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      Judge Orders Giuliani to Pay $148 Million Damage Award Immediately

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      A federal judge found that Rudolph Giuliani had a history of hiding assets and that he must swiftly pay two Georgia election workers he was found to have defamed.A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to immediately pay the $148 million he owes to two former Georgia election workers for falsely accusing them of manipulating ballots after the 2020 election, citing concerns that he might “conceal his assets” if he were allowed to wait.The decision by the judge, Beryl A. Howell, was the latest legal defeat for Mr. Giuliani, who is facing an array of woes for his efforts three years ago to keep former President Donald J. Trump in office after his election defeat. But even though Judge Howell ordered speedy payment, there is no indication that Mr. Giuliani, whose long-running financial problems have only been intensifying, has anywhere near the amount he owes.On Monday, a few days after a jury in Washington imposed the damages on Mr. Giuliani, the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, asked Judge Howell to waive the standard 30-day waiting period and force him to pay them as soon as possible.In their request to Judge Howell, the women, who are mother and daughter, said that Mr. Giuliani had already failed to obey other court orders in the case related to money that he owed them. They also noted that Mr. Giuliani, a onetime U.S. attorney and mayor of New York, was being hounded by his creditors, including his former lawyer, and was saddled by “significant debts threatening his personal solvency.”“There is especially good reason,” lawyers for the women wrote, “to believe that defendant Giuliani intends to evade payment of the judgment by any means he can devise.”In a 13-page order, Judge Howell agreed with virtually everything Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss said about Mr. Giuliani, who admitted that he lied about the women in advance of his trial this month to determine damages in Federal District Court in Washington. Before the trial began, Judge Howell found that Mr. Giuliani was liable for defamation, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.At the trial, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss described how they were subjected to a torrent of threats and racist abuse after Mr. Giuliani, then the personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, directed his millions of social media followers to watch a video of them in a Georgia vote counting center, asserting without any basis that they were cheating Mr. Trump as they counted votes on Election Day.“Giuliani just messed me up, you know,” Ms. Freeman told the jury.The decision on Wednesday to speed up the payments was warranted, Judge Howell wrote, given Mr. Giuliani’s history as an “uncooperative litigant.” The judge said he had a record of disregarding her orders to pay the women’s legal fees and costs related to requests for discovery material.“Giuliani feebly counters concerns about him hiding assets, stating that there is no evidence in the record of any attempt by him to dissipate assets,” she wrote. “This statement simply ignores the ample record in this case of Giuliani’s efforts to conceal or hide his assets.”While Mr. Giuliani could still appeal the damages awarded by the jury, Judge Howell pointed out that the sum the jurors came up with was actually “conservative.” As part of his appeal, he could ask for a stay of immediate payment — though, as Judge Howell noted, he would still have to post a surety bond to show that he was good for at least some portion of the money if he lost. More

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      Biden Says It’s ‘Self-Evident’ That Trump Supported an Insurrection

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      But President Biden said the courts must decide if former President Donald J. Trump should be on the ballot in 2024.President Biden said on Wednesday that it was “self-evident” that former President Donald J. Trump had supported an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, but that the courts would decide whether he should be on the ballot in 2024.The president was responding to a reporter’s question about the Colorado Supreme Court decision on Tuesday that said that Mr. Trump was disqualified from being on the 2024 ballot in the state’s Republican primary because he was part of an insurrection.“Not going to comment on it,” Mr. Biden said after landing in Milwaukee for a speech to the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce.And then he did.“It’s self-evident. You saw it all,” Mr. Biden said, adding that it would be up to the court to decide whether Mr. Trump was in violation of the 14th Amendment, which says that acts of insurrection can disqualify someone from office.“But he certainly supported an insurrection,” Mr. Biden said. “No question about it. None. Zero.”Mr. Biden typically steers clear of talking about Mr. Trump’s legal culpability or any of the federal charges pending against him.Mr. Trump has denied that he incited the Jan. 6 riot. His campaign said it would appeal Tuesday’s decision, which applies only to Colorado, to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the court could end up answering the question for all 50 states.Mr. Trump has been the Republican front-runner for the nomination for months, despite the long list of criminal charges he faces in multiple investigations.On Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the indictments against him “political” and “fake.”The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case that could complicate and delay the election interference case against him in Washington. More

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      What Is the 14th Amendment, and How Could It Disqualify Trump in Colorado?

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      A ruling that Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency will test the court’s methodological values.The ruling by Colorado’s Supreme Court that former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president again because he engaged in an insurrection has cast a spotlight on the basis for the decision: the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which includes a clause disqualifying people who violated their oaths of office from holding government positions in the future.Mr. Trump has vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court. It is dominated by a supermajority of six justices who emerged from the conservative legal movement, which values methods of interpretation known as textualism and originalism. Under those precepts, judges should interpret the Constitution based on its text and publicly understood meaning when adopted, over factors like evolving social values, political consequences or an assessment of the intended purpose of the provision.Some of the major questions raised by the ruling — like whether it would need an act of Congress to take effect as well as the power of a state court to decide whether a federal candidate is qualified — do not turn on interpreting the clause’s text. But here is where textualism and originalism may come into play.What is the disqualification clause?The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 as part of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era. To deal with the problem of former Confederates holding positions of government power, its third section disqualifies former government officials who have betrayed their oaths from holding office.Specifically, the clause says that people are ineligible to hold any federal or state office if they took an oath to uphold the Constitution in one of various government roles, including as an “officer of the United States,” and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or aided its enemies. The clause also says a supermajority vote in Congress could waive such a penalty.According to a Congressional Research Service report, a criminal conviction was not seen as necessary: federal prosecutors brought civil actions to oust officials who were former Confederates, and Congress refused to seat certain members under the clause. Congress passed amnesty laws in 1872 and 1898, lifting the penalties on former Confederates.Is the president an ‘officer of the United States’?Mr. Trump is unique among American presidents: He has never held any other public office and only swore an oath to the Constitution as president. That raises the question of whether the disqualification clause covers the oath he took. While as a matter of ordinary speech, a president is clearly an “officer of the United States,” there is a dispute over whether it excludes presidents as a constitutional term of art.In 2021, two conservative legal scholars, Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law Houston and Seth Barrett Tillman of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, published a law review article about the clause arguing on textualist and originalist grounds that a president does not count as an officer of the United States. Among other issues, they focused on language about “officers” in the original Constitution as ratified in 1788 — including language about oaths that can be read as distinguishing appointed executive branch officers from presidents, who are elected.Last summer, two other conservative legal scholars — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — posted a law review article that invoked similar methodology but concluded that Mr. Trump is ineligible for the presidency. “Essentially all the evidence concerning the original textual meaning” of the clause pointed in that direction, the scholars argued. Among other things, they wrote that phrases like “officer of the United States” must be read “sensibly, naturally and in context, without artifice” that would render it a “‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings.”In an earlier phase of the Colorado case, a lower court judge had ruled that the clause does not cover presidents and so rejected removing Mr. Trump from the ballot. In finding the opposite, the Colorado Supreme Court also cited evidence of people in the immediate post-Civil War era discussing the president as an officer of the government, while focusing on ordinary use of the term rather than treating it as a term of art.Were the events of Jan. 6 an insurrection?The question of whether “insurrection” aptly describes the events of Jan. 6 is another topic of debate, although it was not a major disagreement among judges in Colorado.Some critics of Mr. Trump use that word to describe how a pro-Trump mob overran the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying President Biden’s Electoral College victory. Mr. Trump’s allies — as well as some people who are otherwise his critics — argue that “insurrection” is hyperbole.The Constitution does not define the word. While it was written after the South’s armed rebellion against the Union, its text does not limit its scope to participation in events of a comparable scale. A federal statute allowing presidents to use troops to suppress insurrections discusses “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States” that “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”The Colorado Supreme Court’s four-justice majority found that the events were an insurrection, and that issue was not the basis of any of the three dissents. The lower-court judge who had rejected the lawsuit on the grounds that the president is not an “officer of the United States” had nevertheless found that the events of Jan. 6 constituted an insurrection.Has Trump ‘engaged’ in an insurrection?Even assuming the events of Jan. 6 were an insurrection, there remains the question of whether the actions of Mr. Trump — who did not himself storm Congress — amounted to engaging in an insurrection against the government or giving aid and comfort to its enemies.The House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election concluded that the events met the standard of an insurrection, and asked the Justice Department to consider charging him under a law that makes it a crime to incite, assist, or give “aid or comfort” to an insurrection.The panel cited his summoning of supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, the fiery speech he delivered to them as they morphed into a mob, how he refused for hours to take steps to call off the rioters despite being implored by aides to do so, and an inflammatory tweet he sent about Mr. Pence during the violence.Still, the special counsel, Jack Smith, did not include inciting an insurrection in the charges he brought against Mr. Trump, and to date Mr. Trump has not been convicted of any crime in connection with his attempts to stay in office for a second term despite losing the election. Mr. Trump has argued that all his actions were protected by the Constitution, including the First Amendment.What else have courts said about the clause and Jan. 6?There has never before been a presidential candidate who is accused in court of being an oath-breaking insurrectionist, so there is no Supreme Court precedent solidly on point. But other politicians have faced similar legal challenges in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021.In early 2022, opponents of Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Trump-aligned Republican of North Carolina, filed a lawsuit to keep him from running for re-election based on what they described as his role in encouraging what became the Jan. 6 riot. A Federal District Court judge dismissed the case, ruling that the clause no longer had force after the 1872 amnesty law. But an appeals court overturned that ruling, holding that the amnesty law was only retrospective and the prohibition still applied in general. Mr. Cawthorn lost his primary election, so the case was rendered moot without resolving other issues.Opponents of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-aligned Republican of Georgia, similarly tried to keep her from running for re-election in 2022. A state judge rejected that challenge, finding no persuasive evidence that she “took any action — direct physical efforts, contribution of personal services or capital, issuance of directives or marching orders, transmissions of intelligence, or even statements of encouragement — in furtherance” of what turned into the Jan. 6 riot after she first took the oath on Jan. 3, 2021.And in September 2022, a state judge in New Mexico ordered Couy Griffin, a commissioner in New Mexico’s Otero County, removed from office under the clause. Mr. Griffin had been convicted of trespassing for breaching the Capitol as part of the mob. The judge ruled that the events surrounding the Jan. 6 riot counted as an insurrection and that Mr. Griffin’s role in the matter rendered him “constitutionally disqualified from serving.” More

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      Analysis: Amid Biden’s Dismal Polling, Don’t Expect Him to Shift Strategy

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      Officials in the president’s orbit say polls won’t change a strategy centered on comparing the Biden agenda with a Republican one, even as some allies feel betrayed by his policies.For weeks, polls have shown President Biden trailing his likely challenger, former President Donald J. Trump. Protesters have streamed through Washington, demanding that Mr. Biden call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Groups of key voters, including young people and voters of color, have suggested that they might not support Mr. Biden in the 2024 election.With so many troubling signals, what is a president seeking re-election to do? The answer, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, is to stay the course.Several officials in the Biden campaign and the White House are adamant that unflattering polls and vocal criticism from key constituents over Gaza, immigration and other issues simply have not been enough to shift a strategy that is centered on comparing the Biden agenda with policies favored by Republicans.The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would turn up the volume on that battle cry beginning in 2024.The polls — and the reams of what officials see as negative news coverage — have at times frustrated everyone, including Mr. Biden. But the polling has not changed the president’s mind on any of the issues that could bring political peril next year, including his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza or place conditions on military aid to Israel, the officials said.“They’re not freaking out,” Ted Kaufman, a longtime confidant to Mr. Biden, said in an interview about the president and his team. “When you signed up for this thing, you didn’t sign up to be at 80 percent in the polls. These are genuine veterans, and they’re picked because of their ability to be calm in difficult times.”This thinking is not likely to satisfy a cacophony of voices outside that small circle. Immigration has been one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities. In recent weeks, the White House has considered major new restrictions on migration to satisfy Republicans who refuse to approve aid for Ukraine or Israel without a crackdown at the border.Although members of Congress have not yet secured a deal, the fact that the White House has signaled openness to even some of the policies has drawn enormous criticism from progressives in his own party and immigration advocates who supported him in the past.“For the White House to endorse such cruel policies would be a betrayal to millions of Americans who believed President Biden’s campaign promises to restore our humanitarian leadership and the rule of law,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a refugee advocacy organization.Democrats are clamoring for the president to do more and say more about the threat Mr. Trump poses to democracy. Others want Mr. Biden to encourage the Israelis to end their large-scale campaign in Gaza. Still others say he is running out of time to make the strongest case possible for himself against an opponent who is skillful at commandeering a news cycle.A poll released by The New York Times on Tuesday showed widespread disapproval of Mr. Biden’s decisions around the war in the Middle East. But the polling also showed that those surveyed care much more about the state of the economy than they do about foreign policy, and that a majority of them still support providing military and economic aid to Israel.“The very real investments, resources and work we’re putting in right now aren’t for the next poll of the day — they’re to win an election next November,” said Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman.He also pointed to several other polls published this week that show better odds for Mr. Biden in 2024, including polling from The Times that showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump among likely voters.The plan for Mr. Biden to dig out of the bad news swirling around him in Washington, his advisers say, is to relentlessly focus on his agenda during visits to key states, like the one he made to Wisconsin on Wednesday.The state is crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects — he won there by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and recent polling suggests a close race in 2024. Ms. Harris chose the state to kick off a countrywide tour in support of reproductive rights, beginning in January.During a visit to Milwaukee on Wednesday, Mr. Biden did not focus on foreign policy or immigration or polls. Instead, he talked about investments in the business community during remarks at a Black chamber of commerce.Mr. Biden also said his administration had worked to forgive student loan debt — another point of criticism among Democrats — despite a Supreme Court decision that invalidated his plan for even more relief. According to figures released this month by the Education Department, the administration has wiped out $132 billion in debt for more than 3.6 million Americans.During his remarks, Mr. Biden highlighted Mr. Trump’s recent comments on immigrants “poisoning” the blood of the country, words that echoed Adolf Hitler’s comments about Jewish people.“Well, I don’t believe, as the president — former president — said again yesterday, that immigrants are polluting our blood,” Mr. Biden said. “The economy and our nation are stronger when we’re tapped into the full range of talents in this nation.”Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, said in an interview that the next year would be about addressing the concerns of different groups of voters but also about drawing a clear comparison with Mr. Trump.“Our job will be to make sure people know that they’ve been heard,” Mr. Wilker said, but also to present a comparison between Mr. Trump and “a seasoned leader who actually knows how to listen to people, bring people together and get things done.” In Wisconsin, the Biden campaign has hired a state campaign manager and piloted a volunteer program, with a focus on colleges and Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The program, which also has a pilot in Arizona, will focus on leveraging the social networks of volunteers rather than the door-knocking campaigns of past elections. (A graphic designer, Mr. Wilker said, is on hand to create shareable memes and graphics around topics — basically, an emoji-friendly version of a bumper sticker.)This week, the Biden campaign spent money on advertisements centered on Mr. Biden’s visit that promoted local investments that had come through infrastructure legislation. When Wisconsinites Google political news coverage, the Biden campaign will have paid for search results to surface local stories about the president’s visit.But Mr. Biden’s advisers know that he is a more important messenger than any campaign ad. On Wednesday, the president stopped twice to talk to reporters.In one exchange after landing in Milwaukee, Mr. Biden departed from his usual tendency to abstain when asked about the latest story swirling around Mr. Trump — a court ruling in Colorado that declared the former president ineligible to be placed on the primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection during the Jan. 6 attacks. Mr. Biden said it was “self evident” that his opponent was an insurrectionist, though he said whether Mr. Trump was on the ballot was up to the court.“You saw it all,” Mr. Biden told reporters. “And he seems to be doubling down on — about everything.”Then he acknowledged that his day job was calling.“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got to go do this event.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Trump Cases Crashing Into Supreme Court Could Reshape 2024 Election

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      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

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      With Trump Declared an ‘Insurrectionist,’ His Rivals Pull Their Punches, Again

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      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

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      Trump Asks Supreme Court to Put Off Hearing Case on Immunity Claim

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      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

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      Judge Gives Prosecutors Access to G.O.P. Lawmaker’s Messages in Jan. 6 Case

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      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