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      Former aides warn of ‘running out of time’ to prevent Trump re-election

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      The re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 could “end American democracy as we know it”, according to three women who worked for him in the White House during his chaotic term in office.All three gave testimony to the US House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as the 6 January 6 Capitol attack staged by his supporters. And they warned in an unprecedented television interview on Sunday that time was short to prevent a second Trump administration in which they insist his behavior would be much worse.“People in general have short memories, and might forget the chaos of the Trump years,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary who resigned on the day of the deadly Capitol riot, said on ABC’s This Week.“They also might not just be paying attention to what he’s saying now – and the threat to democracy that exists. It does really concern me if he makes it to the general [election] that he could win. I’m still hopeful that we can defeat him in the primaries, but we’re running out of time.”Matthews was joined in the interview by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a key witness against Trump during the House committee’s public hearings in 2022, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, his former communications director, who said she dreaded him returning to office.“Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly,” Griffin said.“We all witnessed him trying to steal a democratic election before and go into historic and unconstitutional lengths to do so. That just shows he’s willing to basically break every barrier to get into power and to stay into power.“What scares me as much as him and his retribution is the almost cult-like following he has, the threats, the harassment, the death threats that you get when he targets you, is really horrifying and has no place in our American discourse.”About two days before the interview aired, someone placed a fake emergency call to police that prompted armed officers to arrive at the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, after she removed Trump from the state’s presidential primary under the US constitution’s insurrection clause. Bellows was not home when the attempted “swatting” call was made.Hutchinson, ex-aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, said voters needed to believe Trump when he said he would be a dictator on his first day back in the White House.“The fact that he feels that he needs to lean into being a dictator alone shows that he is a weak and feeble man,” she said.Matthews, meanwhile, said Trump had already signaled what his second administration would look like.“We don’t need to speculate because we already saw it play out,” she said.“To this day, he still doubles down on the fact that he thinks that the election was stolen and fraudulent. And his rhetoric has just gotten increasingly erratic. He’s literally called for things like doing away with parts of the constitution, [and] wanting to weaponize the department of justice to enact revenge on his political enemies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I knew that coming forward and speaking out against Donald Trump I could … face security threats, or death threats, online harassment. Despite all the personal sacrifice, I knew that ultimately it was the right thing to do. I just would encourage others to come forward because they’re running out of time in order to try to stop Trump from being in the Oval Office again.”The courage of the three women in speaking against Trump was a recurrent theme in the interview by This Week’s co-anchor Jonathan Karl. Martin and Hutchinson spoke of secret meetings in the basement of the Capitol with Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans who sat on the House committee, and their loss of friendships with others in the Trump White House who felt the women had betrayed them.“There were critical parts of history that the public would not know if not for Cassidy Hutchinson,” Griffin said.“Other senior officials witnessed them, but did not come forward. They did not testify, whether it was credible threats about the attack on the Capitol, that people showing up that day were going to be armed, that there was a scheme to try to stop the vice-president certifying the election.“I credit these women who are younger than me and had not as senior of titles, and stepped forward. For me, I want to be able to look my future kids in the eye and say when history called, I did the right thing, and I had the courage to do it.“That matters to me more than any future job or power structure that might exist if he’s president again.” More

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      Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Trump’s 2024 eligibility, Raskin says

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      Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential election, a prominent Democrat said Sunday, warning that the leading Republican candidate is seeking to become a “political martyr” as he pursues a second presidency.Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin was speaking ahead of the nation’s highest court stepping in to adjudicate recent state rulings in Maine and Colorado that struck the former president from the general election primaries under the US constitution’s 14th amendment insurrection clause.Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, a hard right conservative, was a vocal proponent of Trump’s big lie that his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden was fraudulent, should stand down ahead of the supreme court hearing the case, Raskin argued. Trump’s legal challenges could begin as early as Tuesday.Raskin led the push for Trump’s second impeachment following the deadly January 6 riot that the ex-president’s supporters staged at the US Capitol.“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say if your wife was involved in the big lie in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election, had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union.“He absolutely should recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”Raskin also cautioned that Trump, the runaway favorite in the Republican primary, would inevitably try to overturn the 2024 election if he were to lose again.“If he’s allowed to stay on the ballot, despite his clear incitement of an insurrection and attempt to overturn the results in the 2020 election, and if he loses to Joe Biden as he almost certainly would … he will feel himself a martyr and he will try to overturn the election result again,” said Raskin, who also served on the special House committee which investigated the January 6 attack.“So I don’t think we can run scared from Donald Trump. We’ve got to enforce our constitution.”Allies of Trump, and almost all of his primary challengers, have argued that the separate decisions in Maine and Colorado to disbar him were politically motivated. On Thursday, in an interview on Fox News, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis said the action in Maine “opens Pandora’s box”.Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has accused Trump of “intolerance towards everyone”, was critical of the decision. “It makes him a martyr,” he told CNN last week. “He’s very good at playing, ‘poor me, poor me’, he’s very good at complaining. But stuff like this should be decided by the voters of the US, it should not be decided by the courts.”New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu was another jumping to Trump’s defense on Sunday, telling State of the Union that he believed the insurrection argument used by Maine’s secretary of state Shenna Bellows and Colorado’s supreme court to remove the former president were bogus.“If there was any validity about keeping Trump off the ballot, you’d see 48 other states trying to do the same thing,” said Sununu, who has endorsed Haley for the Republican nomination.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think it is very politically motivated by the Maine secretary of state, Trump should be on the ballot [and] everybody just hopes that the supreme court gets involved and overturns what Maine and Colorado are trying to do.”Sununu also claimed, boldly, that Haley will defeat Trump in New Hampshire’s 23 January primary. An opinion poll just before Christmas placed the former South Carolina governor just four points behind Trump in the state.“Chris Christie isn’t going to make up 30 points in the next three weeks. Nikki Haley can make up five or 10 points and give Trump that defeat that no one thought was possible, and I think that’s very likely to happen,” he said.He did, however, concede that Haley’s failure to identify slavery as a cause of the civil war, which forced her into some furious back-pedaling in recent days, was a mistake.“If you have to clarify an answer, you know, ‘Gee, I guess I should have answered that differently, let’s go clear it up’, so yeah, sure” it was a mistake, he said. More

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      Maine secretary of state targeted in ‘swatting’ call after removing Trump from ballot

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      A fake emergency call to police resulted in officers responding Friday night to the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, just a day after she removed Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the US constitution’s insurrection clause.She becomes the latest elected politician to become a target of swatting, which involves making a phone call to emergency services with the intent that a large first responder presence, including Swat teams, will show up at a residence.Bellows was not home when the swatting call was made, and responding officers found nothing suspicious.Suspects in swatting cases are being arrested and charged as states contemplate stronger penalties.Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was the target of a swatting attempt at her Georgia residence on Christmas morning, the Republican representative and local police said.A man in New York called the Georgia suicide hotline claiming he had shot his girlfriend at Greene’s home and was going to kill himself. Police said investigators were working to identify the caller and build a criminal case.Another New York man was sentenced in August to three months in prison for making threatening phone calls to Greene’s office in Washington DC.While the Maine department of public safety did not share a suspected motive for the swatting attempt against Bellows, she had no doubts it stemmed from her decision to remove Trump from the ballot as he seeks a second presidency in 2024. The swatting attempt came after a conservative activist posted her home address on social media.“And it was posted in anger and with violent intent by those who have been extending threatening communications toward me, my family and my office,” Bellows told the Associated Press in a phone call Saturday.A call was made to emergency services from an unknown man saying he had broken into a house in Manchester, according to the Maine public safety department.The address the man gave was Bellows’s home. Bellows and her husband were away for the holiday weekend. Maine state police responded to what the public safety department said ultimately turned out to be a swatting call.Police conducted an exterior sweep of the house and then checked inside at Bellows’s request. Nothing suspicious was found, and police continue to investigate.“The Maine state police is working with our law enforcement partners to provide special attention to any and all appropriate locations,” the public safety statement said.Bellows said the intimidation factors won’t work: “Here’s what I’m not doing differently. I’m doing my job to uphold the constitution, the rule of law.”Beyond Bellows and Greene, other high-profile politicians who have been swatting call targets include US senator Rick Scott of Florida, Boston mayor Michelle Wu and Ohio attorney general Dave Yost.The Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows’s decision to Maine’s state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case.The Colorado supreme court earlier this month removed Trump from that state’s ballot, a decision that also was stayed until the US supreme court decides whether he would be barred under the insurrection clause, a civil war-era provision which prohibits those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office. More

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      Trump 2024 trials in limbo as supreme court becomes entangled

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      When Donald Trump was indicted in multiple criminal cases this summer, the conventional wisdom was that the former US president could spend vast amounts of time during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign stuck in courtrooms for back-to-back trials in New York, Florida and Washington.But the reality is that with the federal 2020 election interference case on hold pending appeals, and repeated delays pushing the classified documents case behind schedule by several months, for instance, Trump may find himself in courtrooms far less than expected.Trump has pleaded not guilty in his criminal cases: plotting to overturn the 2020 election in Washington, retaining national defense information and obstructing justice in Florida, conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, and paying hush money to an adult film star in New York.The US district judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing the federal election case, set a trial date for March 2024. And with her clear determination to keep that date – including warning that she could even move it forward – the case was widely seen as the one to take place before next year’s election.(There has been no trial date set in Georgia, though the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed an August start, while there has been uncertainty over whether the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg would put his case on hold should a federal trial happen.)That was until the US supreme court became entangled in the case in two major ways this month, in a development that could have far-reaching implications for the timing and for the eventual outcome of the trial.First, the court declined to decide the question of whether Trump could dismiss the charges on presidential immunity grounds before the US court of appeals for the DC circuit had issued its own ruling, remanding the case back to what could kickstart a lengthy appeals process.The supreme court then became entangled in a second way when, two days later, it agreed to review whether an obstruction statute that prosecutors have used against Capitol attack rioters – but formed two of the four charges against Trump – could be used in relation to January 6.Separately, the supreme court is almost certain to take up Trump’s expected appeal against the Colorado supreme court disqualifying him from being on the ballot for the state Republican primary under the 14th amendment, after finding that Trump “engaged” in insurrection.Depending on how quickly the court schedules oral arguments, how quickly it issues rulings and what decisions it ultimately makes, the timing and scope of the special counsel’s case against Trump could be dramatically altered just months before voters choose whether to give him a second term.“In the obstruction case, limiting the application of the obstruction statute – as the court has previously done – could knock out or impact that same charge in the indictment,” said former House counsel and current defense lawyer Stanley Brand, whose firm Brand Woodward has also represented January 6 defendants.The wild card, Brand added, was with the Colorado decision. “A ruling by the court on whether January 6 constituted an insurrection under the 14th amendment could similarly cast a shadow on allegations in the indictment,” he said.The worst-case outcome for the special counsel is that the federal election case remains frozen for weeks while the DC circuit considers the immunity question, Trump secures additional delay by seeking a rehearing before the full circuit, and then rules against the use of the obstruction statute.There is the possibility that the supreme court gives the special counsel its best outcome, where it takes the immunity claim quickly should the DC circuit rule against Trump, preserving the March trial date, and decides the obstruction statute is not being used too broadly and applies to Trump.But the uncertainty over two central parts of the special counsel’s election interference case now has a direct impact on whether Trump will spend more of his 2024 campaign in court, or on the trail.ImmunityThe US supreme court’s first entanglement was with Trump’s foremost defense to charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election results: that the indictment should be dismissed because he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for actions related to his “official duties” as president.The special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday issued a court filing in which his team said no one, not even presidents, were above the law. Smith’s argument suggested that, as president, Trump should be held to an even higher standard to protect the electoral process and reiterated that Trump engaged in “illegal acts to remain in power despite losing an election”.On Friday, the court declined to grant certiorari, remanding the matter back to the DC circuit to decide in a move that could carry profound consequences for the viability of the March trial.Even if the three-judge panel at the DC circuit – Florence Pan, Michelle Childs and Karen Henderson – rules against Trump quickly, Trump can then ask the full appeals court to rehear the case en banc, and then has 90 days to lodge his final appeal to the supreme court.The now-cemented potential for delay was laid out by the special counsel’s supreme court litigator and former solicitor general Michael Dreeben.“The court of appeals’ expedited briefing and argument schedule does not assure an appellate decision that will give this court adequate time to grant review, receive briefing, hold argument, and resolve this case in advance of the scheduled trial date,” Dreeben wrote in the government’s brief.Trump has also made no secret that his overarching legal strategy, for all of his criminal cases, is to pursue procedural delays. If the cases do not go to trial before next year’s election and he wins a second term, then he could direct his handpicked attorney general to drop all of the charges.And even if the case did go to trial before November, the people said, Trump’s preference would have been for the trial to take place as close as possible to the election because it would have given his 2024 campaign ammunition to miscast the criminal case against him as political in nature.ObstructionThe supreme court is also set to consider next year whether federal prosecutors can charge January 6 riot defendants with a statute that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress, which also formed the basis of two out of the four charges against Trump.The case involves Joseph Fischer, who was charged with obstruction for assaulting police officers during the riot, which he sought to dismiss, arguing the obstruction statute passed under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, had to do with document or evidence tampering.The US district judge Carl Nichols, who presided in the case, interpreted the statute as requiring prosecutors to show that the defendant took some action with respect to a document or record and did not apply to Fischer as he assaulted police officers at the Capitol.But a split three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit reversed the decision, deciding that obstruction applied more broadly and encompassed impeding any official proceeding. Fischer, and two other January 6 defendants, appealed to the supreme court to resolve the issue.If the supreme court decides that section 1512 of title 18 of the US criminal code was being used too broadly, that could cripple part of the case against Trump as the special counsel looks to draw a line at trial from the former president’s January 6 speech to the violence.“The court’s grant of certiorari in the Fischer case over over the solicitor general’s objection may foretell trouble for the government’s use of the statute,” Brand said.And if the court strikes down the use of the obstruction statute because it disliked the way prosecutors were using general conspiracy statutes for specific crimes, like it did with Jeffrey Skilling in the Enron scandal, it could undercut the remaining general conspiracy statutes used in the indictment against Trump, Brand added. More

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      How 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok

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      Banning TikTok in the US seemed almost inevitable at the start of 2023. The previous year saw a trickle of legislative actions against the short-form video app, after dozens of individual states barred TikTok from government devices in late 2022 over security concerns. At the top of the new year, the US House followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok from campus wifi.The movement to prohibit TikTok grew into a flash flood by spring. CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress for brutal questioning in March. By April – with support from the White House (and Joe Biden’s predecessor) – it seemed a federal ban of the app was not just possible, but imminent.But now, as quickly as the deluge arrived, it has petered out – with the US Senate commerce committee confirming in December it would not be taking up TikTok-related legislation before the end of the year. With the final word from the Senate, 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok.“A lot of the momentum that was gained after the initial flurry of attention has faded,” said David Greene, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “It seems now like the idea of a ban was being pushed more so to make political points and less as a serious effort to legislate.”Lots of legislation, little actionThe political war over TikTok centered on allegations that its China-based parent company, ByteDance, could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the demands of the Chinese Communist party.TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the United States, denies it improperly uses US data and has emphasized its billion-dollar efforts to store that information on servers outside its home country. Reports have cast doubt on the veracity of some of TikTok’s assertions about user data. The company declined to comment on a potential federal ban.With distress over the influence of social media giants mounting for years, and tensions with China high after the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the US in February 2023, attacks on TikTok became more politically viable for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Legislative efforts ensued, and intensified.The House foreign affairs committee voted in March along party lines on a bill aimed at TikTok that Democrats said would require the administration to effectively ban the app and other subsidiaries of ByteDance. The US treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell off the app or face the possibility of a ban. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and more than two dozen other senators in April sponsored legislation – backed by the White House – that would give the administration new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.But none of these laws ever made it to a vote, and many have stalled entirely as lawmakers turned their attention to the boom in artificial intelligence. Warner told Reuters in December that the bill he authored has faced intensive lobbying from TikTok and had little chance of survival. “There is going to be pushback on both ends of the political spectrum,” he said.The Montana effectMontana passed a total statewide ban on TikTok in May, to start on 1 January 2024, setting the stage for a federal one. That momentum for a nationwide prohibition ebbed, however, when a US judge last week blocked the legislation from going into effect – a move that TikTok applauded.“We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok,” the company’s statement reads.In a preliminary injunction blocking the ban, US district judge Donald Molloy said the law “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users”. The closely watched decision indicated that broader bans are unlikely to be successful.“The Montana court blocking the effort to ban TikTok not only threw a wet blanket on any federal efforts to do the same, but sent a clear message to every lawmaker that banning an app is a violation of the first amendment,” said Carl Szabo, general counsel at the freedom of speech advocacy group NetChoice, of which TikTok is a member.The EFF’s Greene, who also watched the Montana case closely, echoed that the results proved what many free speech advocates have long argued: a broad ban of an app is not viable under US law.“This confirmed what most people assumed, which is that what is being suggested is blatantly not possible,” he said. “Free speech regulation requires really, really precise tailoring to avoid banning more speech than necessary. And a total ban on an app simply does not do that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolitical discussions around the ban also exposed a need for comprehensive privacy legislation, Greene said. The same politicians raising concerns about the Chinese government collecting data had done little to address companies like Meta collecting similar reams of data in the US.“The ideas that were floated were legally problematic and belied a real, sincere interest in addressing privacy harms,” he said. “I think that can cause anyone to question whether they really cared about users.”Election year fearsMeanwhile, some analysts think Congress and the White House are unlikely to even attempt to ban TikTok in 2024, an election year, given the app’s popularity with young voters.Joe Biden’s re-election campaign team has been reportedly debating whether to join TikTok, on which the president does not currently have an official page, to attempt to reach more young voters. Nearly half of people between 18 and 30 in the US use TikTok, and 32% of users in that age group say they regularly consume news there. To date, Vivek Ramaswamy is the only Republican candidate to join the app, a move which has elicited lashings from his opponents in multiple debates.“The same lawmakers calling for a ban are going to need to pivot to online platforms like TikTok for their upcoming get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Szabo. “To cut off a major avenue of reaching voters during an election year doesn’t make political sense.”Even as interest in banning TikTok wanes – politically and among voters – the efforts are not entirely dead. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, told Reuters she is still working on legislation and in talks with federal agencies, noting that the Senate held a secure briefing on concerns about foreign influence by way of social media last month.Even as the interest and political power to fuel a TikTok ban wanes, social networks are going to be under the magnifying glass in the coming year, said Szabo.“As we go into 2024, I will say that control of speech on the internet is going to be even more heated, as lawmakers try to control what people can say about their campaigns,” he said. “I would also expect to see those very same politicians using the platform to raise money and to get out the vote.”Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Mainstream media is playing into Trump’s neo-fascist hands. I’m sticking with democracy and the Guardian | Robert Reich

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      The reason I write a column for the Guardian is the same reason I read it daily: I trust it.Not just the facts it conveys but also its judgment about what to convey – the stories it believes worthy of reporting, and doing it in ways that illuminate what’s really happening.That judgment is especially important as the US faces an election in 2024 in which one of the two likely candidates was engaged in an attempted coup and has given every indication of wanting to substitute neo-fascism for democracy.Again and again, the mainstream media have drawn a false equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden – asserting that Biden’s political handicap is his age while Trump’s corresponding handicap is his criminal indictments.But Trump is almost as old as Biden, and Trump’s public remarks and posts are becoming ever more unhinged – suggesting that advancing age may be a bigger problem for Trump than for Biden.The Guardian has been picking up on this, but why isn’t the mainstream media reporting on Trump’s increasing senescence?Similarly, every time the mainstream media reveal another move by the Republican Party toward authoritarianism, they point out some superfluous fault in the Democratic party in order to provide “balance”.So readers are left to assume all politics is rotten.A recent Washington Post article was headlined: “In a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics.”“How do Americans feel about politics?” the New York Times asked recently, answering:“Disgust isn’t a strong enough word.”But where is it reported that the mainstream media have contributed to making people tired and disgusted with politics?And where is it acknowledged that this helps Trump and his Republican allies?They want voters to be so turned off of politics that they’re unaware of Biden’s accomplishments, such as an economy that continues to generate a large number of new jobs, with real (adjusted for inflation) wages finally trending upward, inflation dropping and no recession in sight.Plus, billions of dollars pumped out to fix and improve the nation’s roads, ports, pipelines and internet. Hundreds of billions allocated to combat climate change. Medicare, now lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Billions in student debt canceled. Monopolies attacked. Workers’ rights to organize, defended.One person interviewed by the Post admitted, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.”As if the “us-against-them politics” is the fault of Democrats as much as it is Republicans, when in fact the GOP is the party of dysfunctional politics.Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, the norms of liberal democracy, the legitimacy of the opposing party or the premise that governing requires negotiation and compromise.Why isn’t this being reported?Trump and his allies want Americans to feel so disgusted with politics they believe the nation has become ungovernable. The worse things seem, the stronger Trump’s case for an authoritarian like him to take over: “I’d get it done in one day.” “I am your voice.” “Leave it all to me.”By focusing on Trump’s rantings and ignoring Biden’s steady hand, the mainstream media are playing directly into Trump’s neo-fascist hands.I’m sticking with democracy, and the Guardian.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Prosecutors urge court to reject Trump’s immunity claims in election subversion case

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      Special counsel Jack Smith urged a federal appeals court Saturday to reject former president Donald Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, saying the suggestion that he cannot be held to account for crimes committed in office “threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation” of the country.The filing from Smith’s team was submitted before arguments next month on the legally untested question of whether a former president can be prosecuted for acts made while in the White House.Though the matter is being considered by the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, it’s likely to come again before the supreme court, which earlier this month rejected prosecutors’ request for a speedy ruling in their favor, holding that Trump can be forced to stand trial on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The outcome of the dispute is critical for both sides especially since the case has been effectively paused while Trump advances his immunity claims in the appeals court.Prosecutors are hoping a swift judgment rejecting those arguments will restart the case and keep it on track for trial, currently scheduled for 4 March in federal court in Washington. But Trump’s lawyers stand to benefit from a protracted appeals process that could significantly delay the case and potentially push it beyond the November election.Trump’s lawyers maintain that the appeals court should order the dismissal of the case, arguing that as a former president Trump is exempt from prosecution for acts that fell within his official duties as president.Smith’s team has said no such immunity exists in the Constitution or in case law and that, in any event, the actions that Trump took in his failed effort to cling to power aren’t part of a president’s official responsibilities.The four-count indictment charges Trump with conspiring to disrupt the certification in Congress of electoral votes on 6 January 2021, when rioters motivated by his falsehoods about the election results stormed the US Capitol in a violent clash with police. It alleges that he participated in a scheme to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states who would falsely attest that Trump had won those states and encouraged then vice-president Mike Pence to thwart the counting of votes.Those actions, prosecutors wrote, fall well outside a president’s official duties and were intended solely to help him win re-election.“A President who unlawfully seeks to retain power through criminal means unchecked by potential criminal prosecution could jeopardize both the Presidency itself and the very foundations of our democratic system of government officials to use fraudulent means to thwart the transfer of power and remain in office,” Smith’s team wrote.In their brief, prosecutors also said that though the presidency plays a “vital role in our constitutional system”, so, too, does the principle of accountability in the event of wrongdoing.“Rather than vindicating our constitutional framework, the defendant’s sweeping immunity claim threatens to license Presidents to commit crimes to remain in office,” they wrote. “The Founders did not intend and would never have countenanced such a result.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trump’s lawyers have argued that the indictment threatens “the very bedrock of our Republic”, prosecutors say the defense has it backwards.“It is the defendant’s claim that he cannot be held to answer for the charges that he engaged in an unprecedented effort to retain power through criminal means, despite having lost the election, that threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic,” they said.A three-judge panel is set to hear arguments on 9 January. Two of the judges, J Michelle Childs and Florence Pan, were appointed by president Joe Biden. The third, Karen LeCraft Henderson, was assigned to the bench by the former president George HW Bush.The US district judge Tanya Chutkan earlier rejected the immunity arguments, asserting that the office of the presidency does not confer a “‘get-out-of-jail-free card”. Trump’s lawyers then appealed that decision, prompting Smith to seek to bypass the court and request an expedited decision from the supreme court.The justices last week denied that request without explanation, leaving the matter with the appeals court.Trump faces three other criminal prosecutions. He is charged in Florida with illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate; faces a state prosecution in Georgia that accuses him of trying to subvert that state’s 2020 presidential election; and faces a New York case that accuses him of falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment to an adult film star. More

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      Trump expected to challenge removal of name from states’ primary ballots

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      Donald Trump is reportedly expected to file legal challenges early next week to rulings in Maine and Colorado knocking him off primary ballots amid mounting pressure on US supreme court justices to rule on whether his actions on 6 January 2021 constitutionally exclude him from seeking a second term in the White House.The New York Times said that Trump’s legal moves could come as early as Tuesday.The impending collision of legal, constitutional and political issues comes after the two states separately ruled that the former US president was ineligible under a constitutional amendment designed to keep Confederates from serving in high office after the civil war.In Maine, the secretary of state, a political appointee, issued the ruling and a challenge will be filed in state court. Meanwhile, in Colorado the decision was made by the state’s highest court and will probably have a swifter passage to the conservative-leaning US supreme court – should it wish to hear the case.The conservative justices on the supreme court are sympathetic to “originalism”, which holds that the meaning of the constitution and its amendments should be interpreted by what its authors wrote. On the other side are justices more in tune with a contemporary application of the spirit of the original wording.The precise wording of the passage in question – section 3 of the 14th amendment – says anyone who has taken the oath of office, as Trump did at his 2017 inauguration, and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”, is ineligible.But at the heart of the anticipated challenges will be whether individual states have the authority to interpret constitutional matters outside their own constitutions. “Every state is different,” Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said on Friday. “I swore an oath to uphold the constitution. I fulfilled my duty.”The rulings have received pushback from elected officials. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said Trump should be beaten at the polls and back-and-forth ballot rulings in states are a “political distraction”.After Maine’s decision on Thursday, Republican senator Susan Collins said voters in her state should decide who wins the election – “not a secretary of state chosen by the legislature”. Former New Jersey governor and trailing nomination rival Chris Christie told CNN the rulings make Trump “a martyr”.“He’s very good at playing ‘poor me, poor me’. He’s always complaining,” Christie added.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, told Fox News that the Maine decision violates Trump’s right to due process – a jury decision on the now-delayed insurrection case. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said: “It should be up to voters to decide who gets elected.”One Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post that all state appeals court decisions on multiple efforts to kick Trump off state primary ballots – 16 have failed, 14 are pending – have ruled in the former president’s favor.“We don’t love the Colorado ruling, of course, but think it will resolve itself,” the adviser said.According to the New York Times on Saturday, Trump has privately told people that he believes the US supreme court will rule against the decisions. But the court has also been wary of wading into the turbulent constitutional waters of Trump’s multiple legal issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, the court denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request to expedite a ruling on whether Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over his alleged crimes following the 2020 election.But the argument that voters, and not courts or elected officials, should decide elections has been under stress since the 2000 election when Republican George W Bush was elected after a stinging legal battle with then vice-president Al Gore over Florida ballot recounts that was ultimately decided by the court.According to the Times, Trump is concerned that the conservative justices, who make up a “supermajority”, will be worried about the perception of being “political” and rule against him.Conversely, the justices might not want to be steamrollered into making decisions on a primary ballot timetable set by individual states that are themselves open to accusations of political coloring.For now, both the Maine and Colorado decisions are on hold. The Colorado Republican party has asked the US supreme court to look at the state’s decision, and Trump is anticipated to repeat that request and has said he will appeal the Maine decision.Maine’s Republican party chair, Joel Stetkis, told the Washington Post that “Shenna Bellows has kicked a hornet’s nest and woken up a sleeping giant in the state of Maine. There’s a lot of people very, very upset that one person wants to take away their choice.”Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the outlet: “We are witnessing, in real time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”Democrats in blue states, he said, “are recklessly and un-Constitutionally suspending the civil rights of the American voters by attempting to summarily remove President Trump’s name from ballots. These partisan election interference efforts are a hostile assault on American democracy.” More