Let justice be done. Every American should applaud these seven officers for standing up to the insurrectionists and their inciter-in-chief, DONALD JOHN TRUMP. From The New York Times:
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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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