A Tuesday ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court that invalidates former president Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s 2024 ballot due to his violating the Insurrection Clause of the 14th Amendment is bad electoral news for the disgraced ex-president, but it could also be a problem for the attorneys defending him on numerous criminal counts, according to Hugo Lowell of The Guardian
Lowell was a guest on MSNBC, and he was asked by host Katie Phang, “As we talked about … there [are] these pockets of cases that coming up and they are intended and designed to ensure that we don’t have another insurrection, another crazy second term with Donald Trump. Is this going to change the litigation calculus, the strategy calculus for Donald Trump now, considering this decision coming out of Colorado?”
“I think it necessarily changes it,” Lowell responded.
“I can tell you with certainty, according to our sources, Trump and his team didn’t anticipate getting removed from the ballot at all,” he continued. “After the district court’s decision in Colorado, that kind of left him just off the hook. They thought that would be the end of the road … I am speculating now, but I assume that the fact that the appeals court has ruled that Trump should be struck off the ballot will come as a surprise. I just texted someone at the campaign and they have not responded to me yet about, you know, kind of what they are thinking.”
The Colorado ruling will also negatively impact attorneys for Trump in other cases, too, Lowell predicted.
“They have consistently called January 6th, you know, this was a First Amendment thing, this was called political speech, an argument they have made in the D.C. federal cases and an argument in the motion to dismiss in Georgia, and this was generally the argument they were settling on with respect to any questions about January 6th and what Trump said at the Ellipse rally. Of course, the D.C. District Court has also, you know, rejected Trump’s arguments that the speech makes him immune from prosecution because they found — well, the judge essentially found that it is not immunizing if the speech was in furtherance of a crime. And I think the fact this is piling up necessarily has to change his legal calculus going into the new year.”
