A US appeals court ruled on Friday that the former US president must be confronted Donald Trump Civil lawsuits over his role in attack Which his supporters launched on the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, rejecting Trump’s claim that he enjoys immunity.
Trump may now face a civil lawsuit, due to the violence during which his supporters stormed the headquarters of the US Congress. More than 1,200 people were arrested during the confrontations.
Two Capitol police officers and a number of Democratic representatives sued Trump in 2021, considering that he may have incited violence in public statements to his supporters before they headed to the Capitol.
A panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that Trump was acting “in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate” when he urged his supporters to march to the building where a riot broke out.
American presidents enjoy immunity from civil lawsuits in the event that they exercise their official responsibilities, but when they do not act in this capacity, immunity does not apply to them.
Trump’s legal team said that, as president, the former US president enjoyed immunity for his actions, including comments he made in which he asked his supporters to “fight like hell” while Congress was preparing to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory for the US presidency, defeating the outgoing president at the time. Donald Trump.
The campaign is not a presidential act
“When a president in his first term chooses to run for a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act,” the ruling by a three-judge panel of the Washington Court of Appeals said.
The ruling added, “When a president running for a second term (..) speaks at an election rally funded and organized by his re-election campaign committee, he is not performing official presidential duties. He is acting as an office seeker, not as an office holder.”
The ruling noted that Trump “admitted that he participated in his campaign to win re-election – including his post-election efforts to change the announced results in his favor – in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate, and not in his official capacity as sitting president.”
The ruling paves the way for Trump to face lawsuits from Capitol Police and Democratic lawmakers seeking to hold Trump responsible for violence committed by his supporters during the riot, which was an attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
The case is one of several civil and criminal challenges facing the most prominent candidate for the Republican Party nomination to compete with Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 elections.
The unanimous decision focused only on whether Trump could be sued, and did not say anything about the merits of the cases themselves.
Trump said that his speech, in which he urged his followers to “fight like hell” against certifying the election, was related to “an issue of public concern” and falls within his official responsibilities. Trump’s spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Limited, narrow and procedural
A Trump spokesman called the ruling “limited, narrow and procedural” and said Trump was “acting on behalf of the American people” on the day of the attack.
Trump made a similar immunity argument in the federal criminal case in which he was accused of illegally conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The judge has not yet ruled on that case.
While Friday’s ruling explicitly stated that it did not affect Trump’s potential criminal immunity, both cases related to Trump’s conduct before and during the Capitol riot.
Trump will be tried next March in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 elections.
