➡ The podcast discussion highlights the political controversy in Colorado, where Dave Williams, the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, suggests a left-wing group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), funded by George Soros, strategically filed a lawsuit in the Colorado court system use to prevent Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s electoral ballot, alleging a violation of the 14th Amendment. Williams further criticizes the majority of Colorado Supreme Court justices, who are Democrat-appointed and went to Ivy League schools, for their decision to remove Trump from the ballot, which he argues undermines the democratic process.
➡ The discussion delves into the topic of a court ruling on Donald Trump’s candidacy in light of allegations of insurrection and the applicability of the 14th Amendment. The speaker asserts the Colorado GOP’s right to nominate their preferred candidate, while the court’s decision, which didn’t specifically address the main issue, led to an appeal to the US Supreme Court. Further complications include the potential non-counting of Trump’s votes and a possible switch from a presidential primary system to a caucus system. Amid these challenges, it’s indicated that the Colorado GOP’s fight continues, mostly through funding from individual donors.
➡ The speaker emphasizes the importance of preserving the right to vote for whomever an individual chooses, amidst concerns over potentially losing that right. Through donations, the speaker hopes to combat organizations that they believe are threatening this fundamental principle and potentially heading the country towards an era reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is on Watch. Welcome to on Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch podcast, where we go behind the headlines to report on stories the mainstream state controlled media doesn’t want you to know about, where we try to recover some lost history and where we try to explain the inexplicable. Today we are joined by the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, Dave Williams. Dave Williams, welcome to on Watch.

Yes, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. So the big question, what in the world is going on in Colorado with regard to President Trump and the ballot and the crazed government lawyers wearing black gowns known as your Colorado Supreme Court? What is going on? I couldn’t begin to really answer the question. I think the best excuse that has been given so far is that there’s some sort of rocky mountain high that we’re dealing with in our state.

But I think the truth is a little bit more sinister than it is funny. Ultimately, what we think happened here was that a dark money, liberal, left wing group shopped for the right court venue to have this case heard. What’s the group? Let’s name names. Sure. The group is primarily, it’s a George Soros funded backed group. Its name is Crew. I believe it’s citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington.

Judicial Watch has a long and storied career with regard to crew. Crew was created by a guy named Norm Eisen, and again, Soros money was involved. Norm Eisen, you’ll be amused to learn, was Obama’s ethics czar. And the very same Norm Eisen met with judicial watch officials, myself and my two colleagues, Paul orphanides and Tom Fitton, way back in the Obama administration and essentially offered us a bribe.

They said that if we would drop a lawsuit that we had planned to file to obtain records of White House visitor logs, that they would hold the big White House press conference and announce how wonderful judicial watch was. You can imagine how far that flew. Right? So we have a long track record with Normizen, the folks at citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington, crew, and they are, they’re democratic party operatives masquerading as some sort of good government group.

They’re not. They do as they’re told, and they take money from open society foundations. But those are the guys who have gone into court and created all the turmoil and all the election interference that you’re having to deal with. Is that a fair summary? I think it’s the only explanation. It’s the only way to characterize what’s going on here. Fact is that we’ve had a bunch of folks that are very desperate to protect Joe Biden and make sure that he wins reelection.

So, hooker by crook, they’re engaging in this extraordinary lawfare scheme to interfere with the election and ensure that the competition is eliminated. The legal claim is that President Trump violated the 14th Amendment and that disqualifies him. That’s the essence of their claim, correct? Yeah, but it’s a ridiculous claim, especially when you understand that Donald Trump has neither been charged nor convicted of insurrection. And if you don’t believe me on how bogus the claim is, just look at the fact that the chief prosecutor, Jack Smith, had the opportunity to bring those charges, chose not to, and now it’s somehow being used as a basis to remove Donald Trump from the Colorado ballot and consequently, the main ballot.

These are dangerous times. This is a constitutional crisis in the making, I think, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Civil War. We don’t have a country if we don’t have free and fair elections. And you can’t have free and fair elections if you don’t have the ability to vote for the candidate of your choosing. The last time the Democratic Party ran around trying to remove someone from the presidential ballot, it was.

I mean, literally. That is true. I’m not being facetious. And so the Democrats were frantic to remove Abraham Lincoln from the ballot in the election of 1860. They were successful in doing so. Lincoln did not appear on any of the ballots in states south of the Mason Dixon line, which, frankly, contributed to, really, the civil war, because what ended up becoming the confederacy said, well, he’s not our president.

He wasn’t even on the ballot. We didn’t vote for him. And that is what the democratic party from 1860 is in parallel with the current democratic party. They seek to remove people from ballots so that people can’t even vote for them if they wanted to. It’s insanely divisive, and I’m not overstating it. This is the kind of thing that results in real civil unrests and disenfranchisement. Yeah, I’ll take it a step further and say the only political group in the nation that really knows about insurrections are the Democrats.

They’re the ones that incited a civil war against the Union. Correct. So it’s not Donald Trump, it’s not the republican party. The people that are really attacking elections and our free democratic process with this republic are the Democrats. The fact that four unelected judges who were appointed by our opposition party, me being the Republicans, right. The fact that they could override the will of the republican party and override the will of millions of voters and say, you can’t vote for Donald Trump, I think, demonstrates how far left and crazy the Democrats have become.

And we have to do whatever we can to stop them. So all seven of those supreme court, the Colorado Supreme Court justices, all seven are Democrat appointed. Is that why. That’s why I suggested earlier that crew knew what they were doing by bringing the lawsuit to Colorado. The threshold for getting a hearing was very low under our election code. That’s why they opposed the change of venue into the federal court system.

And they even admitted as much that they don’t have standing at the federal level, which is why they wanted it back in the Colorado court system. And they knew that judges have been appointed predominantly by Democrat governors. So the four that led the opinion in the four three split, the four in the majority, obviously, are hard over leftist political operatives. The three in the minority. Did any of the three in the minority express any sort of reservation or point to the gravity of what was being done? Was there any conscience at all sort of expressed or in some way demonstrated that? Hey, wait a minute.

What are we doing? Let’s hold on a second. Yeah. Well, we certainly think so. If you read their dissents, they really made a big case for due process. How can we, in good conscience, in essence, throw the leading Republican contender off the ballot when he’s neither been convicted nor charged? And there is a mechanism. Right? There is a legal charge. A federal prosecutor could come and charge Donald Trump with insurrection and go through the process of obtaining a conviction, but they didn’t do that.

That’s the only mechanism by which you could even remotely disqualify someone under the 14th Amendment, section three. And they talked about that. And I think it was a reasoned dissent. And we hope that the United States Supreme Court will certainly look at those dissents and make the case. One thing that your audience should know is that the four justices that voted to remove Donald Trump all went to Ivy League schools, while the three justices who voted against removing him from the ballot, they all went to public institutions.

So just keep that in mind. There’s something rotten in our Ivy League institutions. Yeah. And that should be highlighted by the breaking news as we’re recording this show that the president of Harvard, doctor, and I use the phrase very loosely, based on our credentials, Dr. Gay, is resigning as president of Harvard. So, yeah, there’s something about the Ivy League that it’s sort of a fever swamp mentality, where the thinking they’re educated beyond their intellect.

That’s part of the problem. Let’s get to the position of. So the 19 December, these government attorneys wearing black robes, who are really political operatives in the case of Colorado, they come out with a decision and they knock Trump off the ballot. You’ve got a responsibility. You’re the chairman of the party in the state. One would argue that you’re the one who should be deciding what does or doesn’t happen in your party.

I mean, normally states look at political parties as sort of as clubs, right? You’re a group of people who self identify, who have a charter or a constitution. You organize, you run your set of rules, you police yourselves. You appoint and dismiss people. You’re your own organization. So when it comes to the operations and activities of the Republican Party of Colorado, arguably, you’re the guy who has the biggest interest in what’s going on.

So they make this decision. Now, what do you do? Well, I immediately tell our attorneys that we’re going to file an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Luckily, early on, when this was at the district court level, we intervened as a party to the case, and we felt that that was necessary to do that to protect our members’interests in nominating who they feel is appropriate. And that very well looks like it’s going to be Donald Trump.

But the fact remains is that we have First Amendment rights, specifically the freedom of association, to associate with whoever we want and nominate whoever we want. Right. And I’ve stated this from the very beginning, and in a lot of ways, this is bigger than Donald Trump. If they can do this to the 45th president of the United States, they can do this to any republican candidate. That is correct.

And it’s within our best interest to maintain our ability to vote for whoever we think best represents our party. And so we were granted that intervention, and we presented evidence and made arguments to the court as to why it was important that the political party be the ultimate arbiter of who is a qualified, bona fide candidate for a republican nominating contest. The court disagreed, but nonetheless, that’s what we argued.

I was going to say that would be the key thing, is, at least in my opinion, what were the court’s findings? Did they accept what you said, at least in whole or in part? Did they reject it completely? What was the outcome of that particular piece of litigation? Well, ultimately, I think the court sort of danced around the issue, then really get to it. But during the course of testimony and the hearing itself, we teased out this line of thought and we had the secretary of state’s office more or less admitting that their function was more or less ministerial.

Right. They’re not the ones to be deciding who’s a proper Republican or a Democrat. Right. It’s up to the major political parties to decide the qualifications of any candidate that comes our way. The court more or less decided that district court decided that Donald Trump did engage in insurrection and that the 14th Amendment, section three did not apply in this instance because Donald Trump was not an officer under the United States.

That’s referencing the 14th Amendment. So they really didn’t touch on the issue. Supreme Court also didn’t really touch on the issue. Colorado Supreme Court really didn’t touch on that issue. But it’s something that we’re going to force that issue, and that’s one of the three questions that we submitted to the United States Supreme Court. We wanted them to decide, does the 14th Amendment apply to a president? Section three is the 14th Amendment.

Section three is itself executing, which we don’t believe it is. And then number three, doesn’t the political party, the Republican Party, have a right to nominate who we feel we should nominate? And the Colorado decision, isn’t that a violation of our First Amendment freedom of association rights? Those are great questions. Critical, crucial, crucial questions to have asked. Are there any internal Colorado time limits, restrictions, issues that have to be addressed? Because if the supremes don’t act or don’t decide, then you pass some magic date and nothing can happen anyway.

Is there some other mechanism that these kind of neo marxist operatives are relying on to nullify or to knock out Trump, regardless of what a court decides? Right. Well, this is sort of uncharted territory that we’re wading into, obviously. But there’s a few things that we do know and that are playing into how we operate and conduct ourselves as the appeal moves forward. First off, the Colorado Supreme Court put a deadline in place that if any party appealed by January 4, they’ll go ahead and stay their ruling and allow Trump to be printed onto the ballot.

We did that last week. We appealed, and so that took care of the issue. What was very interesting is we got our appeal in before Trump’s team. We were very proud that we were able to get ours in quicker than any. He has one or two other things to think about. He does. He’s got a lot of lawfare. He’s battling. So I can appreciate our ability to get it in quicker.

But when we got it in, that stayed the ruling. So he’ll be printed on the ballot and of course, the secretary of state, who’s a hyperpartisan hack. The Democrats reluctantly and begrudgingly informed the state that she had to do that. However, what we anticipate now is that even though he might be printed on the ballot, that doesn’t actually mean any votes would be counted for him. Because Jenna Griswold really wants to remove Donald Trump from the ballot because she believes he is an insurrectionist.

So what we believe she’s going to do is sort of segment out votes if the Supreme Court doesn’t act, right. So if the Supreme Court doesn’t act quickly, then we expect the secretary of state to segment out those votes and not count them until there’s some sort of definitive ruling from the Supreme Court. Your secretary of state, it sounds like someone should conduct research to see if she has any old parking tickets or something, some impeachable offense that would remove her from office based on gross violation of Denver parking statutes or some other thing, that she should receive the same level of scrutiny that she wishes to impose on others.

We’re definitely exploring our options to. There might be a library fine, she might have had a late book, and that would be an impeachable offense. We’re exploring our options for political accountability on her part, but we appreciate the work that you guys did to sue her over our dirty voter roles. Indeed. We’re very proud of how we’ve tried to clean up Colorado’s voting roles. We need it because, look, she is not a fair election official.

She is a died in the wool Democrat leftist who is going to use her position to always favor and tip the scales for democrats. Right? So we’re going to do whatever we can to hold her accountable. But with that said, if the Supreme Court doesn’t act quickly, then that’s a very real threat. Just because he’s on the ballot doesn’t mean that we’ve ultimately succeeded, be able to make sure those votes are counted.

The other problem we have is that the party has to send national delegates to the national convention, and we do not want to involve ourselves in a rigged primary election that doesn’t have Donald Trump on the ballot or one that doesn’t count his votes. So if we don’t hear from the Colorado Supreme Court very quickly, then we have to prepare for the potential of pivoting from a presidential primary system to a caucus system so that we can nominate delegates who will then go on and vote for Donald Trump, should they choose to do so.

Yeah, you’ve got your homework to do. You’ve got to have alternatives and options available to you to react to whatever nonsense gets thrown at you. Right. And none of this is free. Right. We don’t have George Soros funded backers who are helping us to undermine democracy. We’re beholden at the mercy of our individual donors, which has been great. We’ve seen a lot of people step up around the country to help us fight this lawfare in court and out of court, and also potentially prepare for caucus.

And if any of your viewers want to help, we need it. Come to our website at cologop. org. Again, that’s colo gop. org. And chip in and pitch in. And at the very least, keep informed, because we’re on the forefront of this battle. We’re on the front lines defending your right to vote for Donald Trump. But we said this in our briefings early on and certainly in our appeal to the United States Supreme Court, that if they get away with it here, you’re going to see a domino effect across the country where other radical secretaries of state or even other litigation comes through to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.

Yeah, I mean, there’s also sort of an irony here, is that every time one of these lunatic, kind of maniac operations is launched and it gets any kind of traction whatsoever, whether it’s your supreme Court or whether it’s Jack Smith and his weird obsessive compulsive conspiracy theories that he’s weaving, whenever people learn about it, there’s actually a boomerang effect. And there’s a whole bunch of people who are so aggravated and annoyed and frustrated at what clearly is such an insanely biased effort to rig the system, to have selective prosecutions, to demonize a political opponent, to go through these sort of weird soviet show trials, where first they announce the conviction, and then they worry about what they’re going to do afterwards.

It actually makes people more motivated to be supportive and to get involved. And that’s really what we can hope for, is that every time one of these crazy things occurs, people realize just how fanatically, insanely obsessed the left is in going after President Trump, and that they’ll do virtually anything. And I’m going to start to strike the word virtually that they will do anything to try to eliminate him as a political, you know, we heard very reckless language and we’ve seen really crazy actions.

So where’s the limit? Where’s the end of this? I don’t know, but there’s a whole lot of people that are motivated because they see just how severe and how nuts it is. So it makes them get energized and want to jump in and fight. Yeah, absolutely. And I say the word fight advisedly. I don’t mean that literally. Peacefully and patriotically. That’s right. Exactly. I think that’s the best thing.

The silver lining, if you will, that’s come out of this is the exposure. Now the whole world gets to see the Democrats for who they truly are. Right? They’re not people that want to protect the notion of one man, one vote. They’re not people that believes in free and fair elections. They will maintain power through whatever means necessary to include removing political competitors that they’re afraid are going to win.

And that’s why we need people to get involved. If all of your viewers, the millions of people who are viewing this, if they were to just pitch in $20 to our efforts, we would have all the resources we would need to combat crew and their George Soros backed organization. And that’s what we need in order to win. We’re trying to not only fight for Donald Trump’s ability to run, but more importantly, your ability as a voter to vote for him or even against him.

Let’s say you don’t even want to support Donald Trump. You have a right to vote against him just as much as you would to vote for him. And that’s, I think, what everyone needs to understand, regardless of who you support in the presidential election, is that our fundamental right to vote for who we choose is at stake here. If they get away with it, then we’re never going to be able to go back to what we used to have.

The underpinning of this country is self governance. We get to choose. But if you have government employees, whether they be elected or appointed, or bureaucrats deciding who the approved candidates are, then look out, we’re about to head into a soviet era time for our country. You are exactly correct. And you’re not exaggerating. Not one syllable of what you said is exaggeration or political hyperbole. Not a thing. You are exactly describing the circumstances that not just you face in Colorado, but in really every state of union, but in particular where there’s other challenges being made on these same bizarre 14th amendment grounds.

What is next? You’ve got a calendar you’re looking at and you’re figuring out, okay, well, we’re looking for a decision on this or for a filing to be made on that, or you’ve got a progression laid out in front of you. What are you worried about, and what does the american public need to know over the next week, two weeks, month, what’s the lineup? Yeah, you bet. I think the thing that we’re most concerned about is not having oral arguments heard quickly.

We need to get some sort of final determination by the United States Supreme Court, preferably in January this month, if not, maybe early February. Absent that, then we’re going to run into some very challenging circumstances again. I have to send national delegates to Milwaukee for our July convention. And currently, as it’s written right now, we use the presidential preference primary on Super Tuesday to determine delegate allocations. If Donald Trump’s not allowed to be on that ballot or votes are not to be counted, then I have to pivot into a caucus situation so that we can allow him to compete.

But that’s not cheap. And that’s why I’m encouraging your voters to visit our website at co l o gop. org to help us fight the lawfare, but also potentially fund a caucus so that President Trump, we can still nominate him in Milwaukee with our delegates. The good news is that the opposition, the petitioners crew, has agreed with us that they want the Supreme Court to hear this and decide it by the first week of February, I believe.

And they’ve submitted that briefing to the Supreme Court. So right now, we’re just in a holding pattern waiting for SCOTUS to grant us cert and then tell us when we can present our case to them, hopefully this month. Dave, thank you very much for giving us a good summary and wrap up and what we’re looking forward to ahead. Once again, remind everyone, where can they go on a website or how can they follow on social media to keep up to speed with what’s going on? The latest information from you.

You bet. Visit our website at cologop. org. Again, that’s colop. org. You’re going to see a big, beautiful picture of Donald Trump’s mug shot with a donation link that you can chip in and help us with. But we’re also posting information about what’s going on there. Or you can follow us on Twitter. Now. X at C-O-L-O-G-O-P. Again, that’s at symbol Cologop. And we’ll keep you up to date on our efforts as we protect your right to vote for Donald Trump.

Dave Williams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I’m Chris Farrell on watch. .