Colorado’s secretary of state on Wednesday accused Donald Trump of trying to escape responsibility for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by claiming that the Constitution protects former presidents from prosecution.
The former president has made this argument in multiple instances, including most recently as he has appealed the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling striking him from the 2024 ballot to the US Supreme Court in Washington. He has also used similar defences in the pre-trial legal battles over his prosecutions for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in state and federal court.
Colorado’s decision by the state Supreme Court to remove Mr Trump from the ballot was swiftly followed by a similar move by Maine’s secretary of state. Mr Trump, who is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, now faces the prospect of legal challenges to determine whether state officials can deny him ballot access over charges that he supported an insurrection — the 2021 attack on Congress.
Jena Griswold, whose agency runs elections in the state of Colorado, argued on MSNBC’s The Last Word that Mr Trump was attempting to use the Constitution as a “get out of jail free card” — and said she disagreed with his lawyer’s assertion that former presidents should not be prosecuted, under the Constitution, for any actions which occurred while they were in office.
“Trump goes on to argue that even if he did incite the insurrection, well, the Constitution doesn’t apply to him. I don’t think that’s right,” Ms Griswold told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “I don’t think that there’s some ‘get out of jail free’ card for the presidency that allows Donald Trump to escape scrutiny of the laws of the land and the Constitution.”
Her position has been increasingly backed up by court decisions in recent months. But the US Supreme Court was asked by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith to take up that issue in December — and instead, the nation’s highest court kicked the can down the road.
Most recently, a federal appeals court sided against the former president on the issue.
Last Friday, a panel of federal judges ruled in favour of a group of Capitol Police officers who have brought a civil suit against the former president over the Capitol attack, and allowed their suit against Mr Trump to proceed over arguments of presidential immunity. Similar arguments on the ex-president’s behalf have been rejected in other cases.
The question of whether (and when) the US Supreme Court will take up the issue has further complicated the already messy process of prosecuting a former president and current leading candidate for the GOP nomination. It remains unclear, even as primaries are set to begin in Iowa and New Hampshire in the coming weeks, whether the criminal trials of Mr Trump will conclude before the November 2024 presidential election.
Mr Trump continues to insist that the efforts to prosecute him for his efforts to block Joe Biden from becoming president after the Democrat won the 2020 election are nothing more than a campaign by Democrats and the “deep state” to interfere in the 2024 election. He also continues to falsely claim that the last presidential election was “stolen” and plagued by widespread fraud; in reality, his own team was unable to prove those allegations in court while US elections authorities at the state and federal levels denied his charges.
