In a 112-page ruling, the judge said the evidence suggests Trump assembled the crowd and then instructed the rally-goers to march on the Capitol.
A federal judge has rejected former President Donald Trump’s effort to dismiss multiple lawsuits accusing him of bearing legal responsibility for the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In a 112-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said the evidence suggests Trump assembled the crowd and then instructed the rally goers to march on the Capitol, despite knowing that the crowd likely included violent and destructive elements.
And Trump’s Twitter attack amid the violence on then-Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the counting of electoral votes that would finalize President Joe Biden’s victory, suggests a “tacit agreement” with those who stormed the Capitol and sent Pence and lawmakers fleeing for safety, Mehta wrote.
“It is reasonable to infer that the President would have understood the impact of his tweet, since he had told rally-goers earlier that, in effect, the Vice President was the last line of defense against a stolen election outcome,” ruled Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
The ruling leaves Trump’s inner circle — and possibly the former president himself — vulnerable to another flurry of deposition subpoenas and document demands. The ruling also declares Trump potentially liable for conduct while he was the sitting president, a rare and momentous legal decision.
“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 has no immediate right to appeal the decision, but he could ask the judge for permission to do so.
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Mehta emphasized that Trump’s rally speech could be seen as legally amounting to making common cause with those seeking to violently disrupt the Jan. 6 session of Congress, the last step to officially certifying Biden’s victory.
“[T]he President’s January 6 Rally Speech can reasonably be viewed as a call for collective action,” Mehta wrote. “The President’s regular use of the word ‘we’ is notable. To name just a few examples: ‘We will not take it anymore’; ‘We will stop the steal’; ‘We will never give up’; ‘We will never concede’; ‘We will not take it anymore’; ‘All Mike Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president.’”
Trump’s lawyers and his political backers have repeatedly noted that the former president told his supporters to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically.” However, the judge said those were Trump’s “only” remarks during his address that seemed to discourage violence.
“Those three words do not defeat the plausibility” of the central conspiracy claim in the suit brought by the group of House members, Mehta concluded.
Mehta issued no final ruling on the legal merits of that claim, but ruled that it was legally sound enough to proceed to the discovery phase of the case.
“Importantly, it was the President and his campaign’s idea to send thousands to the Capitol while the Certification was underway. It was not a planned part of the rally. In fact, the permit expressly stated that it did ‘not authorize a march from the Ellipse,’” Mehta wrote.
“From these alleged facts, it is at least plausible to infer that, when he called on rally-goers to march to the Capitol, the President did so with the goal of disrupting lawmakers’ efforts to certify the Electoral College votes,” he continued. “The Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and others who forced their way into the Capitol building plainly shared in that unlawful goal.”
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A federal judge just rejected Trump’s effort to dismiss lawsuits accusing him of bearing legal responsibility for Jan. 6 https://t.co/PIdm09aMJA
— POLITICO (@politico) February 18, 2022
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