Colorado secretary of state calls Trump a ‘liar’ amid lawsuit to bar ex-president from ballot

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Colorado’s secretary of state has responded after Donald Trump accused her of working to prevent him from taking the presidency once again.

The ex-president has fumed over the last few days in response to a lawsuit filed by a top Washington DC ethics group aimed at preventing Mr Trump from appearing on the 2024 ballot. The lawsuit and CREW’s argument are simple: Mr Trump should not be allowed to run, given his support for the armed mob of his own supporters who attacked the US Capitol and attempted, at his urging, to thwart Congress from certifying the 2020 election’s results.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, has derided the effort as “election interference” on social media — which is technically true, though the obvious difference being that filing a lawsuit is legal, while his efforts to pressure Georgia state officials to “find” thousands of nonexistent votes to add to his total may not have been.

“The group suing me in Colorado to ridiculously try and Unconstitutionally keep me off the ballot (I am leading against DeSanctimonious by almost 50 points, and beating Crooked Joe, BIG!), is TRUMP DERANGED “CREW,” composed of many slime balls,” he wrote on Truth Social.

He would go on to baselessly suggest that this lawsuit filed in Colorado was somehow related to the two criminal indictments the Department of Justice has filed against him.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s top elections official, ridiculed his Truth Social tantrum during an MSNBC interview on Saturday.

“Trump is a liar with no respect for the Constitution,” she said.

“To say that a section of the 14th Amendment is election interference and considering how to uphold the Constitution is election interference is un-American,” she continued. “We know that the former president is a liar who will do everything he can to hold onto power.”

Her remarks come as Mr Trump is preparing to defend the legality of his efforts to cling to the presidency in 2020, a misadventure that failed to stop Joe Biden’s ascendance to the White House and ended with countless officials and appointees resigning in disgrace and disgust after the attack on the Capitol.

Mr Trump has long claimed that he is innocent of all wrongdoing, but faces 91 felony counts of alleged criminal misconduct. In the Georgia case, he’s accused of soliciting public officials to violate their oath; at the federal level, he’s accused of conspiring to defraud the entire country of a duly elected president — both actions which would likely also fit cleanly under the umbrella of “election interference”.