Elections

The ruling that Donald Trump is not eligible for the ballot in Colorado is the latest election-related issue likely to land before the justices. The implications for 2024 could be profound.It has been obvious for months that politics and the law were going to bump into one another in the 2024 campaign, given the double role that former President Donald J. Trump has been playing as a criminal defendant and leading Republican candidate.But in a way that few expected, that awkward bump has turned into a head-on collision. It now seems clear that the courts — especially the Supreme Court — could dramatically shape the contours of the election.The nine justices have already agreed to review the scope of an obstruction statute central to the federal indictment accusing Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. And they could soon become entangled in both his efforts to dismiss those charges with sweeping claims of executive immunity and in a bid to rid himself of a gag order restricting his attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of the case.The court could also be called upon to weigh in on a series of civil lawsuits seeking to hold Mr. Trump accountable for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.And in the latest turn of events, the justices now seem poised to decide a novel and momentous legal question: whether Mr. Trump should be disqualified from state ballots for engaging in an insurrection on Jan. 6 in violation of a Reconstruction-era constitutional amendment.Taking up just one of these cases would place the Supreme Court — with a conservative majority bolstered by three Trump appointees — in a particular political spotlight that it has not felt in the 23 years since it decided Bush v. Gore and cemented the winner of the 2000 presidential race.But a number of the issues the court is now confronting could drastically affect the timing of the proceedings against Mr. Trump, the scope of the charges he should face or his status as a candidate, with potentially profound effects on his chances of winning the election. And the justices could easily become ensnared in several of the questions simultaneously.“In this cycle, the Supreme Court is likely to play an even larger role than in Bush v. Gore,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group dedicated to improving election administration.“It’s not just the issue of whether or not Donald Trump engaged in insurrection, which would disqualify him from holding the presidency under the 14th Amendment,” Mr. Becker said, “but also issues related to presidential immunity and criminal proceedings in general.”All of this arrives at a particularly vulnerable moment for the court. In the wake of its decisions on contentious issues like abortion rights and affirmative action, critics have assailed it for being guided by an overt political ideology.At the same time, some of the justices have come under withering personal scrutiny for their finances and links to wealthy backers. And given that Mr. Trump has at times expressed surprise that the justices he put on the bench have not been more attuned to his interests, any decisions by the court that favor him are sure to draw intense criticism.“Most of the justices would surely prefer the court to keep a low profile in the 2024 presidential election,” said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University.“In a highly polarized, social media-fueled political culture,” he said, “the justices know that nearly half the country is likely to view the court as having acted illegitimately if the court rules against their preferred candidate.”But while the court’s current majority has certainly favored any number of staunchly conservative policies, it has shown less of an appetite for supporting Mr. Trump’s attempts to bend the powers of the presidency to his benefit or to interfere with the mechanics of the democratic process.The justices largely ignored the slew of lawsuits that he and his allies filed in lower courts across the country three years ago seeking to overturn the last election. They also rejected out of hand a last-minute petition from the state of Texas to toss out the election results in four key battleground states that Mr. Trump had lost.None of this, of course, is a guarantee of how the court might act on the issues it is facing this time.Even a decision by the Supreme Court to move slowly in considering the issues heading its way could have major ramifications, especially the question of whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for actions he took as president. If that issue gets tied up in the courts for months, it could make it harder to schedule his trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election before the general election season starting in the summer — and could even delay it until after Election Day.In fact, there are so many moving parts in the overlapping cases that Mr. Trump is facing that it is all but impossible to predict which issues might get taken up, how the justices will rule on the questions they consider and what effects their decisions might have as they flow downstream to the lower courts that are handling the former president’s four criminal cases and his many civil proceedings.It is important to remember something else: Mr. Trump is interested in more than winning arguments in court. From the start, he and his lawyers have pursued a parallel strategy of trying to delay his cases for as long as possible — ideally until after the election is decided.If he can succeed in such a delay and win the race, he would have the power to simply order the federal charges he is facing to be dropped. Regaining the White House would also complicate the efforts of local prosecutors to hold him accountable for crimes.The courts have shown that they, too, are aware that timing is an issue in Mr. Trump’s cases. Judges are normally loath to set the pace of proceedings based on outside pressures, but in the cases involving Mr. Trump the courts have found themselves in an unusual bind.Setting too aggressive a schedule could impinge on the rights of the defendant to have sufficient time to prepare for a complex trial. But to move too slowly would be to risk depriving voters of the knowledge they would glean from a trial before Election Day and give Mr. Trump, were he to win the election, the chance to kill the prosecutions or put them on hold for years.“It’s all extremely awkward,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.Having the courts so enmeshed in Mr. Trump’s legal and political future has opened up the question of just how much ordinary people, not judges, will get to decide what happens at the polls next year. It has also left unresolved the degree to which judicial decisions will affect whether voters are able to hear the evidence that prosecutors have painstakingly collected about Mr. Trump’s alleged crimes before they render a decision about whether to re-elect him.Some election law specialists said the courts should generally defer to voters and not interfere in the choices they can make.“My view is that Trump is a political problem, and the appropriate response is politics,” said Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a law professor at Drexel University.But Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that elections must be governed by legal principles.“It’s commonplace to think that voters, not courts, should determine who’s elected president,” he said. “But it’s also essential to remember that the law, including court rulings, structures the electoral choices voters face when they cast their ballot.”Adam Liptak More

The blockbuster ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court would seem to give Donald Trump’s challengers an avenue of attack, but far behind in the polls, they are skirting the issue.A state high court’s decision that the Republican front-runner for the White House is disqualified from office might seem like a pretty good opening for his ostensible G.O.P. challengers.But in an era of smashmouth politics, ushered in by former President Donald J. Trump, only Mr. Trump appears capable of smashing anyone in the mouth. So, with under four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday — that Mr. Trump was disqualified from the state’s primary ballot under a section of the 14th Amendment that holds that “no person shall” hold “any office, civil or military” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” — was apparently off limits.Mr. Trump still seems to be the one setting the parameters for legitimate debate in the G.O.P., even if he doesn’t participate in the party’s actual debates.“We don’t need to have judges making these decisions,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is rising in the polls but still far behind Mr. Trump, told reporters in Agency, Iowa, on Tuesday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida not only refrained from attacking his chief rival, but he also spun out a conspiracy theory to suggest the ruling was a plot against him to aid Mr. Trump.“What the left and the media and the Democrats are doing — they’re doing all this stuff, to basically solidify support in the primary for him, get him into the general, and the whole general election is going to be all this legal stuff,” Mr. DeSantis said on Wednesday, speaking at the Westside Conservative Club Breakfast in Iowa.At a restaurant outside Des Moines, he asked reporters, “We’re going to be litigating this stuff for how many more years going forward? I think we’ve got to start focusing on the people’s issues.”Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who has clung most tightly to Mr. Trump’s pant legs throughout the primary season, went so far as to pledge solidarity and withdraw his own name from the Colorado ballot, and he demanded the other candidates follow suit. A biotech financier who has spent millions of his own dollars on his campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy railed against “the unelected elite class in the back of palace halls” as he sat in the back of his well-appointed campaign bus.Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whose long-shot run for the Republican nomination has centered on questioning the front-runner’s fitness for office, demurred, engaging not on the Colorado justices’ conclusions but their timing.“I don’t think a court should exclude somebody from running for president without there being a trial and evidence that’s accepted by a jury that they did participate in insurrection,” he said on Tuesday night during a town hall event in New Hampshire.The heart of the Republican primary season is now just weeks away: Voters in Iowa will caucus on Jan. 15, with the first primary of the year, New Hampshire’s, coming Jan. 23. If anything, the former president’s lead seems only to grow. He clobbers his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, in a new New York Times/Siena College poll, drawing 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide.Yet his rivals remain apparently unwilling to take any real risks that could shake the dynamic. Republican primary voters have overwhelmingly decided that each new legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s actions to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, each ruling in cases involving the way he has conducted business, treated women or handled classified material — all of it is simply not relevant to their votes.More than one in five Republican voters think Mr. Trump has committed crimes, and 13 percent of Republicans believe that he should be found guilty in court of trying to overturn the 2020 election, yet most of those voters also say they would still cast their ballots for him.So, his rivals figure, why dwell on it?“I guess that state has that right to remove Trump from the ballot if they feel like it,” Tim Robbins, 72, a farmer and Iowa Republican, said of the Colorado ruling after an appearance by Ms. Haley. “But I think the people need to decide. It’s the people’s decision, not the state’s decision.”He added that he agreed with Ms. Haley’s hands-off approach: “I don’t need somebody to tell me what to think of somebody else,” he said. “I’ll draw my own conclusions.”It seemed on Wednesday that only two people in the race for the White House wanted to talk about the Colorado ruling: Mr. Trump, who sent fund-raising appeals in emails with the subject lines “BALLOT REMOVAL” and “REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT,” and President Biden, who said Mr. Trump “certainly supported an insurrection.”“You saw it all,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision.”There is no evidence suggesting that Mr. Biden has any ties to the Colorado case, or that he has meddled in any of the four criminal cases pending against Mr. Trump. But on his social media network, Mr. Trump was spinning the story that has either paralyzed his rivals for the nomination or elicited hosannas from the competition.“BIDEN SHOULD DROP ALL OF THESE FAKE POLITICAL INDICTMENTS AGAINST ME, BOTH CRIMINAL & CIVIL,” he wrote. “EVERY CASE I AM FIGHTING IS THE WORK OF THE DOJ & WHITE HOUSE.”Michael Gold More

The former president urged the justices to move slowly in his federal election interference case, an apparent attempt to delay the trial, set for March.Former President Donald J. Trump urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to put off a decision on a crucial question in his federal prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election: whether he has “absolute immunity” for actions he took as president.The question, Mr. Trump’s brief said, should be “resolved in a cautious, deliberative manner — not at breakneck speed.” He urged the justices not to “rush to decide the issues with reckless abandon.”The request appeared to be part of Mr. Trump’s general strategy of trying to delay the trial in the case, which is scheduled to start on March 4. That date, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote, “has no talismanic significance.”Last week, Jack Smith, the special counsel, asked the Supreme Court to bypass a federal appeals court and agree to hear the immunity question on a quick schedule. Mr. Trump opposed that request on Wednesday, saying the importance of the matter warranted careful and unhurried deliberation by the appeals court before the justices decide whether to take it up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The roughly 1,700 messages are from the cellphone of Representative Scott Perry, who was involved in discussions with Trump administration officials about overturning the election.A federal judge has allowed the special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election access to about 1,700 messages from the seized phone of Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.Mr. Perry, the chairman of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who played a role in attempts to overturn the election, had sought to keep the messages from prosecutors. But in an order late Tuesday, James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, prohibited federal prosecutors from retrieving just 396 messages from more than 2,000.Judge Boasberg wrote that those messages were covered by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which provides protections for lawmakers’ legislative discussions, while also ordering that a majority be turned over.The messages could offer additional evidence for Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the federal election case against Mr. Trump. Judge Boasberg said they concerned Mr. Perry’s attempts to get information about possible voter fraud; influence people outside the federal government; discuss Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory; and communicate about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.A lawyer for Mr. Perry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.As federal officials investigated the effort to overturn the 2020 election, the F.B.I. seized Mr. Perry’s personal cellphone in the summer of 2022 and created a forensic copy of its contents. The F.B.I. later returned the phone and told Mr. Perry he was not the target of the investigation, his lawyer said at the time.“The Justice Department informed us that Representative Perry is not a target of its investigation,” the lawyer, John Irving, said in a statement. “Representative Perry has directed us to cooperate with the Justice Department in order to ensure that it gets the information it is entitled to, but to also protect information that it is not entitled to.”Mr. Perry then filed a motion to prohibit investigators from getting the messages, arguing that they were protected under the Constitution. He lost that motion, but an appellate court ordered a judge to review the communications on a document-by-document basis.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Perry was among at least 11 Republican members of Congress involved in discussions with Trump administration officials about overturning the results, according to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. Those included plans to pressure Mr. Pence to throw out electoral votes from states won by Mr. Biden. Mr. Perry also endorsed the idea of encouraging supporters to march to the Capitol, the committee said.He played an active role in the attempt to replace Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, with a more compliant official, Jeffrey Clark. More

At least 16 states beyond Colorado currently have open legal challenges to the former president’s eligibility for office — but what happens next depends on the U.S. Supreme Court.This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to disqualify former President Donald J. Trump from holding office again was the first victory for a sprawling legal effort that is still unfolding across the country.At least 16 other states currently have pending legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility for office under the 14th Amendment, according to a database maintained by Lawfare, a nonpartisan site dedicated to national security issues. The lawsuits argue that he is barred because he engaged in an insurrection with his actions surrounding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.Four of these lawsuits — in Michigan, Oregon, New Jersey and Wisconsin — have been filed in state courts. Eleven lawsuits — in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New York, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming — have been filed in federal district courts.Cases in two of these states, Arizona and Michigan, were initially dismissed by a lower court but have been appealed. Another challenge has also been made in Maine.The Trump campaign has said it will appeal the ruling in Colorado, in which the State Supreme Court said it would put its decision on hold — meaning that it is not in effect — until Jan. 4, in hopes of receiving guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court.“We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory, and that this case presents several issues of first impression,” the Colorado justices wrote, noting that their decision could change based on “the receipt of any order or mandate from the Supreme Court.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

A federal judge ordered the top House Republican Scott Perry to turn over nearly 1,700 records from his phone to special counsel prosecutors that could inform the extent of his role in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including removing justice department officials.The move by the chief US district judge James Boasberg, who oversees grand jury matters in federal court in Washington DC, means prosecutors can access the majority of the records that the FBI pulled from Perry’s phone. The device was seized in response to a court-approved warrant.Boasberg ordered Perry to produce 1,656 out of 2,055 records. The US court of appeals for the DC circuit directed Perry to individually review which materials were protected by the speech or debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal peril connected to their official duties, and allowed him to withhold those records.The records include some of Perry’s discussions about efforts to influence the executive branch and state officials, some communications about influencing the conduct of executive branch officials – including that of the former vice-president Mike Pence, according to Boasberg’s 12-page memo.What the special counsel Jack Smith will do with the records remains unclear, given his office previously charged Trump with conspiring to reverse his 2020 election defeat without the materials back in July. Perry can also still appeal the way Boasberg applied the speech or debate clause to his communications.A defense lawyer for Perry declined to say what determinations the Pennsylvania congressman might challenge.The ruling marks the latest twist in the constitutionally fraught case. Last year, the previous chief judge, Beryl Howell, ordered Perry to turn over 2,055 of 2,219 records after finding that speech or debate protections did not apply to informal fact-finding done by members of Congress.Perry appealed to the DC circuit, which overturned Howell’s ruling in September. The court decided that “informal fact-finding” that was not part of a committee investigation, for instance, did in fact qualify as official legislative business as protected by the speech or debate clause.The three-judge panel at the DC circuit of Neomi Rao, Gregory Katsas and Karen Henderson – nominated by Trump and George HW Bush – directed Boasberg to individually re-review the records using their stricter interpretation of speech or debate protections.According to his memo, Boasberg broke down the records into three broad categories: Perry’s communications with people outside the US government, Perry’s communications with members of Congress and staff, and Perry’s communications involving members of the executive branch.The records not withheld in category one most notably included communications about procedures that Pence had to follow at the joint session of Congress to certify the election results and communications about what occurred during the January 6 Capitol attack, the memo said.Category two had more items that were withheld, such as Perry’s discussions about whether to certify the electoral votes on January 6. But Boasberg turned over Perry’s discussions about working with the executive branch and state officials on election fraud issues and influencing their conduct.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe records not withheld in category three most notably included communications that tried to influence executive branch officials’ conduct, discussions about non-legislative efforts to combat alleged election fraud, and again, procedures that Pence had to follow on January 6.Perry was the subject of special interest by the House select committee investigation into the Capitol attack because of the outsize role he played in introducing to Trump a justice department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was sympathetic to Trump’s claims about alleged election fraud.The introduction led Clark to propose sending a letter to officials in Georgia that falsely said the justice department was investigating election fraud in the state. When the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, balked, Trump suggested he would replace him with Clark so the letter would be sent.Trump only relented when he was told by Rosen that the justice department leadership would resign and the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, said he and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, would also quit if Trump followed through. Clark never became the acting attorney general.In August, Trump and his top allies – including Clark – were charged by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, with violating the Georgia racketeering statute over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. Trump and Clark have both pleaded not guilty. More

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about five minutes.Colorado’s Supreme Court was the first in the nation to rule that former President Donald J. Trump was disqualified on the basis of the 14th Amendment.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Colorado Ruling Knocks Trump Off Ballot, by Adam LiptakNearly a Quarter of Trump Voters Say He Shouldn’t Be Nominated if Convicted, by Maggie Haberman, Alan Feuer and Ruth IgielnikAfter Years of Wrangling, E.U. Countries Reach Major Deal on Migration, by Matina Stevis-GridneffF.A.A. to Investigate Exhaustion Among Air Traffic Controllers, by Emily Steel and Sydney EmberInside a Chaotic Billion-Dollar Election in a Pivotal African Nation, by Declan WalshNASA Streams Cat Video From Deep, Deep Space, by Sopan DebJessica Metzger and More

At a House committee hearing, James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, clashed with Jared Moskowitz, Democrat of Florida, who compared a Biden family loan issue with one involving Comer’s personal finances. We won’t go into the details, except that an irate Comer claimed Moskowitz looked like … More