All right, joining me now is Saul Weisenberg, former deputy independent counsel and Fox News contributor, alongside Mike Davis, Article 3 Project President, Saul.
I was going back to that 2016
piece in the Washington Post about
getting the electors
to not represent the popular vote.
I had forgotten about that piece completely
until today.
And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, huh,
that sounds like kind of a little bit of a radical theory in some circles, certainly, But nobody was thinking that would be part of a criminal conspiracy if anyone even thought to implement it. That was interesting.
Oh yeah,
it's completely hypocritical. Of course they would say that President Trump went further
on January 6th, but
there's no question that it's hypocritical.
And
this is more of the same. Can you think of anything more anti-democratic
than the idea that some state functionary,
some state secretary of state can declare on his or her own,
Well, I think Donald Trump has engaged in insurrection or rebellion
as understood in the 14th Amendment without any kind of a trial, without any kind of process, without any kind of definition.
It's just ludicrous.
And to Saul's point, Mike, some states are already
considering this 14th Amendment theory that we all talked about for the first time, I think, last week, the week before.
Here's the Michigan Secretary of State. Watch this.
I'm going to follow the law. What the law says is what is going to dictate how I and
I hope all of my colleagues proceed
in this moment, in particular around thorny issues like this 1. I'm going to be talking with Auschwitz in Pennsylvania, with Cisco, Aguilar in Nevada, with Brad Raffensperger.
Mike, I hope they all immediately reject this,
what seems to me, completely unconstitutional
nonsense.
Well, it is unconstitutional.
There is an article out by Stanford law professor
Michael McDonnell,
a former federal judge who makes it very clear he's
not a Trump supporter by any means, but he makes it very clear that this is a bogus
legal theory by the Democrats. In order to disqualify
under the 14th Amendment, you have to follow a federal statute on insurrection and rebellion. A criminal statute, get a criminal conviction with a judge and a jury, and it has to stand up on appeal before you can even consider this. There's no evidence whatsoever of insurrection.
Democrats looked for several years for the January 6th commission and they found 0 evidence because it doesn't exist.
Yeah, so, Saul, he wasn't charged with an insurrection
account of insurrection. So
the wide-ranging RICO
conspiracy
in Fulton County,
insurrection, As much as they like to talk about it, there
was no sense of an intent to
violently overthrow the government.
So this whole theory rests on,
I think, a fallacious understanding of even what the basic facts are in this case.
Well, here's the problem
with the theory.
If we were starting from scratch,
it's not like there's
a complete lack of support historically
for this conception of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The problem is, in 1869,
there was an opinion by Chief Justice Salman Chase of the Supreme Court. Now he wasn't sitting as a Supreme Court Justice, he was sitting as a circuit judge, but he made a ruling that's been considered definitive
for about 150
years
and what he said was this is not self-executing
this Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,
that there has to be congressional enforcement.
And as Mike pointed out, Congress has passed a statute
that tracks the exact words
of section 3 of the fourteenth amendment.
It says that it makes it a crime to engage in insurrection or rebellion against the government or to
incite it or to give aid and comfort to its enemies.
And the punishment, in addition to the criminal fine, is that you cannot
ever hold office again.
So it's been done.
Again, the idea
that you would have some state official,
a partisanly
elected state official disqualify
Trump
without any kind of due process at all I think it's not going to fly and listen I think 1 of them is going to do it and when they do I think it will move up Rapidly through the courts. I certainly hope it does and I think it will be rejected by the Supremes
Yeah, I mean there you could see right this is gaining momentum And we we pegged it when Ludig and Larry Tribe came out. We knew that this was gonna be a boulder going down the hill, but Trump's lawyers were in court today on the January 6th case, Judge Amy Chetkin said, I understand Mr. Trump is presumed innocent, as is every defendant.
Let's not overlook the fact that Mr. Trump has considerable resources
that every defendant does not usually have.
And this was,
I guess, regarding the timing of the case, which we're going to get into later on. But, Mike, do you detect,
just from that comment from the judge,
I mean, that seems to speak to some anti-Trump bias right there.
This Obama judge is a left-wing radical. She's
been the harshest sentencer of January 6th
Defendants while she excuses the BLM protesters
There's no chance that President Trump is gonna get a fair trial in Washington DC with Judge Tanya Chutkin
Jack Smith and this 95%
Trump deranged jury
pool. Well, Saul, do you think it's possible to get a fair
jury outcome for Donald Trump in D.C. And with a D.C. Jury?
I think it's
virtually impossible if there was ever a case that called for a change of venue. Forget about the judge.
Just because of
the jury panel in DC, I think that would happen. Unfortunately, the law
is very bad on this. There's a supreme court opinion the scaling opinion which we think of is important because of honest services
there's their part of the ruling
is that it's that was that they didn't have to move the Enron trial out of Houston. So it's going to be very tough to do that. Yeah, I don't think they're going to win on that 1. Saul and Mike, as always, thank you.
