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, D.C., issued a sweeping 112-page opinion Friday denying Trump’s motions to dismiss three lawsuits. Mehta said Trump’s rally speech before the riot crossed the lines both of his duties as president and his First Amendment right to express himself.
“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, and the court believes that its decision is consistent with the purposes behind such immunity.”
Trump’s lawyer in the case, Jesse Binnall, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Two of the three suits were filed by congressional Democrats and one by injured Capitol Police officers. The suits also named Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who also spoke at the rally, but Mehta dismissed them from the case.
Giuliani’s urging of the crowd to have “trial by combat” wasn’t likely to incite the crowd 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 Republican Rep. Mo Brooks, who also spoke at the rally.
But Mehta 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.”
The judge also allowed the lawsuit to proceed against the Oath Keepers, a loose militia organization largely comprised of veterans and former police officers, many of whom 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.
“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.”
