At a small rural Missouri high school, two English teachers shared a secret: Both were posting adult content on OnlyFans, the subscription-based website known for sexually explicit content.

The site and others like it provide an opportunity for those willing to dabble in pornography to earn extra money — sometimes lots of it. The money is handy, especially in relatively low-paying fields like teaching, and many post the content anonymously while trying to maintain their day jobs.

But some outed teachers, as well as people in other prominent fields such as law, have lost their jobs, raising questions about personal freedoms and how far employers can go to avoid stigma related to their employees’ after-hour activities.

At St. Clair High School southwest of St. Louis, it all came crashing down this fall for 28-year-old Brianna Coppage and 31-year-old Megan Gaither.

“You’re tainted and seen as a liability,” Gaither lamented on Facebook after she was suspended. Coppage resigned.

The industry has seen a boom since the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is now believed 2 million to 3 million people produce content for subscriptions sites such as OnlyFans, Just for Fans and Clips4Sale, said Mike Stabile, spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult entertainment industry.

“I think that there was a time prior to the pandemic where the idea that someone might become a porn star was akin to saying that someone might be abducted by aliens,” Stabile said. “I think that what the pandemic and the sort of explosion of fan content showed was that a lot of people were open to doing it.”

It frequently proves risky, though. A recent report from the trade association found 3 in 5 adult entertainment performers have experienced employment discrimination. The report, based on a survey of more than 600 people in the industry, said 64% of adult creators have no other significant source of income, while there were no details on the occupations of those who did.

In St. Clair, Coppage was the first to be outed after someone posted a link to her OnlyFans account on a community Facebook group. Superintendent Kyle Kruse said Coppage was not asked to resign, but she did anyway.

“I do not regret joining OnlyFans,” Coppage told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in September. “I know it can be taboo, or some people may believe that it is shameful, but I don’t think sex work has to be shameful. I do just wish things just happened in a different way.”

Gaither, who also coached cheerleading, said she used her account to pay off student loans. She also was outed, although she wrote that she had an alias and did not show her face.

Neither teacher responded to phone or email messages from The Associated Press seeking comment. But both women told other news outlets that their OnlyFans earnings soared from the publicity.

The district said little, but parents and even some students voiced concerns.

“As a society, if we’ve come to it to think that it’s OK for children to be seeing their teacher having sex, that’s outrageous,” said Kurt Moritz, the father of a 7-year-old boy in the district. “We shouldn’t be giving children an extra reason to fantasize over their teachers.”

Moritz and a former student said they were particularly alarmed when Coppage did a YouTube interview with an adult content creator and said she would be willing to film with former students. Moritz said the remark went too far, and 17-year-old Claire Howard, who moved out of the district midway through last school-year, agreed.

“That’s something that shouldn’t be sexualized,” Howard said.

Whether fired adult content creators have a legal recourse is unclear. Employers have wide latitude to terminate employees. The question is whether firing people moonlighting in the adult entertainment industry has a disproportionate effect on women and LGBTQ+ people, said attorney Derek Demeri, an employment law expert in New Jersey.

Both groups are protected, and data from the Free Speech Coalition shows they are the ones who overwhelming produce adult content, he noted.

“If you have a policy that on its face is not about discrimination but ends up having a disparate impact on a protected community, now you’re crossing into territory that may be unlawful,” Demeri said, adding that this applies even in cases where the day job involves working with children.

Attorney Gregory Locke, who was fired in March as a New York City administrative law judge after city officials learned about his OnlyFans account, was contacted by a handful of adult content creators who were terminated from their day jobs. He hasn’t yet sued but said he agrees with Demeri’s legal reasoning.

Locke’s termination followed an online spat over drag queen story hours in which he used a profane remark in response to a councilmember who opposed the events. Locke, who is gay, said people need to stop treating sex work like such a big problem.

“We’re a gig economy now and millennials have more student debt than we know what to do with,” he said. “There’s all sorts of reasons why people would reach out for outside income like sex work, like OnlyFans.”

At least one lawsuit has been filed in a similar situation. Victoria Triece sued Orange County Public Schools in January, alleging she was banned from volunteering at her son’s Florida elementary school because she posts on OnlyFans.

“When you start getting the moral police involved in it, where does it stop? At what point does the school have the right to intervene in one’s private life?” asked her attorney, Mark NeJame.

In South Bend, Indiana, 42-year-old Sarah Seales said she was fired last year from her job teaching science to elementary school children through a Department of Defense youth program called STARBASE after she began posting on OnlyFans to make more money to support her twins.

A Department of Defense spokesperson said it was inappropriate to comment on matters of pending litigation.

Attorney Mark Nicholson, who specializes in revenge porn cases, interviewed Seales and hired her to work on his firm’s podcast. They ultimately decided against suing the blogger who drew attention to Seales’ side gig, he said.

“If we pay our teachers as much as we pay athletes,” Nicholson said, “maybe she wouldn’t have had to open up an OnlyFans.”

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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas. Associated Press writer Jim Salter contributed from O’Fallon, Missouri.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for two Georgia election workers played audio recordings in a Washington courtroom Monday of graphic and racist threats the two women received after Rudy Giuliani falsely accused them of fraud while pushing Donald Trump’s baseless claims after the 2020 election.

The recordings were part of the opening statements in a federal case that will determine how much Giuliani might have to pay the women.

The former New York City mayor has already been found liable in the defamation lawsuit brought by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who endured threats and harassment after they became the target of a conspiracy theory spread by Trump and his allies. The only issue to be determined at the trial is the amount of damages, if any, Giuliani must pay.

The women’s lawyers estimated that reputational damages could reach $47 million, and suggested emotional and punitive damages on top of that could be “tens of millions.”

Giuliani’s lawyer said any award should be much less.

The recordings played by the lawyers Monday included threats accusing the women of treason and threatening to hang them.

The women got hundreds of similar calls, text messages and emails, said attorney Von DuBose. People also showed up at Freeman’s home to pound on her door and at her mother’s house to make “citizen’s arrests,” DuBose said.

“Mr. Giuliani and his co-conspirators stole the lives Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman by destroying their names,” DuBose said.

Freeman and Moss’s lawyers also played recordings of Giuliani falsely accusing them of sneaking in ballots in suitcases, counting ballots multiple times and tampering with voting machines.

“None of that – none of that – was true,” DuBose said.

Trump also repeated the conspiracy theories through his social media accounts, something attorney Michael Gottlieb called “the most powerful amplifier on earth.”

The then-president also assailed Freeman and Moss in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, around the same time people with flags and bullhorns came to Freeman’s home. She wasn’t there, however, because she had fled after the FBI had told her it wasn’t safe. She eventually had to sell her house of 20 years, DuBose said.

Gottlieb asked the jury to award substantial damages to send a message that “In the United States of America, behavior like Rudy Giuliani’s is not the inevitable result of politics. It is not acceptable and it will not be tolerated.”

Giuliani’s attorney, Joseph Sibley, said Freeman and Moss are “good people” who didn’t deserve the treatment they received. But he argued there was little evidence Giuliani was directly responsible for the threats and harassment directed their way, and the former mayor never encouraged it.

“This is something other people did independent of Mr. Giuliani,” Sibley said. He argued that the amount of money they want in damages is the “civil equivalent of the death penalty.”

He said he would ask the jury to award an amount they believe is fair, but at a much lower level.

Giuliani did not speak to reporters as he entered Washington’s federal courthouse — the same building where Trump is to stand trial in March on criminal charges accusing the former president of scheming to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden.

Giuliani is expected to take the witness stand in his own case, his lawyer said Monday, raising questions about whether his testimony could also put him in jeopardy in a separate criminal case in Georgia that accuses Trump, Giuliani and others of trying to illegally overturn the results of the election in the state.

The legal and financial woes are mounting for Giuliani, who was celebrated as “America’s mayor” in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack and became one of the most ardent promoters of Trump’s election lies.

In the Georgia criminal case, Giuliani is accused of making false statements to lawmakers during hearings in December 2020. While showing a surveillance video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where ballots were counted in the days after the election, Giuliani said election workers committed election fraud. Specifically, he said, Freeman and Moss were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” and it was obvious they were “engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.”

The claims about the election workers were quickly debunked by Georgia officials, who found no improper counting of ballots.

Giuliani conceded in July that he made public comments falsely claiming Freeman and Moss committed fraud while counting ballots. But Giuliani argued that the statements were protected by the First Amendment.

Giuliani has pleaded not guilty in the criminal case and maintains he had every right to raise questions about what he believed to be election fraud.

He was also sued in September by a former lawyer who alleged Giuliani only paid a fraction of roughly $1.6 million in legal fees stemming from investigations into his efforts to keep Trump in the White House. And the judge overseeing the election workers’ lawsuit has already ordered Giuliani and his business entities to pay tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees.

Overseeing the defamation case is District Judge Beryl Howell, who is well-versed in handling matters related to Trump, having served as chief judge of Washington’s federal court for the entirety of Trump’s presidency.

Howell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, asked prospective jurors Monday was: “Have you ever used the phrase ‘Lets Go Brandon?’” The phrase is used in right-wing circles to insult Biden.

Moss had worked for the Fulton County elections department since 2012 and supervised the absentee ballot operation during the 2020 election. Freeman was a temporary election worker, verifying signatures on absentee ballots and preparing them to be counted and processed.

In emotional testimony before the U.S. House Committee that investigated the U.S. Capitol attack, Moss recounted receiving threatening and racist messages.

In an August decision holding Giuliani liable in the case, Howell said the Trump adviser gave “only lip service” to complying with his legal obligations and had failed to turn over information requested by the mother and daughter. The judge in October said that Giuliani had flagrantly disregarded an order to provide documents concerning his personal and business assets. She said that jurors deciding the amount of damages would be told they must infer that Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide financial documents in the hopes of “artificially deflating his net worth.”

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Price reported from New York. AP Video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Washington and AP reporters Eric Tucker in Washington, Kate Brumback in Atlanta and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Fire alarms blared in the background of 911 calls that police released Friday, amplifying the terrified voices of students and faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as they hid inside locked offices and under desks while a gunman fired shots outside, killing three professors.

“Someone’s shooting. Please hurry,” said one woman caller, her voice cracking with fear as she described the shots as sounding like they were next door. “I really want to go home.”

The gunman, 67-year-old Anthony Polito, walked into UNLV’s business school around lunchtime Wednesday and fired shots as he roamed the top three floors, where faculty offices are located, police said. Along with the three people who were killed, a 38-year-old visiting professor was wounded and hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.

After police killed Polito in a shootout, he was found to be carrying nine magazines for a 9 mm handgun he’d legally purchased last year and a list of targets at the school — although none of those shot was on that list, police said.

University President Keith Whitfield said Friday that after this week’s shooting, students and students and faculty will not return to campus this year and final exams next week have been canceled.

“Given the physical and emotional trauma that the university community has endured, and because of the impact to campus facilities, we have decided that faculty and staff should continue to work remotely through the end of the calendar year,” Whitfield said in a letter to students and staff.

The attack at UNLV terrified a city that experienced the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history in October 2017, when a gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 after opening fire from the window of a high-rise suite at Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip, just miles from the UNLV campus.

Among the first to call 911 was a graduate student, who told an operator he was locked in his office on the fourth floor and had seen an unfamiliar man walk by before the shooting started.

“A lot of shots and then screaming,” he said, describing what he was hearing. He estimated about six shots.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden, who was visiting Las Vegas on Friday, was scheduled to meet with with Whitfield and other local leaders “to personally share his condolences for those they have lost and reaffirm our support for local law enforcement, UNLV, and the broader community in the wake of this tragedy.”

Police still had no motive for Wednesday’s attack but said the shooter, who was a career college professor, had been denied a job at various Nevada colleges and universities before the shooting and appeared to be struggling financially.

Polito arrived at UNLV about 15 minutes before the shooting in a 2007 Lexus that he parked in a lot south of the business school, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said.

Polito got out of the car, placed loaded magazines in his waistband and then entered the business school at 11:33 a.m. The first reports of gunfire came at 11:45 a.m., McMahill said.

University and city police swarmed the building. UNLV police Chief Adam Garcia has said the first university officer arrived at the business school within 78 seconds of the gunfire report.

Near the main entrance, UNLV officers saw Polito leaving the building, and a shootout erupted. Police killed the shooter about 10 minutes after his rampage began.

Two of the victims were business school professors Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang. The third victim, Naoko Takemaru, was an associate professor of Japanese studies whose office was on the third floor of the business building.

Navarro-Velez, 39, was an accounting professor who held a Ph.D. and was currently focused on research in cybersecurity disclosures and data analytics, according to the school’s website.

Chang, 64, was an associate professor in the business school’s Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology department and had been teaching at UNLV since 2001. He earned a Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of Pittsburgh.

Takemaru, 69, oversaw the university’s Japanese studies program and taught upper-division courses on Japanese language, culture and business.

It’s unclear how many shots Polito fired, but the sheriff said Polito brought more than 150 rounds of ammunition to the campus.

Given that sheer number of rounds, McMahill said he believed Polito may have been intending to open fire on the student union next to the business school, where students were hanging out, eating and playing games.

Polito also was carrying what McMahill described as a “target list” of named faculty members both from UNLV and from East Carolina University in North Carolina, where Polito taught at the business school from 2001 to 2017.

He resigned from East Carolina as a tenured associate professor, according to a statement Thursday from the university.

Polito’s employment record at East Carolina did not include any disciplinary actions or red flags, according to a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation. The official was not authorized to release the information publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

The gunman had been living in the Las Vegas area since at least 2018.

Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson said Polito had an adjunct faculty contract and taught two courses in the school’s the Master of Business Administration program from October 2018 to June 2022. He left when the program was discontinued, said Jason Roth, a spokesperson for the school.

One of Polito’s former students at East Carolina, Paul Whittington, said Polito often talked about his regular trips to Las Vegas. He also seemed obsessive about anonymous student reviews at the end of each semester, Whittington said.

“He always talked about the negative feedback he got,” said Whittington, now 33, who took Polito’s intro to operations management class in 2014. “He didn’t get a lot of it, but there would always be one student every semester, or at least one student every class, that would give a negative review. And he fixated on those.”

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Finley reported from Norfolk, Virginia. Associated Press reporters Michael Balsamo in Washington, Ken Ritter in Las Vegas, Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, Terry Tang and Anita Snow in Phoenix and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Derek Chauvin was stabbed nearly two dozen times in the law library at a federal prison in Arizona. Larry Nassar was knifed repeatedly in his cell at a federal penitentiary in Florida.

The assaults of two notorious, high-profile federal prisoners by fellow inmates in recent months have renewed concerns about whether the chronically understaffed, crisis-plagued federal Bureau of Prisons is capable of keeping people in its custody safe.

In the shadow of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger’s 2018 beating death at a West Virginia federal penitentiary and financier Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 suicide at a Manhattan federal jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, the Bureau of Prisons is again under scrutiny for failing to protect high-profile prisoners from harm.

Chauvin, 47, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020, was hospitalized for a week after he was assaulted Nov. 24 at a medium-security federal prison in Tucson, Arizona — the same complex where an inmate tried to shoot a visitor last year with a contraband gun.

Chauvin’s suspected attacker, an ex-gang leader, told correctional officers he would have killed him if they hadn’t responded when they did, prosecutors said. He was charged last week with attempted murder and has been moved out of Chauvin’s prison to a federal penitentiary next door.

Chauvin’s family is “very concerned about the facility’s capacity to protect Derek from further harm,” his lawyer, Gregory Erickson, said. “They remain unassured that any changes have been made to the faulty procedures that allowed Derek’s attack to occur in the first place.”

Nassar, 60, the ex-U.S. women’s gymnastics team doctor who sexually abused athletes, was treated for a collapsed lung after he was stabbed multiple times in the neck, chest and back on July 9 at a federal penitentiary in Coleman, Florida. His attacker was stopped by other inmates before officers arrived.

The attacks on Chauvin and Nassar, among dozens of other assaults and deaths involving lesser-known federal inmates, are symptoms of larger systemic problems within the Justice Department’s largest agency that put all 158,000 federal prisoners at risk. They include severe staffing shortages, staff-on-inmate abuse, broken surveillance cameras and crumbling infrastructure.

The violence has challenged a perception — repeated by some lawyers and criminal justice experts quoted in the news media when Chauvin was sentenced last year — that federal prisons are far safer than state prisons or local jails. The inmates suspected of attacking Chauvin and Nassar both have violent histories.

After Chauvin’s attack, his mother complained in a since-deleted Facebook post that the Bureau of Prisons was keeping her in the dark on details of the assault and his medical condition — echoing complaints early in the COVID-19 pandemic when families weren’t informed about inmates who were dying from the virus until it was too late. The agency said it gave updates on Chauvin’s health to everyone he asked to be notified.

“Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd was a tragic loss of life and a horrifying reminder of the inequality that pervades our justice system,” said Daniel Landsman, the deputy director of policy at the criminal justice advocacy group FAMM, or Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

“However, no one’s sentence, regardless of their offense, includes being subjected to violence while they’re in prison. The attack on Chauvin is the latest in a long list of incidents that highlight the urgent need for comprehensive independent oversight of our federal Bureau of Prisons,” Landsman said.

An ongoing Associated Press investigation has uncovered deep, previously unreported problems within the Bureau of Prisons, including rampant sexual abuse and other staff criminal conduct, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies, including inmate assaults and suicides.

The Bureau of Prisons, with more than 30,000 employees, 122 prison facilities and an annual budget of about $8 billion, has drawn increased oversight from Congress and scrutiny from government watchdogs in the wake of Bulger and Epstein’s deaths.

A law passed last year requires the Bureau of Prisons to overhaul outdated security systems and replace broken cameras — one of several critical issues that came to light in the wake of Epstein’s suicide. In some instances, however, the agency has been slow to comply, blaming technological challenges.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, meanwhile, has issued a pair of scathing reports citing management failures, flawed policies and widespread incompetence as factors in Bulger’s killing and blaming a “combination of negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures” for Epstein’s suicide.

“The numerous and serious transgressions that occurred in this matter came to light largely because they involved a high-profile inmate,” Horowitz wrote in a June report on Epstein’s suicide. “The fact that serious deficiencies occurred in connection with high-profile inmates like Epstein and Bulger is especially concerning given that the BOP would presumably take particular care in handling the custody and care of such inmates.”

High-profile inmates are labeled in the federal prison system as “Broad Publicity” because of their widespread publicity as a result of their criminal activity or notoriety as public figures. Incidents involving them typically attract far greater media attention and public curiosity than other prison mayhem, but they’re often a sign of larger dysfunction.

In the wake of Epstein’s suicide, officials at a federal jail in Brooklyn took the unusual step of making his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell wear paper clothing and sleep without bedsheets. They woke her up with flashlights every 15 minutes to make sure she was still alive.

But that’s far from the norm. In June, another high-profile inmate, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, was found unresponsive in his cell by correctional officers making rounds after midnight at a federal prison medical center in North Carolina. Kaczynski previously attempted suicide while awaiting trial in 1998 but rejected a psychiatrist’s diagnosis that he was mentally ill.

Responding to Horowitz, Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters wrote that lessons learned from the investigation would be “applied to the broader BOP correctional landscape.” But asked by the AP last week, the agency declined to detail what changes, if any, have been made, saying it does not “discuss specific security practices.”

Peters also promised a sweeping security review after the Tucson gun breach in November 2022, telling the AP that the Bureau of Prisons would assess safety measures and identify lapses at prison camps, potentially providing lessons for tightening protocols throughout the agency. Asked for an update, the agency said it “does not comment on matters related to investigations.”

A spokesperson, Benjamin O’Cone, said the Bureau of Prisons “takes seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintain the safety of correctional employees and the community.”

“As part of that obligation, we review safety protocols and implement corrective actions when identified as necessary in those reviews to ensure that our mission of operating safe, secure, and humane facilities is fulfilled,” O’Cone said.

Chauvin began his incarceration in solitary confinement at a maximum-security Minnesota state prison, sequestered from other inmates and kept in his cell 23 hours a day “largely for his own protection,” his former lawyer wrote in court papers.

He transferred to FCI Tucson in August 2022 after making a deal to simultaneously serve all of his punishment for Floyd’s murder in federal prison — a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights, which was later reduced by seven months, and a 22½-year state sentence for second-degree murder.

Chauvin’s sentencing judge, empathizing with him over his isolation in state prison, expressed optimism that he would fare better with fewer restrictions as a federal inmate.

“While for security reasons and for your protection these conditions may have been necessary, I still feel for you and the difficult days you’ve gone through,” U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson told Chauvin at his July 2022 federal sentencing. “Hopefully, the Bureau of Prisons will be able to improve these conditions substantially.”

Rather than solitary confinement or protective custody, the Bureau of Prisons placed Chauvin in the “dropout yard” — a housing unit for former police officers, ex-gang members, sexual abusers and other high-risk prisoners.

Though generally thought to be safer for such inmates than the general prison population, those units still see occasional flashes of violence, like Nassar’s stabbing in a “dropout yard” unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Coleman, Florida.

Nassar, who was also convicted of possessing images of child sexual abuse, was attacked in his cell after he purportedly made a lewd comment while watching a Wimbledon women’s tennis match on TV. An inmate, identified in prison records as Shane McMillan, stabbed him repeatedly before four other inmates pulled him away.

McMillan was previously convicted of assaulting a federal prison officer in Louisiana in 2006 and attempting to stab another inmate to death at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, in 2011. He remains locked up in Florida and has yet to be charged with attacking Nassar, who was moved to a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Court records did not list a lawyer for him.

In May 2018, Nassar’s lawyers said, he was attacked within hours of being placed in general population at the Arizona federal penitentiary next to Chauvin’s prison. Nassar’s lawyers, who have not shared details of that assault, blamed it on the notoriety of his case and his seven-day televised sentencing.

In contrast, Chauvin’s move to federal prison appeared to start off well. In a brief glimpse of his life as a federal inmate, he appeared by video from FCI Tucson in March — wearing a prison-issued short-sleeve blue button-down shirt — to plead guilty in a Minnesota tax evasion case.

Last month, Chauvin mailed court papers from the prison — complete with his handwritten name and inmate number on the envelope — in a longshot bid to overturn his federal guilty plea. In them, he complained that his ex-lawyer had ignored supposed new evidence of his innocence, but said nothing about how he was being treated behind bars.

Prior to Chauvin’s stabbing, there were no public reports of violence toward him — but he was still at risk.

John Turscak, the former Mexican Mafia gang leader and one-time FBI informant accused of attacking Chauvin, told investigators he thought about stabbing him for a month before seeing an opportunity to strike in the law library around 12:30 p.m. local time on Nov. 24, federal prosecutors said.

Turscak stabbed Chauvin 22 times with an improvised knife, only stopping when correctional officers reached him and used pepper spray to subdue him, prosecutors said. FCI Tucson has struggled with low staffing in the past, but the Bureau of Prisons said nearly every correctional officer position is now filled and staffing wasn’t an issue the day Chauvin was attacked.

Two employees were working voluntary overtime, but none were on mandatory overtime, nor was the prison using augmentation — a practice in which nurses, teachers, cooks and other staff are pulled from other duties to guard inmates, the agency said.

Chauvin’s lawyer said he confirmed to his family that allegations in Turscak’s charging document were accurate, adding that the assailant ambushed him from behind.

Turscak told the FBI that he attacked Chauvin because he is a high-profile inmate for killing Floyd, prosecutors said. Turscak said he chose Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, as a symbolic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement and the Mexican Mafia’s “Black Hand” symbol, prosecutors said.

Turscak, 52, led a faction of the Mexican Mafia in the Los Angeles area in the late 1990s and was due to be released from federal prison in 2026 after serving more than 30 years for racketeering and conspiring to kill a gang rival. Court records did not list a lawyer for him.

Now, after Turscak’s arrest and Chauvin’s return to FCI Tucson, Erickson said he and his client’s family have more questions — and concerns. They are continuing to push for answers on additional measures, if any, that are being taken to protect Chauvin, and will pursue “any avenues available under the law to ensure his continued safety,” Erickson said.

“It remains a mystery how the perpetrator was able to obtain and possess dangerous materials” to fashion a makeshift knife, “and how a guard was unable to reach and apprehend the perpetrator until Derek had been stabbed 22 times,” Erickson said.

“Why was Derek allowed into the law library without a guard in close enough proximity to stop a possible attack? the lawyer said. “His family continues to wonder.”

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Follow Michael Sisak at x.com/mikesisak and Michael Balsamo at x.com/MikeBalsamo1 and send confidential tips by visiting https://www.ap.org/tips/

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Hunter Biden was indicted on nine tax charges in California as a special counsel investigation into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son intensifies against the backdrop of the 2024 election.

The new charges filed Thursday — three felonies and six misdemeanors — are in addition to federal firearms charges in Delaware alleging Hunter Biden broke laws against drug users having guns in 2018. They come after the implosion of a plea deal over the summer that would have spared him jail time, putting the case on track to a possible trial as his father campaigns for reelection.

Hunter Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” special counsel David Weiss said in a statement. The charges are centered on at least $1.4 million in taxes Hunter Biden owed during between 2016 and 2019, a period where he has acknowledged struggling with addiction. The back taxes have since been paid.

If convicted, Hunter Biden, 53, could a maximum of 17 years in prison. The special counsel probe remains open, Weiss said.

In a fiery response, defense attorney Abbe Lowell accused Weiss of “bowing to Republican pressure” in the case.

“Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” Lowell said in a statement.

The White House declined to comment on Thursday’s indictment, referring questions to the Justice Department or Hunter Biden’s personal representatives.

The charging documents filed in California, where he lives, detail spending on drugs, strippers, luxury hotels and exotic cars, “in short, everything but his taxes,” prosecutor Leo Wise wrote.

The indictment comes as congressional Republicans pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, claiming he was engaged in an influence-peddling scheme with his son. The House is expected to vote next week on formally authorizing the inquiry.

No evidence has emerged so far to prove that Joe Biden, in his current or previous office, abused his role or accepted bribes, though questions have arisen about the ethics surrounding the Biden family’s international business.

The separate, long-running criminal investigation into Hunter Biden had been expected to wind down with a plea deal where he would have gotten two years’ probation after pleading guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and avoided prosecution on the gun charge if he stayed out of trouble.

The agreement was pilloried as a “sweetheart deal” by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump. Trump is facing his own criminal cases, including charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, a Democrat.

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, gave credit for the new charges Thursday to two IRS investigators who testified before Congress that the Justice Department had mishandled and “slow walked” the investigation into the president’s son. Justice officials have denied those allegations.

The two IRS employees, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, said the indictment was “a complete vindication of our thorough investigation.”

The new charges against Hunter Biden include filing a false return and tax evasion felonies, as well as misdemeanor failure to file and failure to pay.

The defense signaled that it plans to fight the new charges, likely at least in part relying on immunity provisions from the original plea deal. Defense attorneys have argued those remain in force since that part of the agreement was signed by a prosecutor before the deal was scrapped.

Prosecutors have disagreed, pointing out the documents weren’t signed by a judge and are invalid.

Lowell said he’s also planning to push for dismissal of the gun charges next week, calling them “unprecedented and unconstitutional.”

The three federal gun charges filed in Delaware allege Hunter Biden had lied about his drug use to buy a gun that he kept for 11 days in 2018. Federal law bans gun possession by “habitual drug users,” though the measure is seldom seen as a stand-alone charge and has been called into question by a federal appeals court.

Hunter Biden’s longstanding struggle with substance abuse worsened after the death of his brother Beau Biden in 2015, according to court documents and his memoir “Beautiful Things,” which ends with him getting clean in 2019.

His gross income nevertheless totaled some $7 million between 2016 and 2020, prosecutors said, pointing to his roles on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and a Chinese private equity fund as well as his position at a law firm.

Hunter did eventually file his taxes in 2020, while facing a child support case in Arkansas, and the back taxes were paid by a “third party,” prosecutors have said in court documents.

With the Iowa caucuses rapidly approaching, a shrinking field of Republican White House hopefuls gathered Wednesday in Alabama for the fourth presidential debate.

As usual, former President Donald Trump, who is dominating the GOP primary, didn’t appear. Instead, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie continued their effort to gain a sliver of the spotlight in the race.

Here are some takeaways from the final primary debate of 2023.

The front-runner in the Republican primary has no end of vulnerabilities. He faces 91 criminal charges and just the night before repeatedly refused to rule out abusing power if he returns to office.

But, as has been the pattern, Trump was ignored during much of the debate. There was one great exception in the second hour, when the moderators asked Christie about Trump. The onetime New Jersey governor complained that his three primary rivals have been silent about the threats Trump presents to democracy.

“You want to know why these poll numbers are where they are?” Christie asked. “Because folks like these three people on this stage want to make it seem like his conduct is acceptable.”

Christie then began jousting with DeSantis, who confined his criticism of Trump to the former president’s age and failure to achieve all of his agenda in his first term. “Is he fit to be president or isn’t he?” Christie asked. “Is he fit? Ron, Ron? He’s afraid to answer.”

Ramaswamy accused his rivals of all “licking Donald Trump’s boots,” but then proceeded to argue the Jan. 6,2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol was an “inside job” — hardly distancing himself from the former president and his penchant for lies and misinformation.

Ramaswamy has been particularly adept at pulling fire away from Trump. The 38-year-old political novice and pharmaceutical entrepreneur has specialized in grating, personal attacks that his rivals just can’t bring themselves to ignore.

On Wednesday, he challenged Haley to name three Ukrainian provinces that he claimed his 3-year-old could identify, and Christie, who had tried to launch an attack on Trump to open the debate, exploded.

“All he knows how to do is insult good people who have committed their lives to public service,” Christie said.

Minutes later, Haley took an unusual swing at Trump for failing to go further than simple trade actions against China. But DeSantis jumped in, attacking Haley for her relationship with China. The two Republicans began snapping at each other, leaving Trump unmentioned.

By the end, the moderators asked the candidates which previous president inspired them. No one named Trump.

Haley was under attack from the opening seconds of the debate. And it didn’t let up for almost 20 minutes, a clear reminder that the former United Nations ambassador’s opponents see her as a growing threat in the race.

DeSantis amped up the pressure as he answered the debate’s opening question, which was about his struggling campaign.

“You have other candidates up here, like Nikki Haley, she caves every time the left comes after her,” DeSantis said, casting himself as a fighter.

The Florida governor then seized on Haley’s recent support from Wall Street and at least one major Democratic donor. Ramaswamy soon joined in, highlighting the personal wealth Haley accumulated since leaving the public office.

“That math doesn’t add up,” Ramaswamy charged. “It adds up to the fact you’re corrupt.” Minutes later, Ramaswamy called Haley a fascist.

Haley defended herself aggressively. But as the political adage goes, if you’re explaining, you’re probably losing.

“I love all the attention, fellas, thank you,” she said.

And she drew some applause from the crowd when she pushed back against the criticism of her political donations.

“In terms of these donors that are supporting me, they’re just jealous. They wish they were supporting them,” she said.

Christie has faced questions about why he’s not dropping his struggling campaign and backing Haley, who shares many of his more moderate views. While he’s not showing any sign of leaving soon, he took the opportunity to defend Haley, particularly from Ramaswamy’s heated critiques.

“This is a smart, accomplished woman,” Christie told Ramaswamy during an animated exchange. “You should stop insulting her.”

One candidate was attacked for sitting on a corporate board and being too close to big business. Others fretted about a plot by giant firms to re-engineer the country’s politics — and then one said he wants to gut government regulations to free up business.

This wasn’t a Democratic debate, dominated by that party’s skepticism of corporate titans. The Republican party in the era of Trump is a lot more conflicted about business and industry than in its prior, free-market form.

That was obvious from the first set of questions aimed at Haley, who was asked whether her roles on corporate boards and donations from major companies would sit well with the party’s “working-class voters.”

DeSantis and Ramaswamy continued to hit Haley over that dynamic, even as Haley quipped they were just “jealous” of her donor support. DeSantis also claimed Haley wanted to let in as many immigrants as “the corporations” desired and boasted about how he withdrew $2 billion of Florida public pension money from a hedge fund over its use of environmental, social and corporate governance.

“They want to use economic power to impose a left-wing agenda in this country,” DeSantis said of some corporations’ embrace of ESG, an effort to use progressive principles in investing.

But then Ramaswamy bemoaned the way the government doesn’t fully recognize cryptocurrencies as a real financial instrument, and segued into promising to eliminate three-quarters of the government bureaucrats to cut regulations. That is a routine promise of Ramaswamy’s, and comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to consider a case that could sharply limit how the federal government can regulate industries, a longtime goal of conservative activists who helped assemble a six-judge majority on the high court.

Later, Ramaswamy took yet another turn, arguing there should be strict bans on the back-and-forth between staffers in business and government. “I don’t think that we should want capitalism and democracy to share the same bed anymore,” he said. “It’s time for a clean divorce.”

The GOP’s contradictions over corporations weren’t an explicit subject of the debate, but they were an undercurrent that won’t be resolved for a while.

On immigration, on the economy and on China, the candidates on stage largely agreed. One policy area where there were real differences? Transgender rights.

The issue was barely on the national radar in the last presidential election. But in 2024, it is a centerpiece of the GOP’s increasing focus on cultural issues.

Haley defended her decision, back when she was governor, to decline to support a law that would have limited bathroom use to a person’s gender assigned on their birth certificate.

DeSantis pounced. As Florida governor, he insisted he did more to crack down on transgender rights than anyone on stage.

“I stood up for little girls, you didn’t,” he chided Haley.

DeSantis also offered a fiery argument for laws that block parents from allowing their children to receive transgender-related medical treatment.

Christie pushed back. He also reminded his rivals that conservatives used to believe in less government, not more.

“These jokers in Congress, it takes them three weeks to pick a speaker… and we’re going to put my children’s health in their hands?” the former New Jersey governor said. “As a parent, this is a choice I get to make.”

For the past seven months, the political world has watched a sort of Bizarro primary unfold — a number of Republican politicians have insisted they will become the next president while the last one, Trump, leaves them in the dust.

For those not in the know, Bizarro was a Superman character who came from a world where everything was scrambled. It’s been hard to escape that upside-down feeling as, every month, there’s another debate that Trump skips where no one does anything to change the trajectory of the race.

Wednesday night was an example. The debate was on NewsNation, a little-viewed upstart cable channel. The debate also aired on CW stations — but only in the eastern and central time zones.

Indeed, one big question was whether the debate’s ratings would be surpassed by those of DeSantis’ faceoff with California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, on Fox News last week. The Republican National Committee is expected to soon announce whether it’ll allow further unsanctioned debates. At least one more debate is expected before the Jan. 15 Iowa Caucus.

Perhaps the ultimate Bizarro twist would be if these confrontations mattered in the presidential election. You can never tell when something unexpected might happen in politics. But the time for these debates to matter, if it ever existed, is rapidly running out.

The seven justices peppered both the plaintiffs in the high-profile lawsuit and Trump’s legal team with questions, including if the siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters constituted an insurrection. They also probed the legal ability of the Colorado secretary of state to keep candidates off the ballot, the language of the 14th Amendment itself — which says insurrectionists can’t run for office — as well as whether Colorado can invoke that rule on its own.

The provision at issue in the Civil War-era 14th Amendment was aimed at keeping Confederates away from federal power after the nation reunited. But its language doesn’t explicitly bar insurrectionists from the highest office in the land, prompting the Colorado justices to prod both sides about what that means.

“If it was so important that the president be included, I come back to the question: Why not spell it out?” Justice Carlos A. Samour Jr. asked the petitioners’ lawyers. “Why not include president and vice president in the way they spell out senator or representative?”

The attorneys hoping to keep Trump off Colorado’s ballot had argued that it would be “bizarre” and “counterintuitive” to read the amendment as barring rebels from most federal offices while leaving the presidency open to them.

Trump’s legal team argued the presidency was excluded on purpose, as a unique office. But would that mean, Justice Melissa Hart asked, that Jefferson Davis, the former president of the breakaway Confederacy, could have been elected U.S. president after the Civil War?

“That would be the rule of democracy at work,” replied Scott Gessler, a lead attorney for Trump and a former Colorado secretary of state.

The justices will sift through those answers and others in the weeks to come. They have no timeline to issue their ruling, though Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in January must certify the ballots for the state’s March 5 presidential primaries.

After the hearing, Gessler said he viewed the justices’ close attention to the legal structure of Amendment 14’s Section 3 as “a positive.” That argument is what won for Trump in the lower court. He also didn’t want to read too much into their questioning and posture.

“I think the justices, in one form or another, expressed skepticism of everyone’s answers throughout the whole two hours,” Gessler said. “I don’t think you can really predict a whole lot from it.”

In a statement from the plaintiffs afterward, Lakewood attorney Mario Nicolais said: “Our oral argument today speaks for itself: Donald Trump took an oath to support our Constitution as an officer of the United States, violated that oath when he engaged in insurrection and consequently disqualified himself under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”

The court’s coming ruling could open the case up to a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, especially if the justices disqualify Trump. The Colorado ballot case is among several similar ballot-qualification lawsuits targeting Trump across the country, but so far all have failed.

As it stands, Trump will be on Colorado’s Republican ballot. A Denver District Court judge ruled last month that Trump must be included because the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to presidents — though Judge Sarah B. Wallace also declared in the findings of fact that Trump engaged in insurrection back in January 2021.

That ruling prompted an appeal from both Trump’s legal team and the group of Republican and unaffiliated voters suing to keep him off the ballot.

Trump’s team agreed with Wallace’s reading of the 14th Amendment but asked the state Supreme Court to strike the declaration that he engaged in insurrection.

The petitioners, who are working with the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sought a broader ruling, arguing that an insurrectionist can’t be allowed to seek the Oval Office.

There are similar heavy-hitting cases underway in Minnesota and Michigan, though courts in those states have halted the complaints. Minnesota’s Supreme Court did not rule on the merits but said political parties could nominate whomever they liked — leaving open the possibility of a 14th Amendment challenge before the general election there.

A Michigan court ruled it would be up to Congress to decide if the amendment bars Trump from the ballot there, and that state’s high court declined to expedite its review of the case.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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LAS VEGAS (AP) — The man suspected of fatally shooting three people and wounding another at a Las Vegas university Wednesday was a professor who unsuccessfully sought a job at the school, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press.

The gunman was killed in a shootout with law enforcement, police said. The attack at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas sent shock waves through a city still scarred by the deaths of 60 people in a 2017 mass shooting.

The suspect previously worked at East Carolina University in North Carolina, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information publicly.

Police didn’t immediately identify the gunman, the victims or a possible motive.

Reports of shots fired at about 11:45 a.m. sent police swarming onto the campus while students and professors barricaded themselves inside classrooms and dorm rooms.

Police said the shooting started on the fourth floor of the building that houses UNLV’s Lee Business School. The gunman went to several floors before he was killed in a shootout with two university detectives outside the building, said UNLV Police Chief Adam Garcia.

Authorities gave the all-clear about 40 minutes after the first report of an active shooter.

Professor Kevaney Martin took cover under a desk in her classroom, where another faculty member and three students took shelter with her.

“It was terrifying. I can’t even begin to explain,” Martin said. “I was trying to hold it together for my students, and trying not to cry, but the emotions are something I never want to experience again.”

Martin said she was texting friends and loved ones, hoping to receive word a suspect had been detained. When another professor came to the room and told everyone to evacuate, they joined dozens of others rushing out of the building. Martin had her students pile into her car and drove them off campus.

“Once we got away from UNLV, we parked and sat in silence,” she said. “Nobody said a word. We were in utter shock.”

Students and the community were alerted to the emergency by a university post on X that warned: “This is not a test. RUN-HIDE-FIGHT.”

Matthew Felsenfeld said he and about 12 classmates barricaded their door in a building near the student union.

“It’s the moment you call your parents and tell them you love them,” said Felsenfeld, a 21-year-old journalism student.

Another student, Jordan Eckermann, 25, said he was in his business law class in a second-floor classroom when he heard a loud bang that he thought came from a neighboring music class.

But then a piercing alarm went off, sending students to their feet. Some ran from the room in panic while others heeded their professor’s instructions to stay calm, said Eckermann.

He walked out and locked eyes with a law enforcement officer in a bulletproof vest holding a long gun. Clothing, backpacks and water bottles lay scattered on the floor.

Eckerman said he mouthed to the officer, “Where do I go?”

The officer pointed to an exit.

Minutes later, when he was outside, Eckermann said he heard bursts of gunshots, totaling at least 20 rounds. The air smelled of gun powder. He said he kept walking away from campus, even though he didn’t know where to go.

UNLV’s 332-acre (135-hectare) campus is less than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) east of the Las Vegas Strip.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the 30,000 students were on campus at the time, but Sheriff Kevin McMahill said students had been gathered outside the building to eat and play games. If police hadn’t killed the attacker, “it could have been countless additional lives taken,” he said.

“No student should have to fear pursuing their dreams on a college campus,” the sheriff said.

The shooting occurred just miles from the location of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. In the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre, a gunman opened fire from a high-rise suite at the Mandalay Bay, killing 60 people attending a music festival below and wounding hundreds more.

In response to the campus shootings, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop of all flights coming into Harry Reid International Airport. The university is roughly 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) north of the airport.

Classes were canceled through Friday at the university, and UNLV’s basketball game at the University of Dayton, Ohio, was canceled Wednesday night because of the shootings.

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Associated Press reporters Terry Tang in Phoenix; W.G. Ramirez in Las Vegas, Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

It’s the latest milestone in a lawsuit that alleges Trump engaged in insurrection surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol — and in doing so, disqualified himself from regaining the nation’s highest office under a Civil War-era amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The provision of the 14th Amendment bars anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again.

In November, a district court judge in Denver found Trump did engage in insurrection while also finding that the 14th Amendment restriction did not apply to the presidency the way it would to other federal offices.

Since then, lawyers for both sides as well as outside organizations and state officials across the country have weighed in on how Colorado’s justices should decide the matter. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the early afternoon.

Here’s a guide to the case and what’s at stake.

Why is the Colorado Supreme Court involved?

Denver District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, after a weeklong trial this fall, that Trump can appear on Colorado’s 2024 Republican presidential primary ballot, despite her finding that he participated in an insurrection. This prompted both the petitioners and Trump’s legal team to appeal, though from opposite directions.

The state Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last month.

Who is challenging Trump’s eligibility?

The lawsuit was brought by a group of unaffiliated and Republican Colorado voters who are working with the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The Republican petitioners include Claudine Cmarda, a former Rhode Island congresswoman who now lives in Colorado; Norma Anderson, a former majority leader in both Colorado’s state House and state Senate; and Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer.

Republican-turned-unaffiliated voter Chris Castilian, who served as deputy chief of staff for Colorado’s last GOP governor, Bill Owens, is also involved in the suit. None of the voters involved are current Democrats.

What are the plaintiffs seeking from the higher court?

Wallace’s underlying ruling that Trump engaged in insurrection through his words and actions was seen by critics of the former president as a victory in its own right. But the plaintiffs are now asking the state’s justices to go where Wallace didn’t.

Her overall ruling that the president does not qualify as an officer of the United States — a key phrase in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — would “yield absurd results,” the petitioners argued.

“It would defy logic to prohibit insurrectionists from holding every federal or state office except for the highest and most powerful in the land,” their attorneys wrote in the appeal. The legal team includes former Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson.

Why did Trump appeal a ruling he won?

Trump’s legal team, which includes former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, agrees with Wallace’s ruling that the 14th Amendment shouldn’t apply to Trump. But his appeal argues she committed “multiple grave jurisdictional and legal errors” — including by finding he engaged in insurrection.

Trump’s speech near the White House on Jan. 6 didn’t call for violence, his attorneys argued, and still “the district court found that President Trump’s supposed intent, and the effect of his words upon certain listeners, sufficed to render his speech unprotected under the First Amendment.”

The appeal also questions whether the five-day trial that began in late October was a proper venue for constitutional litigation and the establishment of “new, unprecedented, and unsupported legal standards.”

How have challenges of Trump’s eligibility fared elsewhere?

Similar lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility have been filed in several states, with none succeeding so far. Among other cases with significant backing, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in November that Trump could remain on the ballot there because political parties have discretion over their primary ballots. And a Michigan judge has ruled that Congress should decide if Section 3 applies to Trump.

How will Colorado’s high court consider the case?

The Colorado Supreme Court doesn’t generally overturn a lower court’s findings of facts unless the judge made a clear error, meaning the justices likely will give some deference to Wallace’s finding that Trump did engage in insurrection. Instead, their eyes will focus more closely on how she applied the law and whether the 14th Amendment applies to Trump.

The court has no specific timeline for a ruling, but Secretary of State Jena Griswold must certify the primary ballot in January. That election is set for March 5.

What’s at stake?

In her ruling, Wallace wrote that she took the gravity of the case seriously: “To be clear, part of the Court’s decision is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent” of 14th Amendment’s Section 3.

Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina, called it “significant” that Wallace declared that Trump engaged in insurrection. He is the author of the upcoming book “The Law of Presidential Impeachment” and was the only expert called by both Republicans and Democrats in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

He said recent scholarship is supportive of the petitioners’ arguments that the 14th Amendment should apply to former presidents. But he didn’t have any predictions for the case — except that a ruling in the lawsuit plaintiffs’ favor would make it more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court would get involved, having the final say.

“It’s just speculation when and whether the U.S. Supreme Court will ever hear this case,” Gerhardt said. “But if somebody is being declared ineligible to run for the presidency, that could possibly make this a more pressing matter.”

What outside voices have weighed in?

The case has drawn interest from more than a dozen parties that have filed formal advisory briefs with the Colorado Supreme Court, expressing a range of opinions. Some briefs are outwardly partisan, including joint briefs submitted by more than a dozen state Republican parties; by 19 states with Republican leaders, spearheaded by the attorneys general of Indiana and West Virginia; by the Republican secretaries of state in Wyoming, Missouri and Ohio; and by the Republican National Committee.

“The Reconstruction Congress (after the Civil War) did not grant state officials sweeping authority to undermine the federal government,” attorneys for the national GOP wrote in a brief that argued the 14th Amendment provision shouldn’t be applied until after an election.

Trump’s team also has received backing from Treniss Jewell Evans III — a Texan who pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor charges related to storming the Capitol on Jan. 6; he admitted to drinking a shot of Fireball whiskey in a conference room that other rioters told him belonged to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In his brief, Evans, who said he’d been defamed by the petitioners, disputed characterizations of that day, arguing that “there was no competent evidence … to support that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection or that there was any insurrection.”

What about on the other side?

Several law professors as well as Colorado Common Cause and the Constitutional Accountability Center, which advocates for a progressive reading of the founding document, urged the state’s justices to bar Trump from the state’s ballot.

Nine law professors countered Trump’s First Amendment defense in a joint brief, arguing it doesn’t protect speech that incites lawless action or constitutes a threat — and that disqualification wouldn’t infringe on protected speech, anyway. The filing from Common Cause, a left-leaning government watchdog group, called it “a great credit to prior generations of American political leaders” that the disqualification clause of the Constitution had so rarely been invoked — but argued this case rose to that standard.

“The fact that the Disqualification Clause is so clearly implicated at this hour, then, is a proportionally great discredit to Mr. Trump himself, who allowed a lust for power to supersede his own Oath of Office and over two centuries of American political precedent,” the filing reads.

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TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Four Republican presidential candidates were given several opportunities Wednesday to criticize former President Donald Trump, who was absent from the debate again. But they mostly targeted each other, with former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley taking the brunt of the attacks as she gets more interest from donors and voters.

With just over a month before the 2024 primary calendar begins, the debate demonstrated how firm Trump’s grip remains on the party.

But the focus on Haley reflected how other candidates perceive her as a threat to their chances of taking on Trump directly. Aside from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, most the candidates have spent more time in debates going after each other than taking aim at Trump, reflecting the view of many GOP operatives that there are diminishing returns in attacking the former president given his popularity among Republicans.

The last scheduled debate before Iowa’s GOP caucuses on Jan. 15 may have limited impact on the race, airing on a lesser-known television network, NewsNation, from a state Republican presidential candidates have carried since 1980.

Trump remains dominant in national and early-state polls. And after holding counterprogramming rallies during the first three debates, he didn’t bother this time and instead went to a closed-door fundraiser. His campaign posted an ad during the debate focusing on President Joe Biden as both parties head toward a potential rematch of the 2020 election Trump lost.

Christie repeatedly tore into Trump on Wednesday and challenged Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to answer directly if he believed Trump was fit or unfit to be president again. The crowd at the University of Alabama booed him at one point as he attacked Trump.

“His conduct is unacceptable. He’s unfit. And be careful of what you’re going to get,” warned Christie, who has been alone among leading Republicans in his focus on the race’s clear front-runner.

“There is no bigger issue in this race than Donald Trump,” he said earlier.

DeSantis suggested Trump, who is 77, is too old for the job. Asked repeatedly whether Trump is fit for the presidency, DeSantis did not directly say yes or no.

“Over a four-year period, it is not a job for someone that’s pushing 80,” DeSantis said. “We need someone who’s younger.”

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy again raised his hand as a candidate who would support Trump even if he were convicted of pending federal felonies, though he accused his other opponents of bowing to Trump for years to secure political posts or financial gain. The closest the 38-year-old ever came to criticizing Trump was to call for a new generation of leadership.

Haley stood silently during the extended discussion, and neither the moderators nor her rivals asked for her opinion.

The debate’s brief focus on Trump was a reprieve for Haley, who spent most of the debate on the defensive.

DeSantis accused Haley of backing down from media criticism and Ramaswamy suggested she was too close to corporate interests as she gets new attention from donors. He touted his own willingness to pick high-profile fights with his critics and went after Haley just moments into the debate, reflecting the rivalry between the two candidates reflected in dueling early-state television ads.

They also tussled over China, long an animating issue for conservatives worried about Beijing’s influence. Later in the debate, Haley credited Trump for taking a hard line with Beijing on trade but said he was too passive on other fronts, including allowing China to capture American technology for its own military use and purchase American farmland.

Interrupting Haley, DeSantis accused her of allowing Chinese investment in South Carolina when she was governor and suggested her corporate donors would never allow her to be tough on Beijing.

“First of all, he’s mad because those Wall Street donors used to support him and now they support me,” Haley retorted before accusing DeSantis of being soft on Chinese investment in Florida.

Ramaswamy, always the most eager to deliver personal barbs on the debate stage, turned a foreign policy discussion into another attack on Haley, seemingly trolling her to name provinces in Ukraine and suggesting she does not understand the country. As he kept piling on, Christie stepped in to declare Haley “a smart, accomplished woman” and dismiss Ramaswamy as “the most obnoxious blowhard in America.”

With Trump absent, the atmosphere around the debate lacked some of the buzz sometimes associated with such affairs, especially in ostensibly open primaries. Less than two hours to go before the opening salvo, the media room, which is normally the practice hall for the University of Alabama’s Million Dollar Band, was barely half full. The television and radio platforms around the periphery — the spin room, in debate parlance — were noticeably quiet, lacking the high-profile surrogates or campaign staffers who might normally be appearing live on cable news or talk radio to pitch on their candidates’ behalf.

Outside Moody Music Hall on campus, more buzz came from state high school football championship games being played in Bryant-Denny Stadium.

The debate may have been hard to find for many prospective viewers. It aired on NewsNation, a cable network still trying to build its audience after taking over WGN America three years ago. NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas moderated alongside Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor who now hosts a popular podcast, and Eliana Johnson of the conservative news site Washington Free Beacon.

The field of invited candidates has shrunk in half since eight were on the stage at the first debate in Milwaukee in August, as the Republican National Committee tightened the criteria to reach the stage each time. For Tuesday, candidates had to get at least 6% in multiple polls and amass 80,000 unique donors.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum have all dropped out of the race after participating in at least one debate. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is continuing his campaign but failed to qualify.

The debate setting in Alabama was another reminder of Trump’s strong position — and how he outpaced an even larger Republican field when he first ran and won in 2016. Trump swept Southern primaries from Virginia to Arkansas and Louisiana in his first campaign. And the changes in Alabama Republican politics in many ways reflect Trump’s influence over the party.

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Cooper reported from Phoenix.