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Friday, August 27, 2021
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Politics|Capitol Police Officers Sue Trump and Allies Over Election Lies and
Jan. 6

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/us/politics/capitol-police-jan-6-riot-lawsuit-trump.html
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CAPITOL RIOT FALLOUT

 * Video Investigation: Day of Rage
 * 6 Takeaways
 * Capitol Police Face Crises
 * Security Failures
 * How an Officer Died

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CAPITOL POLICE OFFICERS SUE TRUMP AND ALLIES OVER ELECTION LIES AND JAN. 6

The suit, which took a broad view of the riot’s origins, was the latest effort
to hold former President Donald J. Trump accountable for the Capitol attack.

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The suit contends that Former President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants
violated the Ku Klux Klan Act.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Alan Feuer

Aug. 26, 2021

A group of seven Capitol Police officers filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing
former President Donald J. Trump and nearly 20 members of far-right extremist
groups and political organizations of a plot to disrupt the peaceful transition
of power during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

The suit, which implicated members of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers militia
and Trump associates like Roger J. Stone Jr., was arguably the most expansive
civil effort to date seeking to hold Mr. Trump and his allies legally
accountable for the storming of the Capitol.

While three other similar lawsuits were filed in recent months, the suit on
Thursday was the first to allege that Mr. Trump worked in concert with both
far-right extremists and political organizers promoting his baseless lies that
the presidential election was marred by fraud.

“This is probably the most comprehensive account of Jan. 6 in terms of civil
cases,” said Edward Caspar, a lawyer who is leading the suit for the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It spans from the former president to
militants around him to his campaign supporters.”



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Several police officers who served during the Capitol riot have come forward
with stories of the insults and injuries they faced that day, most prominently
at a congressional hearing in July. But the lawsuit, filed in Federal District
Court in the District of Columbia, was the first time that the seven plaintiffs,
five of whom are Black, offered details of their ordeals.

One of the officers, Governor Latson, was helping to secure the Senate chamber
when a mob of rioters broke in and shoved him, beat him and hurled racial slurs
at him, the lawsuit says. Another, Jason DeRoche, was caught in a melee on the
west front steps of the Capitol, where, according to the suit, rioters pelted
him with batteries and doused him with mace and bear spray, causing his eyes to
swell shut.

The suit contends that Mr. Trump and his co-defendants violated the Ku Klux Klan
Act, an 1871 statute that includes protections against violent conspiracies that
interfere with Congress’s constitutional duties. It also accuses the defendants
of committing “bias-motivated acts of terrorism” in violation of District of
Columbia law.

The use of civil litigation to hold Mr. Trump — and many in his orbit —
accountable for the events of Jan. 6 has taken place even as the Justice
Department has undertaken the largest criminal investigation in its history into
the Capitol attack and a select committee of Congress has opened its own inquiry
into the riot. On Wednesday, members of the committee made far-reaching requests
to federal agencies for detailed records of Mr. Trump’s movements and meetings
on the day of the attack.

The first of the lawsuits was filed in February by the N.A.A.C.P. on behalf of
Democratic lawmakers who accused Mr. Trump, his former lawyer Rudolph W.
Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers of conspiring to prevent
certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.



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In March, Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, filed a similar
complaint against Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr. and Representative
Mo Brooks of Alabama, a Trump ally. That same month, two Capitol Police officers
filed a suit against Mr. Trump.

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In each of those cases, Mr. Trump has sought to have charges dismissed by
arguing that he was acting in his official capacity as president on Jan. 6 and
therefore cannot face civil litigation. Other defendants, like Mr. Giuliani,
have claimed that they were exercising their First Amendment rights to free
speech when they spoke at rallies before the storming of the Capitol.


Image

The mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Several police officers who served
during the Capitol riot have come forward with stories of the insults and
injuries they faced that day.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

While the new lawsuit appears to largely rely on news reports and details
gleaned from criminal cases filed by the Justice Department, it takes a broad
view of the origins of the attack. It argues that the conspiracy to disrupt the
election started as early as May 2020, when Mr. Trump began complaining on
social media that mail-in voting could “lead to massive fraud.”

The suit accuses Mr. Stone, Mr. Trump’s longtime aide and ally, of echoing those
and other claims, sometimes on right-wing news outlets like Infowars. Mr. Stone,
who faced scrutiny early in the Justice Department’s investigation, has long
denied any role in the riot.

At a presidential debate in September, the lawsuit notes, Mr. Trump appeared to
summon members of the Proud Boys by telling them to “stand back and stand by.”
The following month, according to the suit, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the
Oath Keepers, appeared on Infowars, predicting an impending civil war and vowing
to post armed members of his group outside Washington in order to “save the
White House.”

Mr. Rhodes is also under investigation in connection with the riot and recently
acknowledged that he answered questions from the F.B.I., against the advice of
his lawyer.



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A few weeks after the election, the lawsuit says, a key organizer of the Stop
the Steal movement that promoted false claims of election fraud, Ali Alexander,
appeared at a rally outside the State Capitol in Georgia with the leader of the
Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. “We’re going to stop the steal,” the suit quotes Mr.
Alexander as saying. “But first we’re going to stop the certification.”

Mr. Alexander’s lawyer, Baron Coleman, has repeatedly said his client is not
under investigation in connection with the riot. Mr. Tarrio was not in
Washington on Jan. 6 but was sentenced this week to five months in prison for
possessing illegal weapons and burning a Black Lives Matter flag stolen from a
historic Black church in Washington after a separate pro-Trump rally in December
that also descended into violence.

The suit mentions other steps along the path to Jan. 6: In late November, it
says, a California-based political organizer named Alan Hostetter, who believed
the election was stolen, posted a video on the internet claiming that people “at
the highest levels” needed to be “made an example of with an execution or two or
three.”

Mr. Hostetter, who was charged in June with conspiring to storm the Capitol with
members of the Three Percenter militia movement, also said in the video that he
was going to return to Washington “with a million patriots, and we’ll surround
that city.”

As for Jan. 6, the suit paints a picture of Stop the Steal activists riling up
the mob of Trump supporters gathered in Washington with lies about the election,
which the president then echoed in a speech near the White House. Members of the
Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenter movement, it claims, led
the mob on the ground in the Capitol assault.

Mr. Trump, the lawsuit says, knew that “the situation at the Capitol was dire”
but did not condemn the rioters. Instead, it says, he released a video two hours
after the initial breach repeating his lie that the election and been stolen and
telling the attackers that he loved them.









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