So did another during a layover in Chicago, and so did a hostess at a restaurant near her Lakewood home. All of them were people who wanted proof they had met the now-92-year-old lifelong Republican who launched a legal fight that could have, for the first time in the nation’s history, disqualified a major party candidate — and one-term former president, at that — from the Oval Office.

The key word there: Could.

Anderson, a former Senate majority leader in the state legislature, and several other plaintiffs led a case that forced the U.S. Supreme Court to reckon with a designed to keep former Confederates from the levers of power. She and the other plaintiffs saw victories at the state level, including the Colorado Supreme Court����ap narrow ruling barring Trump from the ballot here. But the case ultimately fell when the federal justices unanimously ruled in early March that states don’t have the power to enforce the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Reflecting on the case following Trump’s decisive win in the Nov. 5 election, Anderson doesn’t see a moral victory in the courts holding that Trump engaged in insurrection for his actions following his 2020 election loss, while allowing him to stay on the ballot. But — despite the loss at the courts and Trump’s electoral win — she sees it as a fight worth having.

“We did not succeed,” Anderson said in an interview before Thanksgiving. “But we gave notice to everybody.”

For the Trump campaign, still celebrating its general election victory, the historic case was a footnote — one overridden by the tens of millions of voters who put Trump back in the White House. As of Wednesday, Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 48.3%, with a 312-226 win in the Electoral College.

“The Colorado Supreme Court����ap decision was as wrong as wrong could be,” Dave Warrington, the general counsel for the campaign, said in a statement. “Out of 96 court cases, only the Colorado court (plus a copycat lower court in Chicago) bought off on this eccentric legal theory. And a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court overturned Colorado’s decision. Likewise, President Trump’s historic victory … showed that American voters overwhelmingly reject anti-democratic lawfare.”

“The rule of democracy at work”

The case, brought by Anderson and a handful of other Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters, started in September 2023 with a lawsuit to bar Trump from Colorado’s primary ballot.

They invoked a rarely tested clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that barred people who previously swore an oath to the Constitution, and then engaged in insurrection, from holding office. After a weeklong trial in Denver District Court, they won some traction when Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled Trump did engage in insurrection. But it was a partial victory for Anderson and her team: Wallace also ruled that Trump could remain on the ballot because it wasn’t clear if the amendment applied to the highest office in the land.

The judgment put the case on a fast track for the Colorado Supreme Court, which narrowly ruled Trump was disqualified from office, and then the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled individual states could not disqualify federal candidates.

Trump, who at the time faced numerous state and federal indictments, leveraged the ruling as a vindication — and an example of political warfare levied at him through the judicial system.

During his Aurora rally at the tail end of the campaign this fall, Trump called the Colorado lawsuit a “threat to democracy” and called the U.S. Supreme Court “very brave and very brilliant” for its unanimous ruling that he could remain on the ballot.

“This was actually part of the weaponization (of the judicial system),” Trump said at the Oct. 11 rally. “Their first move was to try to get me off the ballot. They didn’t want to run against me.”

A month later, the case would prove to be an afterthought — if it was a thought at all, among the dozens of issues facing the nation — for millions of Trump voters who delivered the Republican candidate the party’s first popular vote victory in a generation. (Trump won the electoral vote in 2016, while losing the popular vote.)

The 2024 win underscored one of the key arguments from Trump’s legal team as the case winded through the courts: The 14th Amendment does not specify the presidency as on office insurrectionists cannot hold, even as it names senators, U.S. representatives and individual presidential electors; when it comes to the highest office in the land, voters should be the ultimate gatekeeper. 

“That would be the rule of democracy at work,” Scott Gessler, a lead attorney for Trump and a former Colorado secretary of state, told the Colorado Supreme Court last December.

Trump’s team also vigorously fought the label of insurrection for the Jan. 6 attack and rejected that the president played any role in the event.

Anderson, like most Colorado voters, cast her ballot for Harris — though, she laughs, “it was pretty hard for me to vote for a Democrat.” 

“(The national vote) surprised me, with people knowing what he did on Jan. 6, at the Capitol,” Anderson said. “That is insurrection. He may not have gone there, but neither did (Confederate President) Jefferson Davis do anything but talk until the war started.”

“This too shall pass”

Even with the election results, Anderson notes that Trump still bears the judicial designation of insurrectionist. It����ap a point Donald Sherman, the executive director of the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, likewise hews to. CREW helped lead the lawsuit with Anderson and other Coloradans. 

Both disagree with the U.S. Supreme Court����ap final ruling.

Sherman described the decision as “punting” the enforcement of the Constitution to Congress, knowing the highly partisan body likely wouldn’t act. It, in effect, put a constitutional provision up to a popular vote — undercutting the very purpose of a constitution, he argued. 

“What the court effectively did in (the case) is say this one provision, we’re going to put that up to a vote,” Sherman said in an interview. “… And (the voters are) going to make whatever choice they make with the information they have. And unlike the former president, I respect that result.

“But there are some questions — like whether an oath-breaking insurrectionist should become president of the United States — that the Constitution answered already.”

This case was not about one candidate, or one election, Sherman said, but about the rule of law in a constitutional democracy. Among other criticisms of the justices’ ruling, he called it disrespectful to those involved, including his clients and judges who suffered harassment; to police officers attacked by the mob on Jan. 6; and down to the Civil War soldiers who died in the conflict that led to the amendment.

“What this case (did), and what the Colorado Supreme Court did, at least, will be studied,” Sherman said. “And the U.S Supreme Court’s abdication of responsibility will be studied. I’m grateful that our clients were willing to take that risk, for our country.”

And, he added: “History will not record the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in a high regard.”

Mario Nicolais, a Lakewood attorney who worked on the case — and a former Republican — noted that the decision preceded another ruling that found presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts that may otherwise skirt the law.

The two cases, taken together, represent “the single greatest leap forward in presidential power since the Great Depression,” Nicolais said in an interview. And together, they shook his faith in the nation’s institutions.

“Now we know there’s no check for a person who engaged in insurrection, and also there’s now this broad, broad immunity that arguably Trump could use — and has already used in court cases — to say ‘I can do whatever I want,’ ” Nicolais said.

Trump has promised through the campaign and during the transition to seek against political enemies if he returns to office. He’s accused some of treason. He doesn’t direct his ire toward Colorado’s plaintiffs so much as he does , leaving Anderson, Nicolais and Sherman less concerned about being targeted.

But still, some worry remains.

Nicolais noted that Trump never showed up in person for the Colorado court hearings a year ago. He expected that people who sought, and won, criminal convictions would likely face harsher retribution from the Trump White House.

And Anderson joked: “What can you do to an old lady?”

“We are going to stay vigilant,” Sherman said. “That’s all you can do: Stay vigilant and take the necessary precautions you have to take. But people have sacrificed a lot more for our democracy, to make our country live up to its stated goals. I remain ever hopeful for the best and continue to prepare for the worst.”

As for Anderson, she holds on to a gleam of optimism, though she doesn’t discount the gravity of the case she spurred or her continuing criticism of the incoming president. 

“This too shall pass,” Anderson said of a person found in court to be an insurrectionist heading to the White House. “We just have to hope we still have a Constitution when he’s gone.”

Gov. Jared Polis announced the blitz on Thursday afternoon to deal with “this unfortunate leak,” a day after Trump campaign attorneys that Colorado Jena Griswold take immediate action to secure the state’s elections.

On Tuesday, Griswold announced that a spreadsheet posted publicly on her office’s website for several months contained a hidden tab that led to partial passwords — one layer in a security system that relies on multiple passwords and restricted access — protecting Colorado voting machines.

“We want to resolve the current situation quickly by lending resources to help get the necessary passwords changed as quickly as possible with minimal impact on county clerk operations,” Polis said.

Griswold on Thursday hastily deputized state employees who have undergone background checks for deployment around the state. They were to enter restricted-access areas in pairs to update the passwords for election equipment in county offices with local employees observing.

County clerks secure voting machines behind locked doors. State public safety officials on Wednesday morning briefed Polis on the leak and he spoke with Griswold Wednesday afternoon, gubernatorial officials said. The teams deployed to counties include state public safety, homeland security, information technology, and Colorado State Patrol employees. Federal law enforcement officials also were involved.

“Colorado has countless layers of security to ensure voters’ voices are heard,” Griswold said in a prepared statement. “I’m thankful to the governor for his support to quickly resolve this unfortunate mistake.”

In a letter sent to Griswold on Wednesday, the attorneys for former President Donald Trump’s Republican campaign said the password disclosure violates state law and “undermines the integrity of our elections.” They asked that Griswold immediately identify counties affected by the security breach, notify them, direct them to stop processing mail-in ballots and prepare to re-scan all ballots.

“We recognize these steps may be an inconvenience for your office and for the affected counties. But this inconvenience is necessary because it is the only way to guarantee that the elections equipment in those counties whose current BIOS passwords were disclosed by your office are secure and that the chain of custody for that equipment required by Colorado law and regulations is unbroken,” said the letter from Scott Gessler, a Republican attorney with Gessler Blue LLC representing the Trump campaign. Gessler served as secretary of state from 2011 to 2014.

The letter asked that Griswold, a Democrat, confirm by 10 a.m. Thursday that “you will undertake these steps.” Secretary of State spokesman Jack Todd confirmed receipt of the letter but did not respond to Denver Post questions about whether officials had taken or would take the requested actions. State officials first learned of the breach on Oct. 24 and the password changes began Tuesday, Todd said.

A letter that Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Beall sent Thursday to Gessler and Colorado Republican Party chairman Dave Williams says state officials consulted with federal security authorities and concluded that the leaked passwords presented “no immediate threat to the security of Colorado’s voting systems” or the election. “No single error can compromise the integrity of the system. ….. the security of our voting systems is not endangered,” Beall wrote.

State elections officials are investigating how state voting machine passwords ended up online. Griswold has said an employee who was involved no longer works for the state. State Republican Party officials first revealed the leak. A state Tuesday said the partial passwords were “improperly included” on the site.

A quick scroll through her account on X, formerly known as Twitter, reveals dozens of condemnations of the former president, with Griswold repeatedly calling him an “oath-breaking insurrectionist” and a “threat to democracy.”

“It is up to American voters to save our country next November and vote for democracy over chaos,” she posted on Nov. 30.

Those sentiments find broad support in Colorado politics, which largely has been hostile to Trump. But the outspokenness of the Democratic secretary of state — both on social media and in numerous interviews on cable news — doesn’t play well with those who expect a more even-handed approach from Colorado’s top election official, especially in a year when Trump is on the ballot again for president.

Griswold’s social media posts generate plenty of pushback, and lately Colorado Republicans have gone after her more aggressively, including by launching a doomed impeachment bid. They also have criticized her decision to support an attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in a Colorado case the U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned.

Wayne Williams, a Republican who preceded Griswold as secretary of state and lost to her in the 2018 election, says there is no question his 39-year-old successor loudly and boldly wears her liberal politics on her sleeve. She regularly expresses support for abortion rights, gun control legislation and transgender rights in her official capacity as secretary of state.

Griswold also has lambasted U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, as an election denier. Williams understands why some voters might be uncomfortable with that.

“It makes it very difficult for people to believe everything’s fair when you are on a full-out attack on candidates they support,” he said. “I believe her partisan actions undermine the confidence of voters’ faith in the office.”

But Griswold said in an interview that her vocal criticism of Trump was intrinsically linked to her duty to defend the integrity of Colorado’s elections.

“Will I become quiet? The answer is absolutely not,” she said. “We are in an unprecedented and dangerous political climate. It is not partisan or political to protect our democracy.”

Threats against Griswold

The most fervent criticism from Colorado Republicans has come since the U.S. Supreme Court early this month overruled the Colorado high court’s December decision to strike Trump from the Republican primary ballot. Griswold wasn’t among the plaintiffs in the case, but she’d filed a brief in support.

On March 4, Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert against Griswold. Days later, state House Republicans announced an effort to impeach the secretary of state — though it isn’t expected to gain traction, and may not even get a hearing, in the Democratic-supermajority chamber.

Then, on March 14, the Colorado Republican Party , asking it to investigate Griswold for repeatedly calling Trump an insurrectionist when the former president had neither been charged nor convicted of such an offense.

“She has repeatedly lied to and misled the public,” the complainants said in an email issued by the state GOP.

Griswold is unfazed by the criticism.

Two Colorado courts — a Denver district judge in November and the Colorado Supreme Court the following month — determined Trump had engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, she noted.

Griswold said she had received more than 800 threats, including death threats, since a group of Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters filed the ballot challenge lawsuit in September.

“I will not be silenced by Republicans in our legislature trying to score cheap political points — and I’ll never be intimidated by someone like Lauren Boebert,” she said. “I will not allow the extreme right to define standing up for democracy as not doing one’s job — it’s what every single person should be doing.”

Enabling or giving cover to those making false claims about the integrity of an election, she said, is “undemocratic, un-American and unacceptable.”

Griswold has defenders in Colorado. Amanda Gonzalez, Jefferson County’s clerk and recorder and a fellow Democrat, said she admires Griswold’s fiery dedication to shielding elections from those falsely claiming they are rigged or fraudulent.

She sees the role of a state’s top election official these days as being the “democracy-defender-in-chief.”

“She isn’t the first secretary of state to speak about the damage caused by President Trump,” Gonzalez said. “I appreciate a secretary of state who stands up to that and ensures that our system is safe and secure.”

Partisan roots in election oversight

The criticism of Griswold underlines the sometimes-partisan nature of election oversight, which most notably caught the public’s attention during the 2000 Bush v. Gore debacle. Then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who also served as George W. Bush’s state campaign co-chair, was accused of playing favorites after she certified the state’s razor-thin results for Bush over Al Gore.

Trump’s election loss 20 years later put the office into hyper-focus, highlighted by an early January 2021 phone call made by the then-president to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump, who was recorded, suggested that the Republican elections chief “find” more than 11,000 votes to ensure a Trump victory in the state won by Democrat Joe Biden.

“The secretary of state used to be a backwater — now it’s high profile,” said Kevin Johnson, executive director of the Bethesda, Maryland-based .

A big part of the problem rests with how election administration is run in the United States, Johnson said.

“They manage a process that is adversarial in nature and they need to be impartial in overseeing that process,” he said of election officials. “Voters want to see neutrality in the comportment of the leader of elections.”

Colorado is one of 31 states where the secretary of state is chosen in a statewide election. In another seven states, the governor or legislature appoints the secretary. In 10 states, a board of elections, rather than a secretary of state, oversees elections, while in Utah and Alaska, the lieutenant governor is the chief elections officer.

Johnson’s organization has sketched out a way to reduce, if not eliminate, partisanship from election administration by forming a bipartisan state election board that includes members with legal and election expertise.

“Our elections officials are elected in partisan elections — no other democratic country in the world does that,” Johnson said. “The reason no other country does that is it leads to conflicts of interest.”

In a  at the University of Colorado Boulder, released in January, just 52% of Coloradans surveyed thought elections across the country would be run “fairly and accurately” in 2024. The numbers improved when respondents were asked about the state’s upcoming elections — 68% felt they would be fair and accurate.

But there was a stark partisan split, with 88% of Democrats saying Colorado’s elections would be run fairly and 63% of independents saying so. Only 54% of Republicans felt that way.

CU political science professor Anand Edward Sokhey, who oversaw the survey, said he found “the partisan gaps on electoral confidence concerning.” But tracing the exact causes of such disparities in sentiment is difficult, he said, if not impossible.

Eyeing higher office?

Former state GOP party chair Dick Wadhams, like Griswold, is no fan of Trump. He also disagrees with Republican attempts to recall or impeach Griswold.

But he has tough words for the secretary of state.

“In many ways, I think she is as irresponsible as the stolen election conspiracy crowd on the Republican side,” Wadhams said. “She should be restoring trust in the process.”

Griswold, he said, is so baldly partisan that she has disrupted the long, staid tradition of secretaries of state in Colorado, where the function of the office largely took precedence over who was leading it.

Not that all her predecessors were quiet bureaucrats. Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler ran into ethics problems and raised Democratic hackles during his tenure a decade ago — even launching an unsuccessful 2014 bid for governor.

But in Wadhams’ view, Gessler was a “rank amateur compared to Jena Griswold” in terms of partisanship. He surmises that a desire for higher office could be behind Griswold’s approach.

Asked if she had future political ambitions, Griswold said she was “locked in and focused on this election cycle.”

Gonzalez, the Jeffco clerk, said Griswold brought substantial improvements to Colorado’s election system, such as expanding access to voting for eligible voters — with more drop boxes and voting centers, heightened security and a statewide ballot-tracking system.

“I ran for this office because I wanted to protect the right to vote,” Gonzalez said.

Griswold, she said, also has been front and center when it comes to extending protections to county clerks who had come under fire during the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election. She championed a bill two years ago that made it a crime to threaten election officials or publish their personal information online.

Griswold said she wouldn’t back down in the face of criticism, noting that she was reelected by voters by a comfortable margin in 2022. She will be term-limited in 2026.

“We are only here because Donald Trump lost the election in 2020. He refused to accept the result and tried to steal the election from the American people,” she said. “There’s no mistaking what he did — we all watched it unfold on Jan. 6. And I can’t be silent when the future of our democracy is at stake.”

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It’s the latest milestone in a lawsuit that alleges Trump engaged in insurrection surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol — and in doing so, disqualified himself from regaining the nation’s highest office under a Civil War-era amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The bars anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again.

In November, a district court judge in Denver found Trump did engage in insurrection while also finding that the 14th Amendment restriction did not apply to the presidency the way it would to other federal offices.

Since then, lawyers for both sides as well as outside organizations and state officials across the country have weighed in on how Colorado’s justices should decide the matter. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the early afternoon.

Here’s a guide to the case and what’s at stake.

Why is the Colorado Supreme Court involved?

Denver District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, after a weeklong trial this fall, that Trump can appear on Colorado’s 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot, despite her finding that he participated in an insurrection. This prompted both the petitioners and Trump’s legal team to appeal, though from opposite directions.

The state Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last month.

Who is challenging Trump’s eligibility?

The lawsuit was brought by a group of unaffiliated and Republican Colorado voters who are working with the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The Republican petitioners include Claudine Cmarda, a former Rhode Island congresswoman who now lives in Colorado; Norma Anderson, a former majority leader in both Colorado’s state House and state Senate; and Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer.

Republican-turned-unaffiliated voter Chris Castilian, who served as deputy chief of staff for Colorado’s last GOP governor, Bill Owens, is also involved in the suit. None of the voters involved are current Democrats.

What are the plaintiffs seeking from the higher court?

Wallace’s underlying ruling that Trump engaged in insurrection through his words and actions was seen by critics of the former president as a victory in its own right. But the plaintiffs are now asking the state’s justices to go where Wallace didn’t.

Her overall ruling that the president does not qualify as an officer of the United States — a key phrase in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — would “yield absurd results,” the petitioners argued.

“It would defy logic to prohibit insurrectionists from holding every federal or state office except for the highest and most powerful in the land,” their attorneys wrote in the appeal. The legal team includes former Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson.

Why did Trump appeal a ruling he won?

Trump’s legal team, which includes former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, agrees with Wallace’s ruling that the 14th Amendment shouldn’t apply to Trump. But his appeal argues she committed “multiple grave jurisdictional and legal errors” — including by finding he engaged in insurrection.

Trump’s speech near the White House on Jan. 6 didn’t call for violence, his attorneys argued, and still “the district court found that President Trump’s supposed intent, and the effect of his words upon certain listeners, sufficed to render his speech unprotected under the First Amendment.”

The appeal also questions whether the five-day trial that began in late October was a proper venue for constitutional litigation and the establishment of “new, unprecedented, and unsupported legal standards.”

How have challenges of Trump’s eligibility fared elsewhere?

Similar lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility have been filed in several states, with none succeeding so far. Among other cases with significant backing, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in November that Trump could remain on the ballot there because political parties have discretion over their primary ballots. And a Michigan judge has ruled that Congress should decide if Section 3 applies to Trump.

How will Colorado’s high court consider the case?

The Colorado Supreme Court doesn’t generally overturn a lower court’s findings of facts unless the judge made a clear error, meaning the justices likely will give some deference to Wallace’s finding that Trump did engage in insurrection. Instead, their eyes will focus more closely on how she applied the law and whether the 14th Amendment applies to Trump.

The court has no specific timeline for a ruling, but Secretary of State Jena Griswold must certify the primary ballot in January. That election is set for March 5.

What’s at stake?

In her ruling, Wallace wrote that she took the gravity of the case seriously: “To be clear, part of the Court’s decision is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent” of 14th Amendment’s Section 3.

, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina, called it “significant” that Wallace declared that Trump engaged in insurrection. He is the author of the upcoming book “The Law of Presidential Impeachment” and called by both Republicans and Democrats in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

He said recent scholarship is supportive of the petitioners’ arguments that the 14th Amendment should apply to former presidents. But he didn’t have any predictions for the case — except that a ruling in the lawsuit plaintiffs’ favor would make it more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court would get involved, having the final say.

“It’s just speculation when and whether the U.S. Supreme Court will ever hear this case,” Gerhardt said. “But if somebody is being declared ineligible to run for the presidency, that could possibly make this a more pressing matter.”

What outside voices have weighed in?

The case has drawn interest from more than a dozen parties that have filed formal advisory briefs with the Colorado Supreme Court, expressing a range of opinions. Some briefs are outwardly partisan, including joint briefs submitted by more than a dozen state Republican parties; by 19 states with Republican leaders, spearheaded by the attorneys general of Indiana and West Virginia; by the Republican secretaries of state in Wyoming, Missouri and Ohio; and by the Republican National Committee.

“The Reconstruction Congress (after the Civil War) did not grant state officials sweeping authority to undermine the federal government,” attorneys for the national GOP wrote in a brief that argued the 14th Amendment provision shouldn’t be applied until after an election.

Trump’s team also has received backing from Treniss Jewell Evans III — a Texan who pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor charges related to storming the Capitol on Jan. 6; to drinking a shot of Fireball whiskey in a conference room that other rioters told him belonged to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In his brief, Evans, who said he’d been defamed by the petitioners, disputed characterizations of that day, arguing that “there was no competent evidence … to support that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection or that there was any insurrection.”

What about on the other side?

Nine law professors countered Trump’s First Amendment defense in a joint brief, arguing it doesn’t protect speech that incites lawless action or constitutes a threat — and that disqualification wouldn’t infringe on protected speech, anyway. The filing from Common Cause, a left-leaning government watchdog group, called it “a great credit to prior generations of American political leaders” that the disqualification clause of the Constitution had so rarely been invoked — but argued this case rose to that standard.

“The fact that the Disqualification Clause is so clearly implicated at this hour, then, is a proportionally great discredit to Mr. Trump himself, who allowed a lust for power to supersede his own Oath of Office and over two centuries of American political precedent,” the filing reads.

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The primary arguments wrapped up late Friday afternoon, with each side having spent the week trotting out dueling experts, congressmen and witnesses to the storming of the U.S. Capitol. At issue: Did the Jan. 6, 2021, attack rise to the level of an insurrection, and was Trump culpable enough that he’s disqualified from the ballot under the 14th Amendment?

Denver District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s answer to that question is still likely weeks away. The judge has scheduled formal closing remarks for Nov. 15, with her decision to come after that. And with such high stakes, the case may work its way to the Colorado and U.S. supreme courts.

The weeklong hearing was nonetheless the first of its kind, though parallel well-backed efforts are underway elsewhere. The Colorado lawsuit was brought by a group of unaffiliated and Republican voters in the state backed by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. State law allows voters to challenge candidates’ qualifications, making Colorado a viable proving ground for a question with national implications.

While the lawsuit aims to keep Trump off Colorado’s 2024 ballot, and the trial pitted the former president����ap lawyers against the plaintiffs, the lawsuit itself seeks to compel Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, from listing the Republican frontrunner. Griswold, even though she is adamant in her opposition and conviction that Trump engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, has taken a hands-off approach to the case and instead said she’s waiting for the judge’s direction.

The plaintiffs called witnesses that included police officers who fought back the mob on Jan. 6 and an expert in right-wing extremism who testified Trump’s calls to fight were to be taken literally, and that he didn’t meaningfully try to stop the attack. Law professor William C. Banks, who studies presidential powers and national security, noted that Trump could have deployed the National Guard to dispel the riot, as he did during Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

“He knew that mob was dangerous,” plaintiffs’ attorney Eric Olson said during opening remarks. “He told that mob to go to the Capitol with him. Once they were there, and not sufficiently violent, he incited them (with further tweets).”

Trump’s legal team, meanwhile, pointed to statements in which the president called for peace and pointed out the widespread use of words like “fight” in politics. They called Trump supporters to testify that they read Trump’s comments as peaceful and metaphors for political pressure around the election.

One, Colorado Republican Party treasurer Tom Bjorklund, testified in his personal capacity that he was present for the Jan. 6 rally but did not enter the Capitol when it turned into a riot. He pushed the unfounded conspiracy theory that the attackers may have been Trump opponents who sought to disrupt the legal challenge to the 2020 election.

The two sides also debated over the U.S. House Jan. 6 select committee, with plaintiffs seeking to cite pieces of it as evidence while Trump’s team sought to cast it as political and biased. His campaign has regularly said this effort, and the similar challenges in other states, constitute election interference.

“None of President Trump’s speech ever called for violence. None of it ever called for insurrection,” Scott Gessler, an attorney for Trump and former Colorado secretary of state, said.

But on Friday, Timothy J. Heaphy, the lead staff investigator for the House committee, challenged that characterization on the stand: “Donald Trump said, ‘You have to fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore.’ That was something that was stated at the Ellipse (rally). That did instigate violence.”

The Civil War-era amendment bars people who have taken an oath to support the Constitution from holding office if they later “engaged in insurrection.”

While the parties debate the events of the day and their causes, Judge Wallace is also being asked to consider more abstract pieces of the amendment, including when it applies and if it is even enforceable without congressional action or other factors. She regularly accepted evidence under stipulations that it didn’t mean she was taking it at face value.

One expert in constitutional law called by Trump’s legal team, retired professor Robert Delahunty, testified that Congress needed to take further action to make the amendment enforceable.

For Wallace’s part, she declined to be boxed in from interpreting the Constitution — historically, a key realm of the courts.

“In general, I think that’s exactly the job of the court, to interpret the Constitution,” Wallace said. “I’d love to hear from you why, in this instance, I need to say it’s too hard — (as in) ‘Congress, tell me what it means.’ ”

This court case is one of several legal issues facing Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Trump faces several criminal cases related to the 2020 election, as well as a civil fraud case in New York state that is ongoing, among others.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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DENVER (AP) — Lawyers sparred Tuesday over former President Donald Trump’s relationship with the mob that attacked the Capitol, an important point in a Colorado lawsuit seeking to bar him from the 2024 ballot under the rarely used “insurrection” clause of the Constitution.

Still to come: arguments over whether the events of Jan. 6, 2021, amounted to an insurrection under a provision put in the Constitution in 1868 to prevent former confederates from taking over the government.

The plaintiffs presented testimony from an extremism expert who maintained that Trump had a clear relationship with far-right extremists and that they interpreted his pleas to protest the certification of President Joe Biden’s win as a call to arms.

“A consistent theme is individuals reporting that they thought that Donald Trump had sent them there,” said sociology professor Peter Simi of Chapman University, a private college in Southern California.

Trump’s lawyers say his comments protesting the election results were merely a matter of him stating his opinion, which he had every right to do.

The hearing in Colorado is one of two this week — with the second before the Minnesota Supreme Court on Thursday — that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court has never before ruled on the Civil War-era provision in the 14th Amendment.

Late Tuesday, a law professor was expected to testify about Section Three of the 14th Amendment, which has been used only a handful of times since it was adopted a century and a half ago. The testimony will get to the heart of the thorny legal issues the case raises — what constitutes an “insurrection” and how can the extreme political penalty of being barred from office be applied?

The plaintiff’s lawyers contend the provision is straightforward and that Trump is clearly disqualified from the presidency, just as if he were under the Constitution’s minimum age for the office of 35.

Trump’s lawyers argue that there remain a host of questions. Those include whether the amendment����ap authors even meant for the provision to apply to the presidency, which is not mentioned in it — although “presidential and vice presidential electors” are, along with senators and members of the House of Representatives. They also question whether it applies only to those who take up arms or extends to others who simply exercised their free speech rights to support unpopular causes.

Scott Gessler, Trump’s lead Colorado attorney and a former Republican secretary of state there, dismissed the lawsuit as “anti-democratic” and noted that one other presidential candidate — socialist labor organizer Eugene Debs — even ran for the office from prison without people trying to use Section Three to disqualify him.

“If they don’t like President Trump, they need to get involved in an election,” Gessler said after the first day of testimony on Monday. “But what they’re trying to do is short-circuit an election.”

The Colorado testimony began with a description of the Jan. 6 assault, which was intended to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election win.

Lawyers representing six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters argue that Trump’s violent rhetoric preceding the attack makes him culpable, and that he should be barred from the presidency again under the clause prohibiting anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it.

Trump’s legal team and presidential campaign assailed the 14th Amendment challenges as little more than an attempt by Democrats to derail his attempt to reclaim his old job. Trump is so far dominating the Republican presidential primary, and the lawsuits to block him were organized by two separate liberal groups.

Both sides of the ballot-qualification challenge cast the case as putting American democracy at stake — whether by allowing Trump to run again for the country’s highest office or, in the defense’s view, by endorsing a political charade that would rob many voters of their favored candidate.

As the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination faces similar ballot challenges in several states, Colorado’s case is the first to present evidence to a judge as the plaintiffs seek to tie Trump to the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A group of Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters, backed by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed the challenge in Denver District Court. Their lawsuit seeks, based on Trump’s alleged role on Jan. 6, to keep him off the ballot under a provision of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that bars people who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office.

The plaintiffs called police officers who watched the siege unfold to the stand. The first witness, Officer Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, testified about being assaulted by members of the crowd that gathered outside the Capitol. That includes one person who tried to gouge out his eye, Hodges said.

The plaintiffs played body camera footage that showed protestors swarming Hodges and his colleagues and yelling epithets at them. Hodges called the events of Jan. 6 “horrific,” “a terrorist attack” and an assault on democracy.

“(Protestors) told us we were on the wrong side of history when we were defending the United States Capitol and the peaceful transfer of power,” Hodges said.

But Trump’s legal team disputed that the then-president was involved in inciting the event. They argued that he called for peace and, since he didn’t travel to the Capitol, didn’t lead supporters past police barricades or otherwise participate in the violence. He had led a rally near the White House earlier that morning, ahead of Congress convening to certify now-President Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in the 2020 election.

Trump’s attorneys argued that, without any legal conviction for insurrection, the lawsuit’s charge is nebulous. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state who’s part of Trump’s team, cited the precedent of Eugene V. Debs, a socialist politician a century ago. Debs was allowed to run for president despite serving time in prison for sedition for publicly discouraging military recruitment during World War I.

“When there are many definitions (of insurrection), that really means there are none,” Gessler said. “… Frankly, they’re making up the standards so it fits the facts of Jan. 6.”

Before the trial began, Trump’s attorneys challenged the impartiality of Judge Sarah B. Wallace. They found a record of a $100 donation she made in 2020 to a political action committee called the Colorado Turnout Project, a pro-Democrat group. That was before her appointment to the bench.

Trump’s team requested her recusal, saying the donation showed bias against their case. Wallace denied the request. She said she did not recall that particular contribution but had intended to donate to an individual.

Wallace also said she did not have an opinion on whether the Jan. 6 attack constituted an insurrection, if Trump was engaged in insurrection or other matters at hand.

She is overseeing a trial that’s expected to unfold over five days. There is no jury, leaving the decision on Trump’s ballot eligibility in Colorado up to the judge. She expects to issue a ruling by the end of November.

The case is unlikely to end there and could land in the state or federal Supreme Court.

The plaintiffs include Norma Anderson, a former Republican majority leader in the state House and Senate; Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer; and Chris Castilian, who served as deputy chief of staff under former Gov. Bill Owens. The lawsuit seeks to compel Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold to bar Trump from the Republican primary election and, if he wins the Republican nomination, from the state’s general election ballot.

On Monday, the plaintiffs’ attorneys sought to demonstrate a pattern of Trump using violent rhetoric and cheering along violence against political opponents. They alleged that he used his Twitter account to draw a crowd to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The attorneys played a video from proceedings showing images of a noose, people chanting “Hang Mike Pence” about the vice president and fights with police.

“That mob tried to hurt and kill our elected leaders,” Olson said during the opening remarks. “We are here because, despite all that, Trump believes he deserves to be president again.”

The plaintiffs also called U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell to testify to his experiences during the assault. He fled the House floor with a gas mask in hand. The California Democrat later was one of the impeachment managers for Trump’s second impeachment, which charged Trump with inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6. He was acquitted by the Senate, whose fell short of a two-thirds majority threshold.

The plaintiffs have sought to introduce the House Jan. 6 committee’s final report as evidence to highlight Trump’s role. Wallace has conditionally agreed to hear segments of the report over objections from Trump’s attorneys.

Gessler called it a political document, “poisoned” by foregone conclusions and made for prime-time TV — not suitable as evidence in court. Trump’s legal team denies any ties to the siege and has asserted that he was exercising his right to free speech when protesting the election and calling for a political pressure campaign. They cast the legal challenge as partisan “lawfare” and an attack on democracy.

“We’re here with a courtroom behind us because they’re trying to put up their ‘steal’ curtain around Colorado,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser with the Trump campaign, said ahead of the trial’s start. “And when I say ‘steal’ curtain, that����ap S-T-E-A-L. Democrats are trying to steal this race.”

Trump’s campaign characterized the ballot challenge as being among a series of legal cases that amount to election interference heading into 2024. Trump also faces federal criminal charges and state criminal charges in Georgia related to alleged 2020 election interference, as well as a civil fraud trial in New York.

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The ballot disqualification trial, set to begin Monday, will be the first time testimony and evidence are presented in a case that invokes the 14th Amendment to bar the Republican front-runner from a state’s ballot. It puts Colorado at the forefront of a novel legal fight that has united liberal critics and current and former Republicans who contend that Trump’s alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the nation’s Capitol disqualified him from being eligible to run for national office again.

A provision in the Civil War-era federal constitutional amendment bars people who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office.

But there are key unresolved questions: Which actions meet that threshold? Who can enforce it? And what is the burden of proof necessary to bar someone from the ballot under that provision?

Those considerations will be heard by Denver District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace.

“This isn’t a frivolous lawsuit,” said Doug Spencer, a University of Colorado law professor. He sees a “credible argument” that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in fact amounted to an insurrection, but he added that nothing is certain.

“The challenges, of course, are (that) when you’re litigating, every little word and technicality really matters,” Spencer said. “I think there are some real challenges with the plaintiffs prevailing in court.”

The civil suit was brought by several former and current Colorado Republicans, including some who are now unaffiliated voters. It’s spearheaded by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a liberal watchdog group.

Among the 14th Amendment ballot challenges being pursued against Trump in other states are assisted by another group, called Free Speech for People. The Minnesota Supreme Court in that state’s case Thursday.

The Colorado suit, at its core, targets Trump on the basis that he allegedly urged on the Capitol siege and tried to overturn the election he lost in 2020. But it does so by also suing Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold — a Democrat who’s forthright in her assessment that Trump did incite an insurrection — because her office supervises elections and certifies the statewide ballot, making her the official who’d carry out any disqualification order.

Griswold first ran for her office in 2017 and has voiced concerns about threats to democracy during Trump’s presidency as a chief worry. But this case has put her in a position of taking a step back, at least as far as the nominal defendant can.

Her office isn’t putting on the case or providing evidence, beyond what’s asked of her and other officials. She sees the case as a way to ask the court for guidance when it’s not clear if a candidate is qualified for the ballot, a legal action available to voters.

“This case is a foundational case to one of the central tenets about the attack on democracy,” Griswold said in an interview. “Did Donald Trump disqualify himself by engaging in insurrection? That is what this case is about.”

Trump’s legal team, which includes former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, has been fighting the case on the grounds that it’s an attempt to strip Trump of his First Amendment rights. The attorneys also dispute the allegations that he incited the attack on the Capitol. The state Republican Party has joined the case on the opposing side, arguing its members would be disenfranchised if they couldn’t vote for their preferred candidate.

“All of President Trump’s speech about which Petitioners complain is constitutionally protected,” Gessler and fellow attorney Geoffrey N. Blue wrote in their most recent motion to dismiss the case. “… Likewise, no evidence exists showing that speech prior to January 6, 2021, even contemplated any action on January 6, 2021, let alone encouraged people to engage in violence on that day.”

That question of free speech may well prove pivotal to the case — as well as to the question of what constitutes involvement in the Jan. 6 attack, said Jessica Smith, an attorney who leads the Religious Institutions and First Amendment practice group at Denver-based law firm Holland and Hart. She’s not involved in the Trump case.

Smith said participation on Jan. 6 occurred along a spectrum.

A county commissioner in New Mexico, who was convicted for actually breaching the Capitol, was last year by a court under the 14th Amendment. But under a similar challenge, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, was allowed to run for reelection in 2022 — even as one of her home-state judges found that “Her public statements and heated rhetoric may well have contributed to the environment that ultimately led to the Invasion,” .

She was never charged with any crimes and was inside the Capitol with the rest of Congress when the mob swept through.

“Where does Donald Trump fall on that spectrum? He wasn’t there, he didn’t physically enter the Capitol, but he was more involved than Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Smith said in an interview.

While the evidence and witnesses haven’t been disclosed ahead of Monday’s trial, during a recent status hearing the plaintiffs indicated that they intended to introduce part of — a move that came much to the consternation of Trump’s legal team, which views the report as biased.

The judge said the report may be conditionally considered. The legal teams also suggested some members of Congress may be called to testify, though it’s not clear who or when.

Trump is not expected to appear in court or testify this week. The judge earlier rejected plaintiffs’ request to depose Trump.

There are plenty of unknowns in a case without modern precedent — especially one that, like the cases unfolding in other states, could well land before the U.S. Supreme Court. But for now, Wallace will preside over the trial without a jury, and a final hearing is scheduled for Nov. 15.

She has said she hopes to rule by the end of November, leaving more than a month before Griswold must certify the primary election ballot Trump that hopes to appear on. That timeline also will allow for expected appeals.

This case, meanwhile, isn’t the only one Trump faces. Among other matters, he is scheduled to testify in early November in a New York civil fraud trial. He also in Georgia and in federal court related to allegations he sought to overturn the 2020 election.

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“I 100% understand everybody’s concerns for the parties, the lawyers, and frankly myself and my staff based on what we’ve seen in other cases,” District Judge Sarah B. Wallace said as she agreed to the protective order.

The order prohibits parties in the case from making threatening or intimidating statements. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state representing Trump in the case, opposed it. He said a protective order was unnecessary because threats and intimidation already are prohibited by law.

It was sought by lawyers for the liberal group Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is seeking to disqualify Trump from the ballot under a rarely used Civil War-era clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Gessler said heated rhetoric in this case has come partly from the left.

“We do have robust political debate going on here,” he said. “For better or worse, this case has become a focal point.”

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed around the country seeking to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot based on the 14th Amendment clause barring anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it from running for office. Their arguments revolve around Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to halt the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.

The case in Colorado is the first filed by a group with significant legal resources. The issue is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the insurrection provision in section three of the 14th Amendment.

Wallace has set an Oct. 30 hearing to discuss whether Trump needs to be removed under Colorado law prohibiting candidates who don’t meet qualifications for higher office from appearing on ballots. She has said she wants to give the Colorado Supreme Court — and possibly U.S. Supreme Court — as much time as possible to review the decision before the state’s Jan. 5 deadline to set its 2024 presidential primary ballot.

A parallel case in Minnesota filed by another well-financed liberal group is scheduled to be heard by that state’s supreme court on Nov. 2.

Trump’s attorneys are scheduled to file two motions to dismiss the lawsuit later Friday. One will contend the litigation is an attempt to retaliate against Trump’s free speech rights. Wallace has set an Oct. 13 hearing to debate that claim.

Sean Grimsley, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, proposed the protective order in court Friday. He cited federal prosecutor Jack Smith last week seeking a gag order against Trump for threats made in his prosecution of the former president for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“At least one of the parties has a tendency to tweet — or Truth Social,” Grimsley said, referring to Trump’s own social network where he broadcasts most of his statements, “about witnesses and the courts.”

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The state GOP has fundraised off the case and is seeking to intervene in the legal proceeding — which was just sent back to Denver District Court this week by a federal judge after Trump’s attempt to move it failed. The case itself grapples with whether Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is eligible to appear on Colorado’s primary and general election ballots in 2024 under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The petitioners — six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters — cite the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and allege Trump “incited, exacerbated, and otherwise engaged” it. The Civil War-era amendment prohibits people from holding office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country.

The lawsuit, the first well-funded attempt to disqualify Trump from a state’s ballot, is being led by local attorneys and the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

In a recent filing, the Colorado GOP’s attorneys argued the party’s purpose in seeking to intervene on Trump’s side is “to protect the access of its members, statewide, to as many candidates as possible. Nominating and designating candidates is its core role — regardless of who any particular candidate might be.”

The state party hired attorneys associated with the . The group is led by Jay Sekulow, who spearheaded in his first impeachment trial in 2020.

The voters involved in the case argue their interests as Republican primary voters would be harmed if a person later found to be ineligible for the ballot was included on it because that person potentially could siphon votes from other candidates.

Colorado Republican Party Chair Dave Williams has promised a vigorous defense against an effort he’s called “election interference, pure and simple.” He is pursuing plans that include trying to ditch the 2024 Republican primary vote altogether, in favor of selecting national delegates through the party caucus process, if the ballot-challenge lawsuit results in Trump being barred from appearing.

“Please know we are doing everything in our power to ensure Colorado Republican voters can cast their vote for President Trump, or whoever else they choose, on the March 5th, 2024, Super Tuesday Presidential Primary,” Williams wrote in a fundraising email Wednesday morning.

The lawsuit, filed in the Denver court last week, has bounced between state and federal courts before landing back where it started. The state GOP had filed its intent to intervene in the case in federal court, and Williams signaled it will continue to pursue the request.

Trump’s legal team, which includes Republican former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, made the initial request to move the case to the U.S. District Court for Colorado because it invokes a Constitutional issue.

Trump’s team agreed to move the case back to state court after the petitioners warned they do not have standing for federal court. In federal court, the voters serving as plaintiffs would need to demonstrate an actual injury has happened in order to pursue a claim. But the plaintiffs maintain they have standing to sue in state court under Colorado law.

Complicating matters is Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s position as a co-defendant. The Democrat, named in her official capacity because her office supervises elections, did not agree to move the case to federal court — which itself made the move defective, U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer wrote in a filing.

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