A Colorado court on Friday rejected a request to exclude Donald Trump from the ballots in the Republican primaries for the 2024 presidential election in this western American state. The historic indictment of the ex-president on August 1 at the federal level and then on August 14 by the state of Georgia for his allegedly illicit attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election opened a legal debate on his possible ineligibility, leading to appeals in several States.
But a trial judge in Denver, capital of Colorado, rejected the appeal, as did her peers in Minnesota and Michigan previously. The Court orders Colorado electoral authorities “to place Donald Trump on the ballot for the 2024 Republican primaries,” indicates the decision of Judge Sarah Wallace.
Acts of “rebellion”
The applicants, the anti-corruption citizens group Crew, accused Donald Trump of having “incited a violent mob” of hundreds of his supporters to storm the Capitol, seat of Congress, on January 6, 2021, in order to prevent the certification. of the victory of his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
They invoked the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868. This amendment provides for the exclusion of any public responsibility anyone, after having taken an oath to defend the Constitution, who would have engaged in acts of “rebellion”.
However, “Mr. Trump is involved in the rebellion” that constitutes January 6, their lawyer argued. “Mr. Trump acted with the specific intent of inciting political violence and directing it toward the Capitol with the aim of preventing the certification of the election,” the judge ruled. But she motivated the dismissal of the appeal by doubts about whether the 14th Amendment applies to the president.
“Nail in the coffin”
This text, aimed at the time at supporters of the Southern Confederacy defeated during the Civil War (1861-1865), has been used at least eight times in history, according to Crew, but only once for more than a century, in 2022.
Donald Trump’s campaign welcomed the decision, saying it represented “another nail in the coffin of anti-American ballot challenges.”
That same day, however, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over the ex-president’s federal trial for his attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, denied his request to remove the indictment. accusation any reference to his possible responsibility in the assault on the Capitol.
His lawyers argued that these mentions could “lead the members of the jury to wrongly attribute guilt to him” when he is not being prosecuted for these events.
But the judge rejected the request, explaining in her ruling Friday that the court “would not provide a copy of the indictment to the jurors,” and emphasizing that before their deliberations, it would “tell them what the charges were and the evidence to be considered.
Donald Trump, favorite in the Republican primaries, denounces his legal troubles as so much “electoral interference”, at the instigation of the Democratic administration, to exclude him from the race for the White House.