What the MAGA world has been calling an outrageous injustice is really just constitutional karma.
Donald Trump’s supporters are in a continuing uproar over the Colorado Supreme Court barring him from the Republican presidential primary because Section 3 of Article 14 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits insurrectionists from holding public office.
The Trumpies cry out that their man has never been convicted of insurrection and are calling it shameless election interference.
Yet the same MAGA folks who are so enraged now said and did nothing at all when a Jan. 6 defendant convicted of misdemeanor respass on the Capitol grounds was removed from elective office.
Couy Griffin was well known on the far right as the horse-riding founder of Cowboys for Trump. But when a lawsuit was filed in 2022 to remove him from the final year of his term on the Board of Commissioners in Otero County, New Mexico, he was left to fend for himself.
“I had no help, I didn't have an attorney, I didn't have money to pay for an attorney,” Griffin told The Daily Beast.
He added, “I just figured that Trump, his people at the top, would look down to me… and help me through it. But I didn't get any of that help when I went through my removal deal.”
Griffin might be surprised, but he should not have been, because this is how Trump has operated toward the rioters—hanging them out to dry after riling them up.
Griffin defended himself in the civil proceedings, and state District Court Judge Francis Mathew rejected his argument that he had only been exercising his right to free speech.
“His protestations and his characterizations of his actions and the events of January 6, 2021 are not credible and amounted to nothing more than attempting to put lipstick on a pig,” Mathew ruled.
Mathew noted, “The irony of Mr. Griffin's argument that this Court should refrain from applying the law and consider the will of the people… as he attempts to defend his participation in an insurrection by a mob whose goal, by his own admission, was to set aside the results of a free, fair and lawful election by a majority of the people of the entire country (the will of the people) has not escaped this Court.”
The judge’s 46-page ruling addresses a number of the issues that MAGA world now cites in the Trump case. Mathew found that a person does not need to be convicted of insurrection or any other crime to be disqualified under the applicable part of the 14h Amendment. He ruled that a person need only have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, as Griffin did on assuming office, and then broken it by engaging in an insurrection. And the judge determined that “insurrection” must be viewed as it was at the time the amendment was ratified.
“Section Three’s framers and nineteenth-century Americans did not understand an insurrection to require actual violence; intimidation by numbers sufficed,” he wrote. “The mob that arrived at the Capitol on January 6 was an assemblage of persons who engaged in violence, force, and intimidation by numbers.”
Griffin became one of only eight officials nationwide ever removed under the 14th Amendment. The previous was a socialist U.S. congressman found to have violated the Espionage Act in 1919. The others were all former Confederates in the Civil War.
Griffin says the case and the accompanying ruling passed without notice in MAGA world, where Trump is everything and the fate of his far-right underlings is incidental.
“Nobody’s even mentioned it,” Griffin told the Daily Beast. “The only time Steve Bannon has ever mentioned anything about my situation is he said some guy out in New Mexico got pulled from office. I mean, he couldn't even say my name.”
Griffin expressed particular disappointment regarding Mike Flynn because, he said, he had numerous encounters with the former Trump national security advisor and ardent conspiracy theorist.
“General Flynn has been dead silent,” Griffin said. “It’s extremely discouraging, the silence from the right.”
In March, a friend of Griffin arranged for an attorney named Peter Ticktin to represent him pro bono in appealing the removal. Ticktin happens to have been Trump’s roommate at New York Military Academy in their senior year.
The friend is a member of the Mar-a-Lago club and invited Griffin to join him and Ticktin there. As betrayed as Griffin felt, he was only excited to accept.
“It was cool, man,” Griffin told The Daily Beast on Monday. “I had dinner there two nights.”
With that memory, Griffin seemed to momentarily forget any bitterness about being abandoned by MAGA folks during his removal on the same grounds they now decry as election interference. He remained under the spell of a cult that confounds reason.
“Two tables over from President Trump and Melania,” Griffin reported. “So that was really an honor.”
The deserted cowboy was still one of the many chumps for Trump who could put him back in the White House even though he has dishonored democracy itself.
MAGA Shrugged When This Cowboy for Trump Was Booted From Office Over Jan. 6
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14.01.2024
What the MAGA world has been calling an outrageous injustice is really just constitutional karma.
Donald Trump’s supporters are in a continuing uproar over the Colorado Supreme Court barring him from the Republican presidential primary because Section 3 of Article 14 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits insurrectionists from holding public office.
The Trumpies cry out that their man has never been convicted of insurrection and are calling it shameless election interference.
Yet the same MAGA folks who are so enraged now said and did nothing at all when a Jan. 6 defendant convicted of misdemeanor respass on the Capitol grounds was removed from elective office.
Couy Griffin was well known on the far right as the horse-riding founder of Cowboys for Trump. But when a lawsuit was filed in 2022 to remove him from the final year of his term on the Board of Commissioners in Otero County, New Mexico, he was left to fend for himself.
“I had no help, I didn't have an attorney, I didn't have money to pay for an attorney,” Griffin told The Daily Beast.
He added, “I just figured that Trump, his people at the top, would look down to me… and help me through it. But I didn't get any of........
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