October 31, 2023 03:06 PM UTC

Okay For Socialists, Okay For Trump Says Scott Gessler

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Denver Post’s Nick Coltrain reports from the trial playing out this week in Denver District Court, seeking to force Secretary of State Jena Griswold to remove ex-President Donald Trump from the 2024 Republican primary ballot under the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause barring people who try to overthrow the government from running to lead it. The trial pits a group of unaffiliated and Republican plaintiffs against former GOP Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s law firm, who previously represented the Trump campaign in December of 2020 in lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election in Nevada:

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…

We are aware of the differing opinions on the efficacy of a lawsuit to exclude Trump from the ballot instead of entrusting Colorado Republican voters to do the job. With that said, Gessler’s argument before the court yesterday relied on some interesting precedent to say the least:

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. [Pols emphasis]

“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.”

If you feel it’s necessary to factually counter Gessler’s eyebrow-raising citation of early 20th Century Socialist firebrand Eugene V. Debs as precedent for excusing Trump’s incitement of the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol at all, it’s probably enough to remember that Debs wasn’t convicted of inciting any actual violence. If Eugene Debs had ever organized a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on the order of January 6th, his sentence for sedition would much more likely have been to hang.

As for “the facts of January 6th,” Gessler’s credibility to speak to that is only slightly better than fellow Trump attorneys like Jenna Ellis who have pled guilty–and in Gessler’s case, only because he wasn’t charged in Georgia. Gessler’s legal fiction for Trump in 2020 was in Nevada. Gessler has been a megaphone for unfounded misinformation and conspiracy theories for over a decade since his election as Secretary of State in 2010, which made him a natural fit for Trump’s legal team in 2020 and beyond.

If Gessler isn’t careful in how he argues Trump’s case today, he could still join his contemporaries in professional ruin.