New Hampshire officials said Tuesday the state attorney general’s office is “carefully reviewing” whether Donald Trump is disqualified from serving as president again under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, one of several challenges the Trump campaign might face in the coming months.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars anyone from serving in Congress, as president or as vice president if they took an oath of office and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” 

The stipulation was added after the Civil War to block members of Congress who supported secession from returning to office.

Some conservative constitutional law experts are among those who argue Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol disqualifies him from the presidency. 

According to a joint statement from both offices, the New Hampshire secretary of state’s office has requested that the attorney general’s office advise it “regarding the meaning of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the provision’s potential applicability to the upcoming presidential election cycle.”

“The Attorney General’s Office is now carefully reviewing the legal issues involved,” the statement said.

State officials stressed they have not taken any position on the matter, adding there has been misinformation stating otherwise.

Corky Messner, a Republican lawyer in New Hampshire who received Trump’s endorsement when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2020, reportedly met with Secretary of State David Scanlan to make his case for why Trump’s name should not appear on the ballot next year.

“The Constitution must be defended,” Messner wrote Sunday on X, formerly known as Twitter. “No person is bigger than the Constitution.”

In recent weeks, four conservative legal scholars have written articles saying they believe Trump, who is also facing 91 felony charges in four different cases, is constitutionally disqualified.

In a paper for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Chicago’s William Baude and the University of St. Thomas’ Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote they believe the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was clearly an “insurrection or rebellion” and that Trump participated by seeking to alter vote counts, telling people in the crowd he assembled near the White House lies about election fraud and that they needed to “fight like hell,” directing them to march to the Capitol, and then failing to intervene when violence erupted.

“If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close,” Baude and Paulsen wrote. “He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so.”

Retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig -- a prominent Trump critic who testified in front of the Jan. 6 committee last summer -- and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe took a similar position in an essay in The Atlantic. 

“The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again,” Luttig and Tribe wrote.

The four constitutional law experts concluded that a criminal conviction or other judicial action is not required to deem Trump ineligible. 

“The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup,” Luttig and Tribe wrote.

During last week’s Republican presidential debate, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Trump critic, mentioned that some conservative legal scholars believe the 14th Amendment excludes Trump from office.

“Obviously, I'm not going to support somebody who's been convicted of a serious felony or who is disqualified under our Constitution,” Hutchinson said.

But other legal experts disagree.

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at The George Washington University, argued in an op-ed for The Hill last week that there is much dispute about whether what happened at the Capitol meets the definition of an “insurrection or rebellion” or whether Trump supported it. He noted that special counsel Jack Smith has not charged the former president with inciting an insurrection.

“There is a simpler and more obvious explanation for what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021: A political protest became a political riot, and a constitutional theory became constitutional legend,” he wrote.

In a statement emailed to Spectrum News on Wednesday, the Trump campaign said: “Joe Biden, Democrats, and Never Trumpers are scared to death because they see polls showing President Trump winning in the general election. The people who are pursuing this absurd conspiracy theory and political attack on President Trump are stretching the law beyond recognition much like the political prosecutors in New York, Georgia, and DC. There is no legal basis for this effort except in the minds of those who are pushing it.”

Questions about Trump’s eligibility could lead to lawsuits and potentially varying rulings by election officials that result in the former president appearing on some ballots and not others. The Supreme Court could ultimately take up the case or cases.

In Michigan, Robert Davis, an activist known for filing lawsuits against state politicians, has asked Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to leave Trump off the ballot, according to multiple reports.

Benson said in a radio interview this week that "there are valid legal arguments being made" for leaving Trump off of the ballot.

Meanwhile, two nonprofit groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Free Speech for People, have also been urging election officials to declare Trump disqualified and are preparing lawsuits and election board complaints.

“We warned him that should he decide to run again, we would be taking action to ensure the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office is enforced. Now we will be,” CREW said in a statement after Trump declared his candidacy in November. “Trump made a mockery of the Constitution he swore to defend, but we will see that it is defended.”