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      Trump and Giuliani sued by Democratic congressman over Capitol riot

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      Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, the former president’s personal lawyer, have been accused of conspiring to incite the violent riot at the US Capitol, in a legal action filed under a historic law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.The lawsuit was brought on Tuesday by Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and the eminent civil rights organisation the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).It comes three days after Trump was acquitted by the US Senate on a charge of inciting the 6 January insurrection, only for the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit, to point out that presidents are “not immune” to being held accountable by criminal or civil litigation.The suit alleges that Trump, Giuliani and the extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers conspired to incite the attack on the Capitol with the goal of preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election.It argues that they therefore violated a law often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act, passed in 1871 in response to Klan violence and intimidation preventing members of Congress in the Reconstruction south from carrying out their constitutional duties. The NAACP, founded in 1909, says the statute was designed to protect against conspiracies.Joseph Sellers, a lawyer with the NAACP who filed the lawsuit on Thompson’s behalf, told the Associated Press: “Fortunately, this hasn’t been used very much. But what we see here is so unprecedented that it’s really reminiscent of what gave rise to the enactment of this legislation right after the civil war.”Thompson, who chairs the House homeland security committee, was among members of Congress who donned gas masks and were rushed to shelter in an office building during the mayhem of 6 January, in which five people died. Members of he Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been charged with taking part in the riot.Thompson said in a statement that Trump’s “gleeful support of violent white supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger. It is by the slimmest of luck that the outcome was not deadlier.“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. 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.”Filed on Tuesday in federal district court in Washington, the suit charts an expansive effort by Trump and Giuliani to undermine the election result despite state officials and courts rejecting their false allegations of fraud. The two men portrayed the election as stolen while Trump “endorsed rather than discouraged” threats of violence from his supporters leading up to the attack on the Capitol, the suit says.“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 continues. “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.”Presidents are typically shielded from the courts for actions carried out in office but this one focuses on Trump in his personal rather than official capacity. Seeking unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, it alleges that none of the conduct at issue is related to Trump’s responsibilities as president.[embedded content]Sellers explained: “Inciting a riot, or attempting to interfere with the congressional efforts to ratify the results of the election that are commended by the constitution, could not conceivably be within the scope of ordinary responsibilities of the president. In this respect, because of his conduct, he is just like any other private citizen.”Trump faces a potential slew of lawsuits now he has lost the legal protections of office. Additional actions could be brought by other members of Congress or police officers injured in the riot, a prospect acknowledged by the White House on Tuesday.Jen Psaki, the press secretary, told reporters Biden “certainly supports the rights of individuals, members of Congress and otherwise, to take steps through the judicial process but I don’t think we have a further comment on it than that”.She added: “I am not going to speculate on criminal prosecution from the White House podium. The president has committed to having an independent justice department that will make their own decision about the path forward.”Trump defence lawyers are expected to argue that his speech was protected by the first amendment to the constitution and point out that, in a speech on 6 January, he told supporters to behave “peacefully”.Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, said in a statement Trump did not organise the rally that preceded the riot and “did not incite or conspire to incite any violence at the Capitol on 6 January”. More

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      Jamie Raskin derides 'explosive and deranged' tactics of Trump lawyers

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      The architect of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has blamed “explosive and deranged” tactics by the former president’s lawyers for obscuring the strength of the case presented by House Democrats.But the lead impeachment manager, Jamie Raskin, said the Democrats’ case appeared nevertheless to convince even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Trump’s guilt in inciting the Capitol riot.Two days after Trump escaped conviction, and as his supporters reveled in the prospect of his return to frontline politics, Raskin also told the Washington Post it was both “good and terrible to watch” McConnell’s post-verdict speech in which he excoriated Trump – but said he had voted to acquit because the trial was unconstitutional.It was telling, Raskin said, that many of the 43 Republicans who voted to acquit “felt the need to hang their hats” on that argument, which was rejected by constitutional scholars and twice by the Senate itself.Not even Trump’s lawyers attempted to defend what Democrats characterized as Trump’s “big lie”: that he won an election he actually lost by more than 7m popular votes and 74 electoral votes.They couldn’t get a summer internship with My Cousin VinnyNor did Trump’s legal team, led by a personal injury lawyer and a former county prosecutor who declined to pursue charges against Bill Cosby, succeed in freeing Trump from blame for the attack on the Capitol, judging by Republican senators’ speeches.Instead, Trump’s lawyers denied a copious and unambiguous record of what the former president said and did, while drawing false parallels between routine political speech and Trump’s coup attempt.In the final vote of the impeachment trial, seven Republicans voted with Democrats to convict Trump – a 53-vote tally 10 short of the total required.In an indication of how the Republican party has diverged from the popular will, almost six in 10 Americans – 58% – believe Trump should have been convicted, according to a new ABC News-Ipsos poll.Raskin and his fellow House managers were widely praised for their work. Their case featured extensive use of video of events at the Capitol on 6 January, when supporters told by Trump to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat broke in, some hunting lawmakers to kidnap or kill. Five people died as a direct result of the riot.Raskin took on the lead role despite his son having killed himself in December. He told the Post he “told managers we were going to make a lawyerly case but would not censor the emotion”.There has been criticism among Democrats, after the managers persuaded the Senate to vote to call witnesses but then agreed to avoid that step, which could have lengthened the trial. On Sunday, Raskin said witnesses would not have changed any minds.“These Republicans voted to acquit in the face of this mountain of un-refuted evidence,” he told NBC. “There’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult.”The Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett, also widely praised for her role in the trial, told CNN: “We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines.”[embedded content]More evidence of Trump’s alleged wrongdoing may yet be unearthed. Members of Congress from both parties have called for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate why government officials and law enforcement failed to stop the attack on the Capitol.Trump lawyers Michael van der Veen, Bruce Castor and David Schoen celebrated their client’s acquittal but faced widespread ridicule for a case built on flimsy arguments about freedom of speech and scattershot whataboutism concerning Democratic attitudes to protests against racism and police brutality.“They couldn’t get a summer internship with My Cousin Vinny,” Raskin told the Post, perhaps a deliberate reference to a bizarre and famously sweaty press conference given in November by another Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, amid the former president’s failed attempts to prove mass fraud in his election defeat by Joe Biden.My Cousin Vinny is an Oscar-winning 1992 comedy about a hapless lawyer played by Joe Pesci. Giuliani said it was his “one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn”.Trump, who comes from Queens, refused to testify in his own defence. Raskin called him “a profile in absolute cowardice” and said: “He betrayed the constitution, the country and his people.“Trump’s followers need to understand he has no loyalty to them … Donald Trump is the past. We need to deal with the future.” More

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      For Trump, V is for victory – while his lawyers flick a V-sign our way | Richard Wolffe

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      You may have thought the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump was somehow connected to the fascist mob that staged an insurrection on Capitol Hill last month.According to Trump’s lawyers, you are clearly an idiot.In actual fact, the former president was impeached for using the word “fight” – a crime committed by everyone in Congress and a good number of other people you might know.Madonna, for instance. Johnny Depp too. Seriously, America. If it’s OK for Madonna to talk about fighting, or voguing, or being a material girl, what’s the big deal?If the star of Pirates of the Caribbean can talk about walking the gangplank or shivering his timbers, then who is to deny our beloved former president the right to also don an eyepatch and wave a cutlass in our general direction?There was lots of video on the day of the greatest Trump lawyering of all. Mostly the same video, played over and over again, sometimes two or three times in quick succession like a Max Headroom compilation of politicians saying the word “fight”.There was President Biden, and Vice-President Harris. There were a bunch of former Democratic presidential candidates. Also some House impeachment managers.The only challenge for Trump’s lawyers is that none of them led an insurrection. None of them urged a mob to storm Congress. None of them timed their fight song for the precise moment when elected officials were carrying out their constitutional duty to certify an election’s results.[embedded content]But we digress. Back to the best lawyering in the land, a veritable elite strike force of jurists not seen since the last one outside that landscaping business next to the sex shop in a particularly lovely corner of Philadelphia.The strike force featured a new striker. Not the bumbling, rambling Bruce Castor, or the endlessly pedantic David Schoen. No, this time Trump bestowed upon his historic impeachment trial a personal injury lawyer from – yes, you guessed it – Philadelphia. An ambulance chaser, best known in Philly for his radio ads, asking if you’ve tripped while walking down the street.“If the walkway isn’t clear, and you fall and get hurt due to snow and ice, call 215-546-1000 for Van der Veen, O’Neill, Hartshorn and Levin,” the ads say, according to the Washington Post. “The V is for Victory.”Last year Mr V was actually suing Trump for his unfounded claims about mail-in voter fraud. This year, he is not so much chasing the ambulance as driving it.First, Mr V claimed that Trump was encouraging his supporters to respect the electoral college count, not to “stop the steal” as the entire mob was screaming in front of him. Then he claimed that the first of the mob to be arrested was a lefty antifa stooge, not a Trumpy fascist thug.But mostly he claimed that he – and his client – were defending the constitution at the precise moment when they were burning it to crispy charcoal husk.OK, so the Trump mob unleashed violence to stop the constitutional counting of the electoral college votes. But the idea that Congress might stop Trump’s free-speech rights to whip up that mob is an outrageous, unconstitutional human rights abuse that threatens to silence all politicians everywhere.OK, so the Trump mob might have silenced Mike Pence permanently by hanging him on the gallows they built on the steps of Congress. But if Congress tries to stop a president from using a mob to intimidate Congress, where will it end?Pretty soon, Mr V argued, we won’t even have access to lawyers. The hallowed right to counsel, if not ambulance chasers, might be threatened. “Who would be next,” he asked, indignantly. “It could be anyone. One of you! Or one of you! It’s anti-American and sets a dangerous precedent forever.”To his great, sighing chagrin, Mr V lamented the state of political discourse. “Inflammatory rhetoric from our elected officials – from both sides of the aisle – has been alarming frankly,” he said, in sorrow, as if his client were just a hapless symptom of a bigger sickness: a pandemic of mean words from Democrats.“This is not whataboutism,” he declared, after rolling his whataboutist video for the second or third or fourth time. “I’m showing you this to show that all political speech must be protected.”The key to the defense was about incitement to violence and the legal test of Brandenburg v Ohio. Appropriately enough, the Brandenburg in question was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and the test – as Trump’s lawyers helpfully explained – was about whether the free speech in question “explicitly or implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action”.“Mr Trump did the opposite of advocating for lawless action,” said Mr V. “The opposite!”The worst news of all was that Bruce Castor was at the microphone, pretending to be a half-decent lawyerThis is only true if it’s opposite day, when opposite means the opposite of opposite. As it happens, it was indeed just that day at the impeachment trial of our great defender of the constitution, free speech and peaceful politics.Which is why Mr V’s partner, the now legendary Bruce Castor, concluded the defense case. Castor explained that because he was the lead attorney in this legal shenanigan, he was going to take “the most substantive part” of the case for himself. That wasn’t to say, he added hastily, that his learned friends had done a bad job, oh no. The good news, he said, was that the case was almost over. The bad news was that it would take another hour for it to be over.The worst news of all was that Castor was at the microphone, pretending to be a half-decent lawyer.“Did the 45th president engage in incitement – they say insurrection,” began Castor. “Clearly there was no insurrection,” he continued, defining the word as “taking the TV stations over and having some idea of what you’re going to do when you take power”.As a description of the Trump presidency, that sounded pretty accurate. Unlike the part Castor read from his notes about Trump’s attitudes towards mobs in general.“By any measure,” the lawyer said in his most Trumpy way, “President Trump is the most pro-police, anti-mob president this country has ever seen.”From that point on, the defense case smooshed together some condemnation of the Black Lives Matter protests, some justification of Trump’s campaign to overturn the election results in Georgia, and some accusation of a supposed effort to disenfranchise Trump voters – who lost the election.Like so much else connected to the scrambled neural networks inside one Florida resident’s cranium, it made no sense. It was a radio echo bouncing around the cosmos from a distant star that collapsed into a black hole of disinformation and delusion long ago.“Spare us the hypocrisy and false indignation,” said Mr V, as he wrapped up another hypocritical and falsely indignant response to the same old video of Democrats saying fiery things.Now all we have left is the hypocrisy and false indignation of Republican senators who value their own careers above their own lives or the democracy that elected them. The V is for venal. More

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      in Elections

      Dominion Voting Systems sues Giuliani for $1.3bn over baseless election claims

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      Complaint accuses ex-mayor of having ‘manufactured and disseminated’ conspiracy theory related to voting machinesUS politics – live updatesDominion Voting Systems, the voting equipment manufacturer at the centre of baseless election fraud conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and his allies, has sued the former president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit. Related: Schumer promises quick but fair trial as Trump impeachment heads to Senate Continue reading… More

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      ‘Gondor has no king’: pro-Trump lawsuit cites Lord of the Rings

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      Texas case offers baseless mix of allegations of electoral fraud but cites the imaginary kingdom of Gondor as evidenceDonald Trump’s diehard supporters are often accused of living in fantasyland, but one court case recently launched to try to reinstall him as president has surprised even the most hardened observers of Trumpian strangeness by citing as evidence a mythological realm from The Lord of the Rings. Related: Pittsburgh official goes viral by rebuking Ted Cruz – and looking like Jeff Daniels Continue reading… More

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      'This is not justice': supreme court liberals slam Trump's federal executions

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      The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11th-hour clemency appeal was rejected.Higgs, 48, was convicted of murdering three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, even though it was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime but sentenced to life.“This was not justice,” Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in an order issued late on Friday.Sotomayor, who was critical of the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what she saw as “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates. All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020.The government executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than in the previous six decades“To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades,” she wrote.“There can be no ‘justice on the fly’ in matters of life and death,” Sotomayor added. “Yet the court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.”Breyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, Breyer said, would “subject him to a sensation of drowning akin to waterboarding”.He said the court needed to address whether execution protocols risked extreme pain and needless suffering and pressured the courts into last-minute decisions on life or death.“What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind?” he wrote. “Are they supposed to ‘hurry up, hurry up?’”Breyer went further than Sotomayor by questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, the first member of the current panel to do so. The third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also dissented in the Higgs case but did not give an explanation.Higgs’s petition for clemency said he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, it said.He was convicted in October 2000 by a federal jury in Maryland for the first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. Although Haynes shot the women, Higgs handed him his gun.“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” the US district judge Peter Messitte wrote in December.Arguably the most high-profile execution of the Trump administration came just days ago when Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection at Terre Haute and became the first woman put to death by the federal government almost seven decades.Her lawyer accused the Trump administration of “unnecessary and vicious use of authoritarian power”.Many believe officials rushed to complete a series of executions before Joe Biden is inaugurated on 20 January. Biden has stated his desire to have the death penalty abolished at federal and state level. More

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      Nancy Pelosi says lawmakers who aided in Capitol attack may be prosecuted

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      House speaker Nancy Pelosi has said it is possible that members of Congress could face prosecution if found to have “aided and abetted” the violent attack on the Capitol earlier this month that left five people dead.“Justice is called for as we address insurrection perpetrated against the Capitol last week,” the Democratic speaker told reporters on Friday.“If, in fact, it is found that members of Congress were accomplices to this insurrection,” the Democratic speaker said on Friday. “If they aided and abetted the crime, there may have to be actions taken beyond the Congress in terms of prosecution for that.”Pelosi’s comments came after Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic congresswoman of New Jersey, said she saw colleagues leading groups on “reconnaissance” tours of the Capitol a day before the riot.More than 30 Democrats have signed on to a letter, spearheaded by Sherrill, seeking more information about the tours that took place at the Capitol on 5 January.At the press conference – her first since the House impeached Donald Trump for a second time over his role in encouraging the pro-Trump mob – Pelosi announced there would be a review of Capitol security.She said retired Lt Gen Russel Honoré was being tapped to lead a security review of the US Capitol in the wake of last week’s deadly insurrection.Honoré is perhaps best known for overseeing humanitarian aid efforts in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. Pelosi says Honoré will conduct an immediate review of security and inter-agency interaction and Capitol “command and control”.Pelosi would not provide specific details on when she would transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate.“They’re now working on taking this to trial,” the speaker said of the impeachment managers. “You’ll be the first to know when we announce that we’re going over there.”Once the Senate receives the article, the chamber must begin a trial to determine whether the president should be convicted and removed from office.Though the trial will probably conclude after president-elect Joe Biden has taken the oath of office on 20 January, a conviction would prevent Trump from running for president again. A handful of Republican senators have already criticized Trump and signaled that they have not decided whether to support conviction, but at least 17 would need to break ranks to convict.Meanwhile, the justice department inspector general announced on Friday that it was launching a review of the department’s role in the riot. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, said his office would “assess whether there are any weaknesses in DoJ protocols, policies, or procedures that adversely affected the ability of DoJ or its components to prepare effectively for and respond to the events at the US Capitol on January 6”.The justice department has already opened 175 criminal investigations in connection to the Capitol riot, and that number is expected to surpass 300 by the end of Friday, a federal prosecutor said.Speaking at a press conference, Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, said his office is exploring “more significant felony charges” against those involved in the riot.Sherwin said there are also growing indications that law enforcement officers, both current and former, participated in the riot.“We don’t care what your profession is,” Sherwin said. “We will charge you, and you will be arrested.”Steven D’Antuono, the FBI assistant director who leads the Washington field office, said even friends and family of the rioters are providing tips to the bureau.D’Antuono said, “You might want to turn yourselves in instead of wondering when we’re going to knock on your door – because we will.” More

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      Lawyers face fallout from fueling Trump’s false claims of election fraud

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      Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, could be included in a federal investigation and is facing a disbarment complaintProminent lawyers who helped fuel Donald Trump’s baseless charges of election fraud to try and thwart Joe Biden’s win, are now facing potentially serious legal and financial problems of their own tied to their aggressive echoing of Trump’s false election claims, say former Department of Justice lawyers and legal experts.They include a federal investigation into the Capitol attack by a pro-Trump mob, possible disbarment and a defamation lawsuit. Continue reading… More