CNN Legal Analyst Says Trump’s Team Makes Strong Argument On Key Issue In Colorado Case

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Friday that former President Donald Trump’s legal team makes a strong argument about political chaos in their challenge to the Colorado Supreme Court ruling to kick Trump off the ballot.

Trump’s lawyers submitted a brief Thursday to the Supreme Court arguing it should overturn the Colorado decision because the president is not “subject to section 3, as the President is not an ‘officer of the United States’ under the Constitution.” His attorneys go on to say Trump did not engage in an insurrection and that efforts to remove Trump off the ballot would “unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead.”

“Their main argument here, though, that the president, what he did didn’t amount to participating in an insurrection, and by the way, if you do this, you will create a chaotic country, which is not a legal argument. How do you expect the Supreme Court to address that?” CNN’s Poppy Harlow asked.

“Well so a lot of focus is on this phrase ‘chaos and bedlam,’ I can’t defend the bedlam part of it,” Honig said. “But the chaos part of it, I think if you look at the brief, they say ‘legal chaos, political chaos,’ and they’re right. I mean, we’ve done the map. We’ve shown the map. The red states are all the states that have rejected the 14th Amendment challenges, the yellow states, and there’s about a dozen of them, are all the ones where the challenges have failed so far but not finally, and then you have the two blue states. You have Colorado and Maine that have thrown him off. That is chaotic, and in fact one of the Colorado Supreme Court justices said, the dissenters, said the problem with all of this is its chaos. You can’t have some states throwing him off, some states not.”

Elie Honig Breaks Down How Kenneth Chesebro Could Tank Fani Willis’ Case

“But my question to you is, it’s not really a legal, constitutional issue. That is not – the Supreme Court would address. Can they still do it that way?” Harlow asked. (RELATED: ALAN DERSHOWITZ: No, The 14th Amendment Can’t Disqualify Trump)

Honig Rips Maine Secretary Of State For Relying On YouTube Clips In Her Ruling To Oust Trump From Ballot

“That is a policy argument that you can make to support a legal argument. With respect to the legal arguments, there’s two categories in the brief. One is the factual claim, ‘I did not engage in an insurrection.’ I don’t think the Supreme Court’s gonna take that. That’s not what they do, that’s not their function. They don’t make findings of facts. That’s what judges and juries are for. Then there’s this series of procedural arguments which boil down to, in a sentence, we don’t know how this process works. And we can’t make it up on the fly here, different state by state, and then apply it backwards, and so there’s various sort of versions of that. But I think the procedural arguments where this is going to be decided and I think won on Trump’s behalf.”

Honig Explains Trump Legal Team’s ‘Very Effective Argument’ Against Jack Smith 

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December to remove Trump from the ballot in a 4-3 decision. Nine days later Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows of Maine declared Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot as well.