Attorneys for a group of Colorado voters focused Monday on the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the former president

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Trump’s role, opening a trial that could determine whether the Constitution’s insurrection clause bars Trump from running for the White House again.

Attorney Eric Olson detailed Trump’s violent rhetoric leading up to the Jan. 6 attack and encouraging a mob that came within 40 feet of the vice president as he stormed the Capitol. He said Trump called and organized the crowd.

We’re here because, after all, Trump claims he has the right to be president again, Olson said. But our Constitution, our nation’s shared charter, says he can’t do that.

Trump’s legal team and presidential campaign blasted the lawsuit as little more than an attempt by Democrats to derail his bid to reclaim his old job. Trump has dominated the Republican presidential primaries so far.

Before the trial on the lawsuit began, his lawyers filed a motion to force the judge to avenge herself because she had donated money to a liberal group in the state in the past. She said no. The campaign also noted that the current lawsuit was filed by a liberal nonprofit in a state that voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump refuses to say in a TV interview how he saw the January 6 attack happen

They’re sending money to these dark money groups, they’re going to a Democratic jurisdiction and a Democratic judge, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said.

Monday’s hearing in Colorado state court is the first of two lawsuits that could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court. On Thursday, the Minnesota Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a similar case.

Ultimately, the case in Colorado or Minnesota is expected to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the Civil War-era provision. Section 3

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of the 14th Amendment prohibits those who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and then rebelled against the Constitution from holding higher office.

The testimony in Colorado began with details of the Jan. 6 attack aimed at blocking Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory. The witnesses included some who were there.

Officer Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department remembers being beaten and someone trying to gouge out his eye as he defended the Capitol from rioters. Footage from the body camera he was wearing that day was shown in court.

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“I feared for my life and for my colleagues,” Hodges said. I was afraid of the people in the US Capitol building members of Congress, the Vice President and what these people would do to them and how it would affect our democracy.

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell testified that members of the House of Representatives watched the attack on their phones with increasing alarm, grabbing gas masks and thinking about how to defend themselves. He said they were all closely following Trump’s posts on Twitter.

We linked the president’s tweets to our own safety in the House and also to the integrity of the proceedings, said Swalwell, who managed Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives over the attack and also a federal lawsuit had filed a lawsuit against him for inciting the riot.

The trial will proceed in phases, beginning with a description of the attack and Trump’s words and actions, followed by arguments over whether the attack actually constituted an insurrection. Later this week, lawyers are expected to call constitutional experts to delve into the meaning of the insurrection clause.

Trump’s lawyers argue that the former president was never involved in an insurrection and was simply exercising his right to free speech to warn about election results that he believed were not legitimate. They noted instances in which the congressional authors of Section 3

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refused to use it more than a century ago against people who merely supported the Confederacy rhetorically.

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His lawyers said none of the issues are simple in a provision of the Constitution that has not been used in 150 years. In court filings, they said the insurrection clause was never intended to apply to the office of president, which is not mentioned in the text, unlike senator or representative in Congress and elector of president and vice president.

This is a legal Hail Mary from Democrats, said Mike Davis, a lawyer who appeared outside the court with representatives of the Trump campaign before the trial began. This case is going to fail.

A lawyer representing Trump, Scott Gessler, called the lawsuit anti-democratic and noted that at least one other presidential candidate, socialist labor organizer Eugene Debs, has fled jail without people trying to disqualify him.

Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state, said there is an informal principle in election law known as the rule of democracy, which essentially means making the mistake of letting people vote when there is uncertainty.

The landmark January 6 report concludes that Trump deliberately misled and provoked insurrectionists

At the start of the hearing, held Monday in a large courtroom in downtown Denver filled with lawyers, journalists and several armed sheriffs, the judge rejected the motion by Trump’s lawyers who asked her to step aside because she had ever contributed money to a liberal group.

Trump’s campaign said it had filed a motion for the judge, Sarah B. Wallace, to recuse herself because she made a $100 donation in October 2022 to the Colorado Turnout Project, a group whose website says it was founded to combat violent uprisings such as the January 6 attack.

She was appointed to the bench by Governor in August of that year. Jared Polis, a Democrat. Wallace denied the motion, saying she did not remember the donation until the motion was filed and that she has no bias on the legal issues in the case.

“I will not allow this legal process to turn into a circus,” she said.