Supreme Court showdown likely on Trump’s ballot eligibility
Former president Donald Trump’s latest legal woes are threatening to throw the Republican primary contest into chaos weeks before the party’s voters begin the nominating process with the Iowa caucuses.
Challenges from voters, seeking to keep Trump from running again over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, are likely to end up before the US Supreme Court, with pressure already mounting for the justices to act quickly to quell the legal chaos.
On Thursday, Maine’s top election official moved to remove Trump from the ballot, citing his conduct after the 2020 vote, culminating in the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Hours later in California, election officials said Trump would stay on their ballot.
Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said the ruling in Maine — the second state to bar Trump, following Colorado — set the stage for an “epic constitutional showdown.”
“This puts more pressure on the Supreme Court to act and make a decision,” Waldman said. “There’s a real need for national clarity on this.”
Trump has faced lawsuits from voters across the country who say he is barred from seeking another term by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says a person who “engaged in insurrection” after taking an oath to support the Constitution is ineligible for office.
The questions about Trump’s eligibility for the White House have failed to dent his commanding lead over the rest of the Republican field. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump with an over 51 percentage point lead over his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, nationally and well ahead in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Trump campaign has lambasted efforts to bar him as politically motivated and he has insisted he acted within his official duties as president in the run-up to the assault on the Capitol, where his supporters sought to stop lawmakers from certifying President Biden’s victory.
The Supreme Court is likely to decide soon whether it will review a Colorado Supreme Court decision that declared Trump ineligible for the ballot there. State Republicans have asked the justices to intervene, and Trump is expected to file his own appeal.
Colorado voters seeking to bar Trump have asked the justices to expedite briefing, so they can use a Jan. 5, 2024 private conference to consider granting review.
Even with the high court’s intervention it is unclear how clearly a ruling could resolve the matter.
Waldman said he expects the justices to decide not whether Trump engaged in insurrection, but who has the authority to decide whether such an act bars him from holding office in the future, throwing those decisions back in the hands of state courts and election officials.
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Cohen says he used AI for case citations
Michael D. Cohen, a former fixer and lawyer for former president Donald Trump, said in a new court filing that he unknowingly gave his attorney bogus case citations after using artificial intelligence to create them as part of a legal bid to end his probation on tax evasion and campaign finance violation charges.
According to the filing, which was unsealed Friday, Cohen said he used Google Bard, an AI chatbot, to generate case citations that his lawyer could use to assist in making the case to shorten his supervised release. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in 2018 and had served time in prison.
Cohen said he gave those citations to one of his attorneys, David M. Schwartz, who then used them in a motion filed with a federal judge on Cohen’s behalf, the filing said.
Cohen’s admission comes after US District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York said in a Dec. 12 order that he could not find any of the three cases cited by Schwartz and asked for a “thorough explanation” of how these cases came to be included and “what role, if any,” Cohen may have played in the motion before it was filed.
In the filing, Cohen wrote that he had not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.’’ To him, he said, Google Bard seemed to be a “supercharged search engine.”
Cohen added that at no point did Schwartz or his paralegal “raise any concerns about the citations” he’d suggested. “It did not occur to me then — and remains surprising to me now — that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming they had existed,’’ Cohen wrote.
Schwartz did not immediately return a request for comment.
The episode comes as Cohen is expected to play a prominent role in a Manhattan criminal case against Trump. It is also an indication of how common AI is becoming in legal case work, as a new generation of AI language tools make their way into the legal industry.
According to Cohen’s filing, the mistake was caught by E. Danya Perry, a former federal prosecutor who is now representing Cohen in his effort to cut short his probation. Cohen said Schwartz made an “honest mistake,” and Perry has provided real case citations that make the case for why Cohen’s probation should be terminated.
This is at least the second instance this year in which a Manhattan federal judge has confronted lawyers over using fake AI-generated citations. Two lawyers in June were fined $5,000 in an unrelated case where they used ChatGPT to create bogus case citations.
GOP challenges findings on Wis. district boundaries
MADISON, Wis. — Republican lawmakers have asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to stay and reconsider its finding that the state’s legislative district boundaries are unconstitutional.
Attorneys representing a host of Republican state Senators filed a motion with the court Thursday saying they can’t meet the court’s Jan. 12 deadline for new maps. They also argue the court didn’t listen to their arguments in the case and didn’t give them a chance to respond to the deadline for new boundaries. They asked the court to stay all proceedings until it decides on the motion.
The legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 64-35 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.
Democrats filed a lawsuit in August arguing the maps are unconstitutional and give the GOP an unfair advantage. They filed the action a day after liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in, flipping the court’s majority to 4-3 liberal control.
The court ruled on Dec. 22 that the current boundaries are unconstitutional because they aren’t contiguous. Many districts include sections of land that aren’t connected, resulting in maps that resemble Swiss cheese.
The court ordered the Legislature and other parties involved in the lawsuit to produce new maps by Jan. 12, with supporting arguments due 10 days later. The court likely will release new maps sometime in late February or early March unless the Legislature acts first.
State elections officials have said maps must be in place by March 15 to be in play for the 2024 election.