2023

By Keith Coffman

DENVER (Reuters) – Colorado authorities are investigating possible threats against state Supreme Court justices, Denver police said on Tuesday, one week after the court’s decision barring former President Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot.

The Denver Police Department also said it was providing “extra patrols” around the homes of the justices, who ruled 4-3 on Dec. 19 that Trump should be disqualified under a little-known clause of U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment for engaging in insurrection.

Two nights later, Denver police officers were dispatched to the home of one of the justices in response to a call for service that police afterward described as an apparent “hoax report,” adding they were still investigating the incident.

Republican strategists have suggested the Colorado ballot ruling, likely headed for a U.S. Supreme Court appeal, would spark a backlash among political conservatives by reinforcing the narrative that Trump is the victim of a partisan legal process.

NBC News and other media outlets have since reported the emergence of violent rhetoric on right-wing online forums from Trump supporters aimed at the four Colorado justices who sided against him.

The posts in question included messages calling for the justices’ personal information to be publicly exposed, and an apparent reference to the judges that said: “All f**ing robed rats must f**ing hang.”

“The Denver Police Department is currently investigating incidents directed at Colorado Supreme Court justices and will continue working with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners to thoroughly investigate any reports of threats or harassment,” police said in a statement on Tuesday.

Responding to a query about the probe, an FBI spokesperson in Denver said in a statement the agency was “aware of the situation and working with local law enforcement.”

“We will vigorously pursue investigations of any threat or use of violence committed by someone who uses extremist views to justify their actions regardless of motivation,” the FBI statement added.

Neither the police nor the FBI commented on the nature or extent of the incidents under investigation.

A spokesperson for the Colorado state judicial branch likewise declined to comment on the issue.

Trump became the first candidate in U.S. history deemed ineligible for the White House under a provision of the 14th Amendment prohibiting officials who engage in “insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. government from holding elected office.

The Colorado high court held that the insurrection clause applies to Trump because of the role he played in stoking the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential race.

The Colorado court, whose decision applies only to the state’s March 5 Republican primary, said it would delay the effect of its ruling until at least Jan. 4, 2024, to allow time for an appeal.

(This story has been refiled to fix a typo in paragraph 4)

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Stephen Coates)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump has centered his unlikely rise from reality television star to onetime — and potentially future — president on the idea that he’s wiser than Washington’s bumbling political class, once going so far as to label himself a “very stable genius.”

But when it comes to one of history’s darkest moments, Trump is professing ignorance.

Facing criticism for repeatedly harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood “poisoning” Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust.

“I never knew that Hitler said it,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday, volunteering once again that he never read Hitler’s biographical manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”

“I know nothing about Hitler,” he insisted. “I have no idea what Hitler said other than (what) I’ve seen on the news. And that’s a very, entirely different thing than what I’m saying.”

Trump’s assertion that he knows so little about one of the 20th century’s most documented figures is notable for someone seeking the presidency, a role steeped in and shaped by history. But claiming ignorance, particularly when it comes to people who espouse racist or antisemitic rhetoric, is a tactic Trump has repeatedly deployed when aiming to distance himself from uncomfortable storylines.

After he was endorsed by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke during his winning 2016 campaign, Trump insisted he had no knowledge of the white supremacist who had run for office numerous times and is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “perhaps America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite.”

“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper in February 2016. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”

Asked if he would condemn the white supremacists supporting him, Trump said he would “have to look at the group. I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about.” He continued to repeat that assertion even after Tapper said he was referring to the KKK.

Trump has also pleaded ignorance in other cases. As he ran for reelection in 2020, Trump said he didn’t know much about QAnon, the convoluted conspiracy that alleges Democrats are involved in a satanic pedophilia ring and casts Trump as the nation’s savior — even as he retweeted accounts promoting the conspiracy.

“I know nothing about it,” he said during an NBC town hall. Nonetheless, he refused to rule it out as false. “I don’t know that and neither do you,” he said.

It was the same when Trump was asked to condemn the Proud Boys militia group, which was key in organizing the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Enrique Tarrio and other members of the far-right extremist group have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other crimes for their part in the attack, which was part of a desperate bid to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

“I don’t know who the Proud Boys are,” Trump told reporters after instructing the group, during a presidential debate, to “Stand back and stand by.”

“I mean, you’ll have to give me a definition ‘cause I don’t really know who they are,” Trump said of the group, which was drawing headlines at the time.

Trump has also suggested he was unaware of some of the most consequential periods of American history. At a recent rally in Reno, Nevada, Trump said he had to ask Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to define the post-Civil War era known as Reconstruction as he boasted about his growing popularity with Hispanic voters and Republican wins along the border.

“They say the first time since Reconstruction. You know what Reconstruction means? That means the Civil War,” Trump told the audience. “I said, ‘Give me a definition, governor, of Reconstruction. You said I’m the first one to win all of these towns since Reconstruction.’ He said, ‘Well, Reconstruction: since the Civil War.’ That’s a long time ago. That’s pretty good.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump “has been very clear that he’s talking about criminals and terrorists who have crossed the border under Joe Biden’s watch. When he’s back in the White House, the United States will return to a secure border and a system that places the safety and security of Americans first.”

The former president’s claims about Hitler are particularly notable given his upbringing in New York, home to one of the nation’s largest Jewish populations.

Trump has also participated in Holocaust memorial events. He spoke at a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2017, where he denounced Holocaust deniers as accomplices to “horrible evil.” And he paid a brief visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, where he called the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews “the most savage crime against God and his children.”

Trump’s insistence that he has not read “Mein Kampf” — an assertion he also made at an Iowa rally last week — evoked a different Hitler book he once allegedly had in his possession.

Journalist Marie Brenner reported in Vanity Fair magazine in 1990 that Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that, “from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”

Trump told Brenner that, “it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew.” Davis confirmed to Brenner that he had indeed given Trump ”a book about Hitler,” but it was “My New Order, “ a collection of Hitler’s speeches. “I thought he would find it interesting,” Davis said, adding, “I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”

“Later, Trump returned to this subject.,” Brenner wrote. “‘If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,’” Brenner wrote.

Knowing basic American history is important for a president, said Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer, who studies political history.

“We don’t need a historian as president, but certainly you want a president with a feel for some of the basic parts of American history, of world history,” he said, noting, for instance, that Reconstruction was a “a formative moment for civil rights and race relations.”

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote that, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”

Trump told Hewitt his message was “very different” and he had “zero” racist intent.

“I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works,” he said. “They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way. It’s a very different kind of a statement. What I’m saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country.”

Still, he repeated “poisoning” references eight times.

Among those references: “They are poisoning our country. They are poisoning the blood of our country. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They’re terrorists. Absolutely that’s poisoning our country. That’s poisoning the blood of our country. And that’s what’s happening.”

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By Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Donald Trump scored a victory on Wednesday in his fight against challenges to his eligibility to run for the White House again when Michigan’s top court declined to hear a case seeking to disqualify him from the state’s presidential primary ballot.

The Michigan Supreme Court said it would not hear an appeal from four voters in the state seeking to bar the former president from the Feb. 27 Republican primary for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The voters argued that Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, could not serve as president under a provision in the U.S. Constitution that bars people from holding office if they engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” after swearing an oath to the United States.

“We are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this Court,” the justices said in a brief order.

Trump in a post on his Truth Social site said that the court “strongly and rightfully denied” what he called a “desperate Democrat attempt” to take him off the ballot in Michigan.

The Michigan ruling contrasts with a decision by Colorado’s top court last week to disqualify Trump under the same constitutional provision, known as Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Trump has vowed to appeal the Colorado ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump has been indicted in both a federal case and in Georgia for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election but he has not been charged with insurrection related to the Jan. 6 attack.

A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court could resolve the issue of Trump’s eligibility nationwide to run in the 2024 presidential race.

A lawyer for the voters cast the ruling as procedural, noting that the court allowed them to revive their case for the November 2024 general election.

“The Court’s decision is disappointing but we will continue, at a later stage, to seek to uphold this critical constitutional provision designed to protect our republic,” the attorney, Mark Brewer, said in a statement.

Unlike in Colorado, the Michigan Supreme Court did not decide the merits of whether Trump engaged in insurrection. The justices upheld lower court rulings concluding that courts should not decide the issue for the primary election.

Unlike 14th Amendment challenges brought in some other states, Michigan is considered one of the key swing states likely to decide the outcome of the general election.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward, Jasper Ward and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Richard Cowan, Paul Grant, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)

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