A top House Democrat sued former President Donald Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, and two right-wing groups for their alleged roles in planning and executing the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, just days after the Senate acquitted Trump on the same charge.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who sits atop the House Homeland Security Committee, partnered with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll to file the lawsuit in the District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday morning. Thompson sued as a private citizen, not as a member of Congress, CNN reported.
“While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the president accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatantly planned,” Thompson said in a statement. “Failure to do so will only invite this type of authoritarianism for the anti-democratic forces on the far right that are so intent on destroying our country.”
The 32-page suit states that Trump and Giuliani worked with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to target Congress in riots and, in doing so, violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a century-old law that protects black people who were formerly slaves and lawmakers from white extremists. It uses some of the same arguments that the House impeachment managers made during the former president’s second impeachment.
The document states that Trump’s comments at the “Save America” rally prompted thousands to march to storm the Capitol, where lawmakers were in the process of certifying President Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election, and that Giuliani called lawmakers during the event and asked them to “slow down” the count.
“The insurrection at the Capitol was a direct, intended, and foreseeable result of the Defendants’ unlawful conspiracy,” the lawsuit states. “The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence. It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully coordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the Electoral College.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the legal move was meant to prevent the spread of domestic terrorism.
“If we don’t put a check on the spread of domestic terrorism, it will consume this nation and transform it to something that none of us recognize,” Johnson said. “We must, as a nation, prevent the spread of this type of boldness where [insurrectionists] will go to our U.S. Capitol and seek an act of treason.”
Trump and his lawyers have defended their comments ahead of the riots as protected by the First Amendment.
