US Supreme Court to hear Trump appeal of ballot ban

The US Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear Donald Trump's appeal of a ruling by Colorado's highest court that would keep him off the presidential primary ballot in the western state.

The conservative-majority Supreme Court, which includes three justices appointed by the former president, said it would hear oral arguments in the high-stakes election case on February 8.

The Colorado Supreme Court barred Trump last month from appearing on the Republican presidential primary ballot in the state because of his role in the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by his supporters.

Lawyers for Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, urged the US Supreme Court earlier this week to hear the case and "summarily reverse the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling."

They said the Colorado ruling, "if allowed to stand, will mark the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.

"The question of eligibility to serve as President of the United States is properly reserved for Congress, not the state courts, to consider and decide," they added.

The 77-year-old Trump has also lodged an appeal against a ruling by the top election official in Maine that would keep him off the primary ballot in the northeastern state.

Trump's attorneys urged the Maine Superior Court to toss out the ruling by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, calling her a "biased decision-maker" who "acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner."

The Colorado Supreme Court and Maine secretary of state both ruled that Trump is ineligible to appear on the primary ballot because of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

Section Three of the 14th Amendment bars people from holding public office if they engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" after once pledging to support and defend the Constitution.

The amendment, ratified in 1868 after the US Civil War, was aimed at preventing supporters of the slave-holding Confederacy from being elected to Congress or from holding federal positions.

Similar 14th Amendment challenges to Trump's eligibility have been filed in other states as well. Courts in Minnesota and Michigan recently ruled that Trump should stay on the ballot in those states.

Separately, the twice-impeached former president is scheduled to go on trial in Washington in March for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

He also faces racketeering charges in Georgia for allegedly conspiring to upend the election results in the southern state.

Maine and Colorado hold their presidential nominating contests on March 5 -- also known as "Super Tuesday" -- when voters in more than a dozen states, including California and Texas, go to the polls.

Biden sets sights on Trump

Joe Biden's all-out attack on Donald Trump in his first 2024 campaign speech said it all -- the US president knows he is in for the fight of his political life.

The 81-year-old Democrat has the worst approval ratings of any modern president at this stage in his term, and is either neck-and-neck or trailing his likely Republican opponent in the polls.

For months Democrats have been clamoring for Biden's campaign to step up to the plate, as voter concerns mount about the economy and the age of America's oldest president.

Biden did just that on Friday. He launched into a ferocious condemnation of Trump, comparing his rival to the Nazis and branding him "sick," a "loser" and a threat to US democracy.

The question now is whether that strategy -- identifying Trump as his main rival even before the Republican nomination process officially starts in Iowa later this month -- will be enough.

"If the election were held tomorrow, President Biden would lose," William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told AFP.

- 'Uphill fight' -

Until now Biden's strategy has focused on positive messages about the president's accomplishments -- particularly on leading the economy out of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But "they haven't really moved the needle so far," said Galston, particularly as many Americans are still feeling the effects of high food and housing prices, whatever the improving government statistics say.

Migration through the Mexican border remains a major headache, while there is division in his party over his support for Israel's war on Hamas, and Republicans in Congress are blocking his bid for more funds for Ukraine.

Another major worry is that Biden has been hemorrhaging support among the Black and Hispanic voters who helped him to the White House in 2020.

But perhaps Biden's biggest vulnerability is his age: he has suffered a series of trips and verbal slips that Trump, just four years younger at 77, has repeatedly mocked.

Galston said Biden would have to wage a "vigorous campaign," including multiple trips to battleground states and presidential debates, to convince voters he was not "doddering and senile."

"If he can't wage a vigorous campaign I'm afraid that will simply validate the doubts," he said.

On the economy, Biden would be reliant on wages continuing to rise faster than prices, and a lack of shocks such as a wider Middle East war.

"My overall thesis is that President Biden's campaign is going to have to hope that global events and the domestic economy cooperate," he said.

"Otherwise, that's going to be an uphill fight for the election."

- 'Full Hitler' -

The Biden campaign now appears to be focusing on his strength as the Democratic Party's only proven "Trump-slayer."

Biden's speech on Friday, near the symbolic American Revolutionary War site of Valley Forge, was his harshest yet.

It was also the closest he has come to going "full Hitler" -- the term younger aides used for directly comparing Trump to the Nazi leader, according to a recent CNN report.

So far Biden has also refused to directly mention the 91 felony counts that Trump faces, in order to avoid the appearance of influencing the judiciary, but that could change if he continues to languish in the polls.

But it remains to be seen whether attacking Trump will turn things around.

"I would say that democracy really is on the ballot. That's Biden's line but I think it's objectively true, it's not hyperbole," said William Howell, a politics professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

But he told AFP that "most elections are not decided on these kinds of issues, they're decided on the economy, and the incumbent president's approval ratings, whether or not we’re at war -- these types of material things."

"And while the stakes are very real, it is less clear that talking about them in a full-throated way is the ticket to actually winning reelection for Biden."

Trump rallies supporters in Iowa

Donald Trump hits the campaign trail in the first-in-the-nation presidential nominating state of Iowa on Saturday as Americans mark the third anniversary of the deadly assault on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters.

People watched in horror on January 6, 2021, as TV images were beamed into homes nationwide showing rioters -- egged on by the ex-president and fueled by his false claims of voter fraud -- storming the seat of US democracy to halt the transfer of power.

Trump, the runaway leader in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was impeached for inciting insurrection and faces multiple felony charges over his conduct leading up to and during the violence.

He will headline a rally in Newton, just outside of state capital Des Moines, at 1:00pm (1900 GMT) before delivering remarks at a middle school in Clinton, on the Illinois border.

"Ten days from now the people of this state are going to cast the most important vote of your entire lives," Trump told a crowd in Sioux Center on Friday as he kicked off his Iowa visit.

"I believe that too -- very much. I used to say that 2016 (was), and I believed it then. And now I believe this is even much more important. Our country's going to hell."

Trump leads rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis by more than 30 points in Iowa, which stages its Republican nominating contest -- known as a "caucus" -- on January 15, kicking off the 2024 primary season.

The announcements for his speeches did not mention the January 6 anniversary and the Trump campaign did not respond when asked if he planned to address the subject.

Trump has described January 6 as "a beautiful day" and has made the "great patriots" and "hostages" imprisoned over the riot a cause celebre, vowing to pardon many if elected.

The false claim that Democratic election theft led to January 6 has become orthodoxy among Republicans, with hard-liners in Congress promoting the fantasy that the chaos at the Capitol was a "false flag" operation by federal agents.

A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll released on Thursday found that 44 percent of Trump voters believe the FBI organized and encouraged the riot.

- Threat to democracy -

The House of Representatives, then controlled by the Democrats, impeached Trump for inciting the violence, which was linked to the deaths of five police officers and several rioters, although he was acquitted by allies in the Senate and denies all wrongdoing.

A later congressional investigation concluded that the violence was the culmination of a criminal conspiracy led by Trump to subvert the election. Separately, the ex-president is facing multiple federal and state felony charges related to the events.

Democrats plan to make the tycoon's conduct on January 6 a key campaign issue, pointing to the 450-plus Trump supporters jailed over allegations ranging from seditious conspiracy to trespassing and assaulting police.

Biden gave a speech in Pennsylvania Friday framing the election as a test of the robustness of the republic and highlighting the Capitol riot as a demonstration of Trump's threat to democracy.

He also accused his predecessor of echoing Nazis with his rhetoric on immigration, accusing him of being willing to "sacrifice our democracy" to regain power.

"Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He's willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power," Biden said in a full-throated attack on his presumptive election rival.

Trump retorted at his Sioux Center event that Biden was merely trying to distract from a White House term that has been "an unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption and failure."

"That's why Crooked Joe is staging a pathetic, fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today," he said.

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House at the time of the assault, marked the anniversary with an op-ed in The Atlantic arguing that Trump "resorted to insurrection" after failing to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

"The threat to our democracy is real, present and urgent," she wrote.

New York prosecutor seeks $370m from Trump in fraud case

New York's attorney general is seeking $370 million from former president Donald Trump in a fraud case which has seen the real estate mogul accused of inflating the value of his properties, court documents showed Friday.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and his two eldest sons are accused of fraudulently inflating the value of real estate assets to receive more favorable bank loans and insurance terms.

"Record evidence... supports disgorgement of $370 million, plus pre-judgment interest," said the filing, significantly more than the $250 million that New York Attorney General Letitia James previously said she would seek.

"The myriad deceptive schemes they employed to inflate asset values and conceal facts were so outrageous that they belie innocent explanation.

"Defendants offered no specific rebuttal to these calculations."

The requested amount is linked to the "wrongdoer's unlawful profits," the filing said.

The amount to be paid will be determined by the judge, Arthur Engoron, whom Trump has repeatedly attacked on social media.

It will be released in his final decision and order, for which no date has yet been confirmed.

- 'Totally corrupt' -

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, lashed out at James, calling her "totally corrupt" and saying "I did nothing wrong."

"My financial statements are great and very conservative," he said. "This case should never have been brought."

Trump's lawyers rejected any notion of fraud, arguing that real estate valuations are subjective and the banks lending to the organization had not lost any money.

- 'Decided against me'? -

Trump repeatedly took to social media during the case, saying it was "decided against me before it even started."

During the trial Trump called the judge "crazy" and "unhinged," and denounced James, who is Black, as "racist."

Engoron responded by slapping Trump with two fines -- one for $5,000, another for $10,000 -- when he ruled the onetime reality television star had violated a partial gag order imposed after he bashed the judge's clerk on social media.

Even before opening arguments, Engoron ruled that James' office had already shown "conclusive evidence" that Trump had overstated his net worth on financial documents by between $812 million and $2.2 billion between 2014 and 2021.

As a result, the judge ordered the liquidation of the companies managing the assets in question, such as the Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street skyscrapers in Manhattan and the opulent Seven Springs private estate outside New York City.

That order is on hold pending appeal. But its potentially sweeping consequences highlight the high stakes for the former president, who has built his political persona on the image of successes described in his book "The Art of the Deal."

This trial is only the tip of the legal iceberg for the candidate, as he also stares down four criminal trials set to unfold during the 2024 campaign season.

He is scheduled to stand trial on March 4 in Washington, charged by federal prosecutors with allegedly seeking to upend the results of the 2020 election in a concerted effort that led to the violent January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

Trump also faces federal charges for allegedly mishandling top secret documents after he left the White House, and has been charged with racketeering in Georgia on accusations that he tried to overturn the 2020 election results in the southern state.

The states of Colorado and Maine have barred him from standing in their Republican presidential primaries on the grounds that he had engaged in an insurrection on January 6. Trump has challenged both rulings.

A congressional report claimed Thursday that Trump's businesses received at least $7.8 million from foreign governments, including China, during his time in the White House, in violation of a constitutional ban on "foreign emoluments."