2023

By Andrew Goudsward

(Reuters) -Maine on Thursday became the second U.S. state to bar Donald Trump from a Republican presidential primary ballot, part of a flurry of legal challenges to his eligibility to run for president in 2024.

The challenges are being filed under a provision in the U.S. Constitution banning officials who have engaged in “insurrection” from holding public office.

Here is a look at some of the notable challenges under the provision known as Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and where they stand:

WHAT IS SECTION 3 OF THE 14th AMENDMENT?

Passed after the U.S. Civil War, Section 3 bars anyone from holding public office if they engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” after previously swearing an oath in support of the United States.

The provision was enacted in 1868 to prevent former members of the pro-slavery Confederacy from serving in the U.S government.

Advocacy groups and some anti-Trump voters have brought legal challenges to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in several states based on Section 3, arguing that then-President Trump engaged in insurrection when he urged his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to go to Washington and stop Congress from certifying the November 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

A mob of his supporters then stormed the U.S. Capitol and were unsuccessful in blocking the certification.

WHAT DID MAINE RULE?

The state’s top election official, Democrat Shenna Bellows, granted a challenge from a group of former state lawmakers who argued that Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, was not qualified to serve as president again under Section 3.

Bellows ordered Trump kept off the ballot for the March 5 Republican primary but put her ruling on hold to allow Trump to appeal to a state court.

HAVE ANY OTHER STATES DISQUALIFIED TRUMP?

Colorado become the first state to exclude Trump from a primary ballot. The state’s highest court ruled on Dec. 19 that Trump engaged in insurrection.

Colorado is viewed as a safely Democratic state in the November 2024 general election, meaning Biden would be expected to carry the state regardless of whether Trump is on the ballot.

The court paused its ruling to allow Trump to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which the former president indicated he would do. The Colorado Republican Party filed its own appeal to the Supreme Court on Dec. 27, clearing a path for Trump to remain on the primary ballot despite the state court ruling.

WHAT IS TRUMP’S DEFENSE?

Trump and his allies have criticized disqualification cases as undemocratic and part of a conspiracy by his political rivals to keep him out of office.

His lawyers have argued that only Congress can enforce Section 3 and that presidents are not subject to disqualification. A lower court judge in Colorado agreed that Section 3 does not apply to presidents before that ruling was overturned by the state’s top court.

Trump’s legal team also disputes that he engaged in insurrection, arguing that Trump was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech on Jan. 6.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges accusing him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results but has not been charged with insurrection.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The Maine decision will be reviewed by state courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to take the Colorado case given its political importance and the unsettled legal questions it raises.

It is not clear how the Court would rule, but it is dominated by a conservative majority that includes three Trump appointees. The court may not need to decide whether Trump engaged in insurrection and could rule narrowly that Section 3 does not apply to presidents or that it cannot be enforced by courts.

A ruling that Trump is disqualified from the presidency would be momentous step with seismic political implications.

WHICH STATES HAVE REJECTED BALLOT CHALLENGES?

Lawsuits in several states seeking to keep Trump off primary ballots have failed. Courts in Minnesota and Michigan ruled that Trump could not be excluded from the primary but allowed challengers to revive their cases for the November 2024 general election if Trump is the Republican nominee.

Courts in both states ruled that Trump’s eligibility for the presidency under the U.S. Constitution was not relevant to internal party primaries.

Michigan is considered one of the hotly contested states that can swing to either Democrats or Republicans and likely to decide the outcome of the general election.

Some state election officials have also turned aside efforts to keep Trump off the ballot. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Thursday announced that Trump would be included on the list of candidates in that state’s Republican primary. California is a Democratic stronghold in general elections.

WHERE ELSE ARE CASES PENDING?

Challenges to Trump’s eligibility have been filed in at least 12 states. One of the more closely watched cases is in Oregon, where the state Supreme Court is poised to decide in the coming days whether to consider a lawsuit seeking to disqualify Trump from the state’s primary ballot.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Ross Colvin and Mark Porter)

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A civil rights leader was escorted by police out of a North Carolina movie theater after he insisted on using his own chair for medical reasons, prompting an apology from the nation’s largest movie theater chain.

The incident occurred Tuesday in Greenville during a showing of “The Color Purple.” The Rev. William Barber II said he needs the chair because he suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, a disabling bone disease.

Barber, 60, leads a nonprofit called Repairers of the Breach, which focuses on issues including voter suppression and poverty. He also co-chairs the national Poor People’s Campaign, which is modeled after an initiative launched in 1968 by the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

During an hourlong news conference on Friday, Barber spoke in support of people with disabilities and the need for businesses to provide the accommodations required under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I know that if I cannot sit in my chair in a theater in Greenville, North Carolina …. that there are thousands of other people who will be excluded from public spaces in this nation,” Barber said.

Barber said managers at the AMC theater asked an armed security guard and local police officers to remove him after he stood firm on using the chair. Barber said he agreed to be escorted out after officers said they’d have to close down the theater and arrest him.

Barber said he left his 90-year-old mother behind with an assistant to watch the film. Video of the incident shows Barber talking to an officer before walking out of the theater.

“This is not about me personally,” he said. “Though it happened to me personally, this is about what systemic changes, policy changes (and) training needs to be done to ensure this happens to no one.”

Greenville police said in a statement that a caller from the theater said a customer was arguing with employees and the theater wanted him removed. After a brief conversation with a responding police officer, “Barber agreed to leave the theater voluntarily,” police said. No charges were filed.

AMC apologized in a written statement, saying it welcomes and works hard to accommodate guests with disabilities, WRAL reported.

“We are also reviewing our policies with our theater teams to help ensure situations like this do not occur again,” the statement said.

Barber said he’ll meet next week with the chairman of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Adam Aron, after Aron reached out to him. Barber said he is “hopeful it will lead to just and good things for those with disabilities.”

Barber previously served as president of the North Carolina NAACP, leading protests over voter access at the Statehouse that got him and more than 1,000 people arrested for civil disobedience. He stepped down from that role in 2017.

Barber is now a professor at Yale Divinity School. He said Friday that he tells his students they must care about people.

“There’s no way to follow Jesus without learning to pay attention to whoever is broken and vulnerable in society,” Barber said. “Because that’s where God shows up.”

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By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, said in court papers unsealed on Friday that he mistakenly gave his attorney fake case citations generated by an artificial intelligence program that made their way into an official court filing.

Cohen, who is expected to be a star witness against Trump at one of the former president’s criminal trials, said in a sworn declaration in federal court in Manhattan that he did not realize the citations generated by Google Bard were fictitious.

The case citations were included by an attorney for Cohen in a motion seeking an early end to his supervised release following Cohen’s imprisonment for campaign finance violations.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman earlier this month said three court decisions cited in the motion did not exist. He directed Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, to demonstrate why he should not be sanctioned for citing non-existent cases.

Cohen, who was disbarred nearly five years ago, in Friday’s filings said those citations came from his own online research and that he had not expected Schwartz to “drop the cases wholesale into his submission without even confirming they existed.”

Cohen said he had “not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.”

“I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused,” Cohen said in the filing.

Google Bard is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Alphabet Inc’s Google.

Courts nationally are grappling with the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and how to regulate their use in court proceedings.

Two New York lawyers were sanctioned in June for submitting a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by ChatGPT.

Cohen was recently a key witness in New York state Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud case against Trump.

Cohen is expected to also testify in the state criminal case against Trump that accuses him of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements to Cohen for a $130,000 payment to silence porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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