{"id":38521,"date":"2022-09-07T12:05:16","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T18:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/new-mexico-banishes-trump-ally-from-office-for-insurrection\/"},"modified":"2022-09-07T18:05:16","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T18:05:16","slug":"new-mexico-banishes-trump-ally-from-office-for-insurrection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/new-mexico-banishes-trump-ally-from-office-for-insurrection\/","title":{"rendered":"New Mexico banishes Trump ally from office for insurrection"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Otero
Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin speaks to reporters as he arrives at federal court in Washington on June 17. A New Mexico state district court judge has disqualified Griffin from holding public office. (Gemunu Amarasinghe\/Associated Press file)<\/span>Gemunu Amarasinghe<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SANTA FE \u2013 A New Mexico state district court judge on Tuesday disqualified county commissioner and Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin from holding public office for engaging in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

The judgment from state District Court Judge Francis Mathew permanently bars Griffin from federal and local public office. It arrived amid a spate of lawsuits aimed at sidelining political candidates and elected officials linked to the Capitol riots.<\/p>\n

Griffin was previously convicted in federal court of a misdemeanor for entering Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, without going inside the building. He was sentenced to 14 days and given credit for time served.<\/p>\n

The new ruling immediately removes Griffin from his position as a commissioner in Otero County in southern New Mexico. He also is barred from serving as a presidential elector.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Griffin aided the insurrection even though he did not personally engage in violence,\u201d Mathew wrote. \u201cBy joining the mob and trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds, Mr. Griffin contributed to delaying Congress\u2019s election-certification proceedings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Griffin said he was notified of his removal from office by Otero County staff members, who prevented him from accessing his work computer and office space at a county building in Alamogordo.<\/p>\n

Griffin, who served as his own legal counsel at a two-day bench trial in August, called the ruling a \u201ctotal disgrace\u201d that disenfranchises his constituents in Otero County.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe actions that are being taken are, I believe, perfect evidence of the tyranny that we\u2019re right now living under,\u201d Griffin said. \u201cThe left continues to speak about democracy being under attack, but is this democracy? Whenever you\u2019re removed from office by the civil courts by the opinion of a liberal judge.\u201d<\/p>\n

A flurry of similar lawsuits around the country are seeking to punish politicians who took part in Jan. 6 under provisions of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution<\/a>, which holds that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution can be barred from office for engaging in insurrection or rebellion.<\/p>\n

The provisions were put in place shortly after the Civil War.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was written to deal with former Confederates … and it\u2019s basically been dormant ever since with one or two odd exceptions,\u201d said Gerard Magliocca, a professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. \u201cThere was nothing else that could be described as an insurrection against the Constitution until Jan. 6.\u201d<\/p>\n

At trial, Griffin invoked free speech guarantees in his defense and argued that removing him from office would cut against the will of the people and set a \u201cdangerous precedent.\u201d Elected in 2018, Griffin withstood a recall vote last year but isn\u2019t running for re-election or other office in November.<\/p>\n

Mathew wrote that Griffin\u2019s arguments \u201cdisregard that the Constitution itself reflects the will of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Griffin \u201coverlooks that his own insurrectionary conduct on January 6 sought to subvert the results of a free and fair election, which would have disenfranchised millions of voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawsuit against Griffin was brought by three plaintiffs in New Mexico with assistance from the Washington-based Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Supportive briefs were filed by the NAACP and progressive watchdog group Common Cause. A federal court declined a recent request to take up the case.<\/p>\n

Tuesday\u2019s judgment is \u201ca historic win for accountability for the January 6th insurrection and the efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power in the United States,\u201d Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics President Noah Bookbinder said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Griffin, a Republican, forged a group of rodeo acquaintances<\/a> in 2019 into the promotional group called Cowboys for Trump that staged horseback parades to spread President Donald Trump\u2019s conservative message about gun rights, immigration controls and abortion restrictions.<\/p>\n

This year, Griffin voted twice as a county commissioner against certifying<\/a> New Mexico\u2019s June 7 primary election, in a standoff over election integrity<\/a> fueled by conspiracy theories about the security of voting equipment in the Republican-dominated county.<\/p>\n

Two other commissioners eventually agreed to certify, but Griffin cast the lone dissenting vote while acknowledging that he had no specific basis for questioning the results of the election \u2013 attributing his decision to \u201cmy gut feeling and my own intuition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Griffin is among a dozen people charged in the Jan. 6 riot that had either held public office or ran for a government leadership post in the 2\u00bd years before the attack. Of those, seven have been convicted of crimes for their participation.<\/p>\n

Unlike Griffin, the members of Congress targeted for disqualification were neither charged nor convicted of crimes associated with the Capitol riot.<\/p>\n

In Georgia, a federal judge allowed a 14th Amendment challenge against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green to advance, but a state administrative law judge found there wasn\u2019t sufficient evidence to back voters\u2019 claims that she had engaged in insurrection, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Greene was qualified to run.<\/p>\n

Greene won her primary, and the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the decision last week to leave her on the ballot. The federal appeal is pending.<\/p>\n

In North Carolina, a federal judge blocked the state elections board from formally examining whether U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who spoke at the rally that preceded the riot, should remain on the state\u2019s May 17 primary ballot.<\/p>\n

Cawthorn narrowly lost that election, and later in May a federal appeals court reversed the lower court decision. The panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the trial judge got it wrong when he ruled that an 1872 law that removed office-holding disqualifications from most ex-Confederates also exempted current members of Congress like Cawthorn. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed as moot because Cawthorn isn\u2019t on the November ballot.<\/p>\n

Arizona state courts have kept U.S. Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs and a state legislator on the ballot amid efforts to disqualify them. A judge agreed in April with the lawmakers that Congress created no enforcement mechanism for the 14th Amendment, barring a criminal conviction.<\/p>\n

Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, Mark Sherman in Washington and Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

County Commissioner Couy Griffin speaks to reporters as he arrives at federal court in Washington on June 17. A New Mexico state district court judge has disqualified Griffin from holding public office. (Gemunu Amarasinghe\/Associated Press file)Gemunu Amarasinghe SANTA FE \u2013 A New Mexico state district court judge on Tuesday disqualified county commissioner and Cowboys […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[815,138],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-38521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-associated-press-new-mexico","tag-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38521"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=38521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}