There have been many efforts, over nearly four years, to hold Donald J. Trump accountable for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but almost all of them have been stymied in the end by failure or delay.
There is, however, one endeavor that is still alive and moving forward, albeit somewhat gingerly: a suite of eight civil lawsuits, accusing Mr. Trump of inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The lawsuits, all of which are being heard in Federal District Court in Washington, were largely brought by police officers and members of Congress who claim they were harmed when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, disrupting the certification of the 2020 election. The suits, which have also implicated several members of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, have all been consolidated for the moment in front of Judge Amit P. Mehta, who has handled several criminal cases related to the riot.
The suits accuse Mr. Trump of conspiracy to violate civil rights, incitement to riot, battery, assault, disorderly conduct and infliction of emotional distress, among other things.
The cases are not criminal, but if they end up at trial, they could result not only in financial damages imposed on Mr. Trump, but also in the public airing of evidence about Jan. 6 that has not taken place — and may never — in the context of his dismissed or delayed criminal trials.
“I believe these eight cases remain the only matters in which plaintiffs are seeking both damages from President Trump and to hold him accountable for his role in the events of Jan. 6,” said Joseph Sellers, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who filed the first of the cases in February 2021.
Since the Capitol was breached, Mr. Trump has managed to defeat or severely impede an astonishing array of efforts to hold his feet to the fire for his role in the Jan. 6 riot, which interfered with the lawful transfer of presidential power.
Within a month of Jan. 6, at his second impeachment trial, the Senate voted to acquit him on charges of provoking the attack. Almost two years later, a House select committee that investigated the assault recommended that Mr. Trump face indictment for crimes including inciting an insurrection, but had no power to bring the charge itself.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected a separate effort to bar Mr. Trump from running for the White House based on the argument that the 14th Amendment precludes insurrectionists from holding high office.
A state criminal case in Georgia accusing Mr. Trump of trying to subvert the results of the election is technically still alive, though it may not reach a jury for years, if at all. And just last month, a judge in Washington — acting at the request of the special counsel, Jack Smith — dismissed a similar federal indictment, acknowledging that a longstanding Justice Department policy forbids pursuing criminal prosecutions against sitting presidents and president-elects.
For the moment, the civil suits against Mr. Trump are creeping along steadily, but with no guarantee they will reach a jury.
One of the reasons they have managed to survive this long is that the Supreme Court has held for years that presidents can be sued civilly for allegations emerging from their private, unofficial conduct, and are immune from lawsuits only if the accusations arise from their official actions.
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the federal criminal case against Mr. Trump used some similar reasoning — private acts could serve as the basis of a prosecution while official acts could not — but had a very different end result.
When the court agreed in February to hear Mr. Trump’s claims of being immune to criminal charges, the case was frozen in place for several months. Then in July, when the justices ultimately granted him a broad form of immunity and sent the matter back to the trial judge in Washington to decide which parts of the indictment could survive, there were more delays, ensuring that the case would not be resolved until after the election in November.
Mr. Trump’s victory ultimately ran into the Justice Department’s ban on prosecuting sitting presidents, resulting in the case’s demise.
The civil suits, however, have already survived an immunity review by two different courts.
In February 2022, Judge Mehta ruled that immunity did not apply to the case in part because Mr. Trump’s speech near the White House on Jan. 6, directing his followers to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, had little to do with protected presidential duties like executing laws or commanding the armed forces. Instead, Judge Mehta said, the speech and other public remarks by Mr. Trump concerning Jan. 6 were part of his private “efforts to remain in office for a second term.”
Last December, a federal appeals court in Washington agreed with much of Judge Mehta’s legal reasoning, saying that the lawsuits could move forward and rejecting the broad assertion of immunity that Mr. Trump’s legal team had invoked in an effort to get the cases dismissed.
But the appellate court’s decision introduced a new wrinkle to the legal fight. The court sent the cases back to Judge Mehta for additional proceedings on the question of immunity and ordered both sides to drill down further on the question of whether Mr. Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 was a protected official act or an unofficial part of his campaign.
And so for the better part of the past year, the plaintiffs and defendants have been getting ready to present their arguments about that issue. They have collected evidence from government agencies and Trump-world witnesses about who funded and organized the rally near the White House where Mr. Trump spoke on Jan. 6 just before the attack.
At a hearing in Washington on Friday, Mr. Sellers, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, suggested a briefing schedule on the question of immunity that stretched into April. But Jonathan Shaw, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said Mr. Sellers’s proposal was perhaps ambitious.
Mr. Shaw told Judge Mehta he wanted more time because he needed to put together a new defense team now that some of the key lawyers who had worked on the case would soon be headed to the serve in the White House. Among them, Mr. Shaw said, was David Warrington, whom Mr. Trump recently named as his White House counsel.
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