(Article republished from Revolver.news)
The 200+ page decision is a work of such slop that it makes Roe v. Wade look like a paragon of principled and coherent legal reasoning by comparison. The theory of the case is that Trump is constitutionally prohibited from returning to the White House on the basis of the following “Section 3” provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The language does not make clear whether the provision even applies to the office of the presidency, and in fact, the district court opinion to which this decision responds ruled that it doesn’t apply. Of course, the critical question is not just whether the section applies to the presidency but whether Donald Trump in fact engaged in an “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. This is where things become flatly ridiculous. Trump clearly did nothing illegal or even inappropriate in his speech on January 6th. His language was well within the bounds of ordinary political rhetoric, and his exhortation to the crowd to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically” is entirely unobjectionable (contrast that to Ray Epps’ exhortation that the crowd break the law and go into the Capitol). The notion that Trump’s behavior would rise to the level of an “insurrection” or “rebellion” is still more absurd when one understands the Civil War context of the provision. At least now we can better understand the ultimate aim of Biden’s preposterous claim that January 6 is the worst “attack on democracy since the Civil War.”
At any rate, the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision overturned the district court’s ruling that Section 3 doesn’t apply to presidents but upheld the district court’s finding that Trump is guilty of insurrection. On that basis, the decision concludes that Trump isn’t constitutionally eligible to be president and is therefore excluded from the ballot—never mind the fact that Trump was never convicted of insurrection in court and that the sham J6 charges against him don’t even include “seditious conspiracy,” though it is quite likely, especially in light of the Colorado decision, that these will come in a superseding indictment.
As ridiculous as the “Section 3” legal theory is, other far-left states are eager to jump on the bandwagon in order to protect democracy by excluding the front-runner for the 2024 race from appearing on the ballot. California’s lieutenant governor recently vowed to explore every legal option to exclude Trump from the ballot, for instance.
More interesting than the sham legal theory behind the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision is the organization behind it called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). As the organization boasts on its website, CREW is responsible, along with a handful of law firms, for bringing the cases in question to the Colorado Supreme Court. CREW might be familiar to Revolver readers for the fact that notorious Democrat lawfare hatchet man Norm Eisen co-founded the organization in 2003 and ran it for most of Trump’s presidency, during which time it generated nearly 200 lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Norm Eisen drafted ten articles of impeachment against Trump before Trump’s phone call with Zelensky even took place and went on to serve as special counsel in the first impeachment proceedings against Trump. Eisen worked with his colleague on a lawsuit claiming Trump violated the emoluments clause before he was even sworn in. Incidentally, his colleague Joseph Sellers represented Congressman Bennie Thompson in his January 6 lawsuit against Trump, which later became the basis for the second impeachment against Trump and the January 6 Committee report. Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Norm Eisen has been a key architect of nearly every attempt to delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue, and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the United States—all in the name of democracy, of course. Years ago, we first brought Norm Eisen’s name to national attention in the context of his work on color revolutions overseas and the fact that he was deploying the same tools as a lawfare operative to undermine Trump that he would use in the State Department to undermine foreign leaders deemed to be adversaries of the United States.
Tucker Carlson: "Norm Eisen, remember the name." https://t.co/Nhh55LAaH3
— The Columbia Bugle ?? (@ColumbiaBugle) September 16, 2020
Believe it or not, Eisen is not the least reputable person associated with the anti-Trump lawfare outfit CREW. None other than disgraced Democrat operative David Brock joined CREW’s board of directors in 2014, where he remained until the end of 2017. David Brock, of course, is the architect of the infamous leaked “Brock” memo that envisaged CREW’s central role in its comprehensive lawfare, media, and political strategy to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
The Washington Free Beacon (Archived):
The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock’s private and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, “Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action,” outlines Brock’s four-year agenda to attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Shareblue.
The memo contains plans for defeating Trump through impeachment, expanding Media Matters’ mission to combat “government misinformation,” ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy, using a “digital attacker” to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat “fake news.”
Brock has withdrawn from CREW, though he’s still active in fundraising efforts. Norm Eisen has also left CREW to found a new lawfare arm shamelessly called the States United Democracy Center. States United appears to pick up where CREW left off. When it is not targeting so-called “election deniers” running for office (that is, those who dare question the integrity of the 2020 election), States United is directly engaged in anti-Trump lawfare related to January 6.
The man running the show now at CREW goes by the name of Noah Bookbinder. Bookbinder, like Eisen and Brock, is animated by a fanatical obsession with Trump. Here’s Bookbinder over four years ago droning on about Trump’s tax returns:
Here is Bookbinder doubling down on CREW’s instrumental role in getting Trump off the Colorado ballot:
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bookbinder, however, is the fact that he happens to hold a position on the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory board, to which Homeland Security director Mayorakas appointed him in March 2022. The idea that the Department of Homeland Security would be formally associated with the head of a group like CREW with such manifestly partisan motivations seems inappropriate at best, and even worse when we consider that CREW is intensely involved in attempts to prevent Trump from running for a second term by any means possible.
In another sense, however, Bookbinder’s association with the DHS in particular is entirely appropriate. It has long been our position that the DHS is the absolute tip of the spear when it comes to the political weaponization of the national security apparatus against Trump supporters. Recall that the Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board,” an organization set up to censor “disinformation” related to the 2020 election, COVID, among other things, was run out of the DHS. Fortunately, this particular group was too ridiculous, even for the present political moment, and had to be disbanded.
As Revolver has reported extensively, Bennie Thompson, the former head of the January 6 commission, was also the Department of Homeland Security’s man in congress, being chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security from 2007–2011 and then again in 2019.
Thompson is a key component in the establishment DNC’s merger with the national security state after 9/11, using the pretext of fake “domestic terrorism”. As an untouchable incumbent in Mississippi with 28 years in Congress, Thompson was the chair of the Homeland Security Committee from 2007-2011 and has been back in charge again since 2019.
Essentially, whenever Democrats have a majority in the House, Thompson is put in as the hatchet man to control oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.
Bennie Thompson scratches the back of an ever-expanding US national security state. In turn, Thompson is rewarded with plush committee chair roles and an expanding DHS turf of his own.
Indeed, Thompson was tapped to serve as the Permanent Chair of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. In the 2020 election, Thompson presided over all official business of the convention that made Joe Biden the Democratic nominee for President.
Ironically, in 2004, Thompson was one of only 31 House Democrats who voted to overturn the results of the Bush-Gore election. But today, the vast Department of Homeland Security agency reports to him. And that agency now calls anyone who claims fraud in the 2020 election “Potential Terror Threats.”
It is also noteworthy that Norm Eisen’s new lawfare outfit is essentially an extension of the DHS. Indeed, Norm Eisen’s new lawfare group contains not one, not two, but three former heads of the Department of Homeland Security—that’s right, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Tom Ridge were all heads of the DHS.
Norm Eisen’s merger with DHS heavyweights no doubt reflects the reality that the DHS is at the forefront of the Regime’s attempt to undermine Trump and his supporters. And now we see that the current head of CREW, Noah Bookbinder, actually has a formal advisory role with that same agency. Interesting indeed.
On the whole, we see a number of dark trends converge in CREW’s role in excluding Trump from the Colorado ballot—a decision sure to be overturned but nonetheless portentous in terms of the overall sense of where things are going. Of course, the fact that someone with an advisory position in the Department of Homeland Security runs a group attempting to remove the frontrunner for 2024 from the 2024 ballot, all in the name of democracy, is not exactly optimal. It is never a great sign when the national security bureaucracy under the control of a nation’s leader is used to attack the frontrunner from another party. And the relationship between the DHS and the head of CREW, together with Norm Eisen’s deep ties with DHS bigwigs, underscores just how deeply interconnected the regime’s tentacles are and suggests a powerful integration between the national security bureaucracies and the more political lawfare organizations in the regime’s full-spectrum efforts to destroy Trump.
It has been clear for a long time now that this regime will do anything to stop another Trump presidency and to prevent the American people from ever meddling in their own elections again. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
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