Shenna Bellows, the Secretary of State in Maine, issued a surprise decision in recent days against the appearance of Donald Trump on forthcoming ballots in the state for presidential primaries that will be held there, tying him to the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and invoking Constitutional rules against certain individuals who “engaged in insurrection” later holding office.
Found in the 14th Amendment to that guiding document, those standards have also been invoked in challenges to Trump’s eligibility for office brought in other states including Colorado. In an interview on MSNBC that followed her decision, Bellows declared Trump to be knowingly responsible for the chaos of January 6, which has been connected to a series of deaths and straightforwardly threatened the very continuance of U.S. democratic processes. Relatedly, among the charges facing Trump in his criminal case covering his post-election plots is an allegation of conspiring against the expression of the right to vote by Americans.
“The weight of the evidence, all of the evidence, made clear that Mr. Trump was aware of the tinder laid by a multi-month effort to de-legitimize a democratic election — the election of 2020, and then chose to light a match on January 6, and then did nothing for a time,” Bellows argued, adding: “The events of January 6, 2021, and this was borne out by the evidence, were unprecedented and tragic. They were an attack not only upon the Capitol and on the government officials there, members of Congress [and] the former vice president, but also an attack on the rule of law.”
Federal prosecutors who brought that case against Trump have repeatedly made similar connections, indicating an ambition of using circumstances of the Capitol attack against Trump at his eventual trial. The idea is that his argued connections help establish his mindset and intentions heading into his other alleged crimes. Meanwhile, Bellows has characteristically already faced threats to her safety from Trump devotees. Watch her interview below:
