Trump accused of pressuring election officials as Giuliani files for bankruptcy: Live

Joe Biden beat Mr Trump by 154,000 votes in Michigan, paving the way for him to win the White House.

Colorado’s secretary of state says she has received “hundreds if not thousands” of threats since a lawsuit was filed challenging Donald Trump’s eligibility to appear on the 2024 presidential election ballot in the state.

“I’ve been concerned about violence and threats of violence since Donald Trump incited the insurrection,” Jena Griswold told HuffPost on Wednesday. “Within three weeks of it being filed, I received 64 death threats and over 900 non-lethal threats of abuse. I stopped counting after that.”

On Tuesday, Colorado’s highest court issued a majority 4-3 ruling finding that the former president is disqualified from appearing on the state’s ballots in 2024 for his role in the violence on 6 January 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the seat of American democracy in a bid to overturn the 2020 election.

The case was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on behalf of six voters who argued that Mr Trump should be barred from ballots under the text of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has sworn an oath to uphold the constitution and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office.

Ms Griswold’s office was sued due to her role as Colorado’s chief elections official.

She told The Independent: “I did not file this case. I’m part of this case because I’m the secretary of state.

“So yes, I’m extremely concerned. It just underlines that Donald Trump is a major threat to American democracy, elections and stability,” she said. “He uses threats and intimidation against his political opponents. When he doesn’t win elections, he tries to steal them. He is a dangerous leader for this country.”

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The Biden campaign has taken to comparing former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and the president himself has also stepped into the fray.

In the last month and a half, as Mr Trump’s rhetoric has grown more extreme, calling his political opponents “vermin” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the Biden campaign has issued statements comparing Mr Trump to the Nazi leader at least four times.

It’s a continuation of Mr Biden’s 2020 campaign, when he was running to “restore the soul of America” and the US as the global leader of the liberal international world order amid a steady rise of authoritarianism throughout the 2010s.

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It may be “the end of Rudy Giuliani,” according to the former New York mayor and Trump attorney’s lawyer Joseph Sibley.

That’s because a federal jury ruled that he owes nearly $150m to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss after he defamed them, falsely claiming they had been committing voter fraud to aid Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

The women described being harassed, receiving death threats, and having to flee their homes due to the conspiracy theories pushed by Mr Giuliani.

Before the ruling, Mr Sibley said awarding the women tens of millions would be “the civil equivalence of a death penalty” for Mr Giuliani.

But how much is the former New York mayor actually worth?

“He has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t have the resources to handle litigation,” a source familiar with Mr Giuliani’s legal woes told ABC News.

While there’s no concrete number, there are some indicators as to how much Mr Giuliani has stored away in his coffers.

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The dam has officially broken following the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to bar Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot in that state.

A Democratic state official in California is now calling for the former president to be stripped of ballot access in that state too, citing the Colorado court’s finding that Mr Trump had participated in an insurrection via his support and tangential leadership of the mob which attacked the US Capitol on January 6, attempting to halt the election certification process.

Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis sent a letter to the secretary of state urging her to make a similar determination in the days ahead; California’s deadline for certifying ballots for the upcoming 2024 primary is this coming week.

“[T]he Colorado Supreme Court held in Anderson v. Griswold... that Trump’s insurrection disqualifies him under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to stand for presidential re-election. Because the candidate is ineligible, the court ruled, it would be a ‘wrongful act’ for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on that state’s presidential primary ballot.”

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Rudy Giuliani has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy days after he was ordered to pay more than $148m to a mother-daughter pair of election workers he defamed in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, underscoring the downfall of a man once hailed as “America’s Mayor.”

His filing in New York comes one day after the federal judge overseeing his defamation case ordered him to “immediately” pay the women, pointing to his history as an “uncooperative litigant” and concerns that he will try to “conceal his assets” during any appeals.

Last week, an eight-member jury unanimously agreed that Donald Trump’s former attorney owes Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss $16.2m and $16.99m respectively in compensatory damages, an additional $20m each for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and a further $75m in punitive damages.

Judge Howell had already found Mr Giuliani liable for defamation in a damning pretrial ruling earlier this year. A four-day trial in Washington DC sought to determine how much he owed.

Ms Moss, who was a clerical worker in a county election office, and Ms Freeman, her mother, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots, were subject to relentless abuse, threats and racist attacks in the wake of the 2020 election.

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On Wednesday night, Seth Meyers said what we’re all thinking right about now:

“What is politics now? Like, for real, what are we all doing?”

Those important questions — which might’ve hit home a little too hard — were followed by a constitutional history lesson from Mr Meyers on how Colorado’s Supreme Court has banned former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot.

“After the Civil War, Congress ratified a section of the 14th Amendment in order to keep secessionists who were disloyal to the United States out of government,” Mr Meyers said on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

Mr Meyers is referring to section 3 of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states that no person holding government office “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

He assured viewers not to worry if they hadn’t heard of it: “It’s a Reconstruction-era amendment which high school history class always skipped over for some reason.”

The Colorado Supreme Court cited that amendment when they issued their 4-3 decision barring Mr Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot earlier this week.

“The only way this amendment could apply any more directly to Donald Trump is if it said ‘No person shall hold any office who hasn’t previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and the United States shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same including any flamboyant land-owning weirdos whose ties are too long and won’t stop complaining about how toilets don’t flush and windmills killing birds,” Mr Meyers continued.

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Rudy Giuliani has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy days after he was ordered to pay more than $148m to a mother-daughter pair of election workers he defamed in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, underscoring the downfall of a man once hailed as “America’s Mayor.”

His filing in New York comes one day after the federal judge overseeing his defamation case ordered him to “immediately” pay the women, pointing to his history as an “uncooperative litigant” and concerns that he will try to “conceal his assets” during any appeals.

Last week, an eight-member jury unanimously agreed that Donald Trump’s former attorney owes Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss $16.2m and $16.99m respectively in compensatory damages, an additional $20m each for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and a further $75m in punitive damages.

Judge Howell had already found Mr Giuliani liable for defamation in a damning pretrial ruling earlier this year. A four-day trial in Washington DC sought to determine how much he owed.

Ms Moss, who was a clerical worker in a county election office, and Ms Freeman, her mother, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots, were subject to relentless abuse, threats and racist attacks in the wake of the 2020 election.

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Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis was asked if Donald Trump is facing jail time.

She said: “Everyone in society is the same. I don’t know why that’s such a difficult concept for people. You can look at the charges and based on those charges, we will be recommending appropriate sentences. No one gets a special break because of their status.”

Michael Gottlieb, attorney for Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, told The Independent after Rudy Giulaini’s bankruptcy filing that “This maneuver is unsurprising, and it will not succeed in discharging Mr. Giuliani’s debt to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss”.

Whether Donald Trump’s former attorney, facing a mountain of legal problems, can cover the extensive costs of his lies surrounding the 2020 presidential election is likely to be a hotly contested subject in the verdict’s aftermath. He has already vowed to appeal.

Lawyers for Ms Moss and her mother Ms Freeman have said they were not able to get a full accounting of Mr Giuliani’s net worth and assets, largely because he never responded to subpoenas for them.

Throughout the four-day trial as well as court filings over the last two years of the case, Mr Giuliani’s attorneys have said he does not have enough funds to cover his debts – though it still remains unclear what, if anything, he does have.

Attorney John Langford told MSNBC that the legal team is “going to work diligently to track down every asset that he has, work to ensure that what he has rightly goes to Ruby and Shaye for what he owes them”.

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