At a speech over the weekend, Donald Trump expressed delight after a court rejected an attempt to keep him off of Colorado’s primary ballot in 2024.
However, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal from the Obama administration and former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks have hinted that the ruling would be extremely detrimental to the outgoing president.
On Friday, Colorado state District Judge Sarah B. Wallace declared that Trump had committed acts of rebellion during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. However, she dismissed an attempt to remove Trump’s name off the state’s ballot, noting uncertainty about whether the constitutional amendment that bars insurrectionists from public office truly extends to the nation’s highest office, the presidency.
Katyal did not accept it.
“If I were to put the headline on Friday night, as an appeals lawyer, it would be this is the very worst decision Donald Trump could get from the trial court,” the former Department of Justice official told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Sunday. “Because it’s going to go on appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court, perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court and there Trump is going to face extreme headwinds.”
Katyal pointed out the distinction between the “legal part” of Wallace’s decision, which states that it does not apply to the presidency, and the “factual finding,” which states that Trump committed insurrection.
According to him, “the appeals court gives the factual findings enormous deference” because “a trial judge’s factual finding is nearly impossible to overturn.” Katyal clarified that the legal conclusions can be overturned as “that’s basically a fresh look at the legal thing.”
However, Wallace in this instance “factually made devastating findings against Trump and then looked at this weak legal technicality—that the president is not covered by the 14th Amendment—that even the judge acknowledged would be absurd.”
A similar argument was made by veteran Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks during a separate interview on MSNBC.
She declared that the judge’s ruling was “wrong on the law.”
“Of course on the facts she is right, and she made a factual finding that he is insurrectionist,” Wine-Banks added. “And that would bar him if he were an officer. And I believe that any higher court will find that it was the intent to bar such a person from holding the office of president and that he will be barred.”
Rephrased from: The Republic Brief By: Trump Knows
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Rephrased from Trump Knows by InfoArmed