized we were trying to model what we want the country to be.” John Paredes grew up in the Philippines, where, in the eighties, his grandmother and step-grandfather were sentenced to death by a military court for opposing the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (Their sentences were overturned when Marcos was deposed.) After finishing law school in the U.S., Paredes joined a big firm. But then, he told me, “Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016,” as President of the Philippines. “Then Trump here. I knew what I needed to do.” He’s currently leading a P.D. lawsuit against a group of Trump supporters who, in 2020, surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus with dozens of trucks and impeded its progress down a Texas highway.
P.D. is effectively engaged in a high-stakes game of Whac-a-Mole. In early 2017, it focussed on Trump’s potential use of federal law enforcement to attack his opponents. “Essentially what Putin did to Alexei Navalny—but here,” Bassin told me. To guard against the weaponization of the D.O.J., every Administration since Watergate has issued a White House–D.O.J. Contacts Policy in order to, as Jimmy Carter’s Attorney General put it, in 1978, insure that “neither favor nor pressure nor politics is permitted to influence the administration of the law.” P.D. successfully helped pressure Trump’s White House, which had not released its policy, to do so. When Trump fired the then F.B.I. director, James Comey, for investigating ties between Trump associates and Russian interference in the election, midway through Comey’s term, “the policy helped make clear that this was offensive to the principle of independent law enforcement,” Bassin told me.
In 2019, P.D. convened a task force that created a shortlist of potential election crises, including Election Day violence by partisan groups and officials declaring false emergencies. (“A pandemic was among the last cuts,” Chandler, the former D.O.D. officer, told me ruefully.) “It was about protecting the process, not a discussion of policy or party,” Michael Chertoff, a Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a member of the task force, told me. “That’s paramount when you’re dealing with people who are afraid they’re gonna lose and are prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater rather than accept defeat.” One scenario the group imagined was the General Services Administration withholding funds from a Presidential transition; months later, Trump’s G.S.A. appointee, Emily Murphy, tried 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 guard against election subversion.
P.D. has filed suits claiming that, in the lead-up to the January 6th insurrection, Trump violated D.C. laws that prohibit the aiding and abetting of assault and battery, as well as the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, intended to prevent the political use of mob violence and intimidation. In Florida, it has taken on partisan use of speech codes and book bans, and, in Virginia, the disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions. One of the group’s lawyers, Erica Newland, has spent a great deal of time on a different kind of project: imagining a second Trump term. “You have Michael Flynn”—who worked as Trump’s national-security adviser and publicly advocated for Trump to declare martial law and redo the 2020 election in key states—“heading D.O.D. and sending the military to chill and crush protests,” Newland told me. “You have Joe Arpaio,” the former Arizona sheriff, who was convicted of contempt of court following a judge’s order that his department end its practice of racial profiling—“heading the Marshals Service. We have not had assassinations of judges yet, but, as soon as that happens, the courts, which have been a bulwark, start falling.” Her name for the internal document tracking these potential future threats: “The Doomsday Book.”
A primary threat to democracy, as the group saw it, was disinformation. Efforts to protect the truth were floundering. In 2020, for example, a nonpartisan group called the Election Integrity Partnership began tracking online posts that appeared to violate the rules of the platforms on which they appeared. But after the election an obscure Trump Administration official launched a crusade against the “censorship industry.” Missouri’s attorney general at the time, a MAGA Republican, began filing lawsuits alleging that government officials, at times using the nonprofit’s findings, were bullying social-media companies into barring conservative users. In July, 2023, a Trump-appointed district judge in Louisiana ruled that, except in rare circumstances, the government couldn’t work with non-governmental groups to police disinformation. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the question by June. But, given the uncertainty around the issue, social-media companies have lately backed away from policing lies on their platforms.
As this was unfolding, P.D. was working on what it called its “Law for Truth” strategy. “We could see the dominoes,” Rachel Goodman, a former A.C.L.U. attorney, who heads the Law for Truth project, told me. A relatively small number of individuals and media outlets, she explained, account for most election-related disinformation online. According to one study, more than half the retweets of the forty-three most prominent false or misleading stories about voting, prior to the 2020 election, originated from three dozen users. Since 1964, the protective standard in libel law has been “actual malice”: if you could show that someone had willfully lied or recklessly spread mistruths, and damaged a reputation in the process, you might hold him legally responsible. “The idea of getting accountability for people defamed as part of the Big Lie was really interesting,” Goodman said.
In early 2021, the voting-machine company Smartmatic sued Fox News for more than two billion dollars, alleging that the conservative pundit Lou Dobbs had spread falsehoods about its voting systems. Fox cancelled “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 suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for eight hundred million dollars. P.D. decided that it would aim for the root of the problem, targeting smaller, more fringe outlets and individuals. “Once they initiate a lie, larger outlets can amplify it on their news or opinion programs often by caveating it with ‘It’s been reported that . . .’ ” Goodman told me. P.D. has taken on half a dozen defamation clients. It sued the right-wing activist group Project Veritas, which had falsely accused a postmaster in Erie, Pennsylvania, of ordering employees to backdate mail-in ballots for Biden. It sued the makers of the debunked documentary “2000 Mules,” which had accused, among others, a Black voter in Georgia, who returned multiple ballots, of being a “ballot mule.” (In fact, as authorities determined prior to the film’s release, he had been dropping off ballots 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 still in its early days, but Protect Democracy has seen some success. In May, 2022, OAN, which had allowed Giuliani and others to make false claims about Freeman and Moss on its programs, settled with the women for an undisclosed sum, and the network aired an “updated report from Georgia officials,” in which it told viewers, “There was no widespread voter fraud by election workers.” In February of this year, Project Veritas settled its case, and offered a similar “update” to the public, acknowledging that it was now “aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred.” In June of last year, P.D. was part of a suit against Kari Lake, the right-wing Republican who narrowly lost her bid to become the governor of Arizona in 2022, and is currently running for Senate, after she accused an Arizona election official of tampering with printers and skewing the count on Election Day, in an effort to make Lake lose the race. (The official did not.) In March, Lake conceded her liability for defamation in the lawsuit, and is now awaiting a ruling on how much she should pay in damages.
These settlements have taken place largely out of public view. But, last December, when the case against Giuliani was brought to trial, it presented P.D. with a stage. A few days before the proceedings began, I sat in a boardroom, in Washington, D.C., with Freeman, Moss, a handful of P.D.’s lawyers, and a communications staffer. The women had arrived in D.C. exactly three years to the day since, as Freeman put it, “everything happened.” They were “in their feelings,” she said. Moss, who wore sequinned Uggs and white nails, cooled herself with a hand fan. Goodman asked what they hoped for from the trial. “Clarity,” Moss responded, softly. “Just because you’re not famous or rich or powerful or have a big-name job, that doesn’t mean you’re a nobody. And people can’t do whatever they want to do to you.”
Moss recalled learning about voting as a child. Her grandmother would remind her that Black people had long been barred from exercising their right to vote. “She was so proud—so proud—and I wanted to give that to everyone,” Moss said. She dabbed tears. She had spent nearly ten years with the Fulton County department of elections, lately as the supervisor of absentee ballots. She talked about offering detailed instructions, in that recent role, to seniors who wanted to vote but couldn’t drive. “I want to be remembered for that,” she told the lawyers. “Not for what that man did to me.” A week later, a jury awarded the former election workers a hundred and forty-eight million dollars in damages caused by Giuliani’s lies. Outside the courthouse, in D.C., it was freezing cold, but the sky was bright blue. Freeman called it “a good day” in which “a jury stood witness to 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, stood a few hundred yards away, by a side entrance to the courthouse. He appeared to relish the attention of the journalists and hecklers swarming around him—one woman held a sign calling him “RICO RUDY” and “RACIST PIG.” “The absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding,” Giuliani said of the damages. As for his defamatory remarks, he added, before his spokesperson pulled him into an Uber, “they were supportable, and they are supportable today.” He repeated the claims on Newsmax that evening. Days later, Freeman and Moss’s lawyers filed a new lawsuit against Giuliani, seeking an injunction against further defamation. (The suit is currently on hold while Giuliani, who, in April, failed to get the judgment overturned, navigates bankruptcy. It’s possible that the women will see only a fraction of the money that a jury awarded them.)
If there’s a center-left consensus on the perils of democratic instability at the moment, it does not extend to P.D.’s use of defamation law. Some of the pushback concerns free speech. “This kind of litigation may make liars more cautious,” Eugene Volokh, who teaches First Amendment law at U.C.L.A., told me. “But the good chilling effect on lies and the bad chilling effect on truths walk hand in hand.” In an age of incipient authoritarianism, it’s especially important that speech protections be broad, critics say, so that news organizations are not afraid of reporting on what they believe to be true. Fox invoked free speech in a recent counterclaim against Smartmatic, saying that its lawsuit is “designed to serve as a warning to others to think twice before exercising their own free speech rights.” In January, a judge allowed Fox to advance its claim. Nora Benavidez, a free-speech attorney in Atlanta, explained, “Going after the purveyors of disinformation must be very carefully done so we don’t develop case law that ultimately undermines free speech—which, by its very nature, includes lies.”
Samantha Hamilton, an attorney at the University of Georgia Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, told me that defamation law was a deficient tool in the fight against disinformation because the biggest lies, such as “The election was stolen” or “Vaccines don’t work,” typically don’t cause reputational harm to a specific individual. “Defamation really doesn’t have a role to play,” she said. Bassin defends the project’s results so far. Ten days after OAN was served with the lawsuit, DirecTV informed OAN that it would not renew the network’s contract that spring. Bassin acknowledged that several factors were at play but told me, “Our complaint was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Soon after, Verizon also cut ties with OAN. “As a result of us filing, there’s a good case to be made that OAN lost access to a quarter of U.S. households with TVs,” Bassin said. (A spokesperson for DirecTV told me that its decision was primarily financial.) Still, as Benavidez pointed out, even millions in damages might have little long-term effect on behemoths like Fox. “It’s just the cost of doing business now,” she said.
Behavioral experts have also found that most people tend to discount or reframe new information, like legal verdicts, that don’t fit into their belief systems. This form of cognitive bias complicates the problem of disinformation and potentially undermines attempts to fix it with verdicts. “If we’re expecting defamation law to do much of the heavy lifting in solving a complex issue like disinformation, I think we’re expecting too much,” Hamilton said. During the Giuliani trial, I noticed an audience member in the courtroom, a lawyer named Fletcher Thompson, who seemed distressed. During a bathroom break, I approached him. After days of testimony, he was still convinced that Biden had stolen the election. “I can see what happened,” he told me. “I make my own inferences. I think there was a plan to do this.”
Law for Truth plans to file more suits in the coming months. Ultimately, though, Bassin and his colleagues understand that P.D.’s impact has limits. Democracy is neither a natural system nor an easy one 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 cover of it, by the Lumineers, as he was driving home from the grocery store last fall. He pulled over and looked up the lyrics, which he later sent to a few colleagues. (P.D. staffers share music and other upbeat items of interest on a group text called “The Good Place.”) “It’s coming to America first,” Cohen sings in the fourth verse. The lyrics continue:
“So much of the battle to both protect and deliver democracy is fought in the hallways of legislatures and in oak-panelled courthouse rooms,” Bassin told me. “And not enough of it is in the register of culture and in people’s emotional lives.” He mentioned Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist and political scientist, who, in the nineteenth century, argued that “habits of the heart” are vital to maintaining democracy in America. “We’re bringing the tools of democracy to bear to win battles—over truth, over laws, and the violations of laws—but they’re battles,” Bassin went on. “At some point, you’ve got to stop battling and build bridges.” Protect Democracy has obtained the rights to use Cohen’s “Democracy” lyrics before the 2024 election; it has yet to figure out exactly how to deploy them. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the person who obscured her face with masks and sunglasses.
