WASHINGTON — Donald Trump must face lawsuits accusing him of inciting the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, a federal judge ruled, rejecting the former president’s immunity and free-speech arguments.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington issued a sweeping 112-page opinion on Friday denying Trump’s motions to dismiss three lawsuits. Mehta said Trump’s speech at a rally before the riot crossed the lines of both the First Amendment and the protections from civil liability presidents usually have while in office.
“To deny a president immunity from civil damages is no small step,” Mehta wrote. “The court well understands the gravity of its decision. But the alleged facts of this case are without precedent.”
Trump’s lawyer in the case, Jesse Binnall, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
It’s another legal setback to the former president, who on Thursday was ordered by a New York judge to testify under oath in state Attorney General Letitia James’ civil probe of the Trump Organization. In seeking to enforce her supboena, James revealed last week that Trump’s longtime accounting firm Mazars dumped him as a client and said a decade of financial statements it prepared for his company weren’t reliable.
Two of the three suits over the Jan. 6 riot were filed by Congressional Democrats and one by injured Capitol Police officers. The former president and other defendants were accused of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which safeguards federal officials and employees against conspiratorial acts directed at preventing them from performing their duties.
Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani also spoke at the rally and repeated false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. But Mehta dismissed claims against both Trump Jr. and Giuliani.
Giuliani’s urging of the crowd at the Jan. 6 rally to have “trial by combat” wasn’t likely to incite people to violence, the judge said, and Trump Jr.’s claims of election fraud were protected by the First Amendment. Mehta said he would also dismiss the lawsuit against another rally speaker, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican.
But Mehta, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, said Trump’s words to the crowd were of a different nature.
“These words stoked an already inflamed crowd, which had heard for months that the election was stolen and that ‘weak politicians’ had failed to help the president,” the judge wrote. “So, when the president said to the crowd at the end of his remarks, ‘We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,’ moments before instructing them to march to the Capitol, the president’s speech plausibly crossed the line into unprotected territory.”
Mehta said Trump’s words may have crossed the line set by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1969 decision that found statesments are no longer protected by the First Amendment if they are “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and (were) likely to produce such action.”
The judge also allowed the lawsuit to proceed against the Proud Boys, Warboys and Oath Keepers, loose militia organizations, many of whose members took part in the Jan. 6 riot.
Mehta said the plaintiffs had presented plausible evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and right-wing groups whose members stormed the Capitol. He noted that a civil conspiracy claim did not require a showing that the participants reached an express agreement. A tacit or implicit agreement was sufficient.
The judge said it was reasonable to believe that Trump was familiar with those groups and what they might do. During one of the presidential debates, Trump clearly expressed knowledge of the Proud Boys when he asked them to “stand back and stand by,” Mehta said.
“The president, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and others ‘pursued the same goal’: to disrupt Congress from completing the Electoral College certification on January 6th,” the judge said. “That President Trump held this goal is, at least, plausible based on his words and actions.”
