House Democrat Files Civil Lawsuit Against Former President Donald Trump

Days after former President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate of inciting insurrection, he was hit with a civil lawsuit from Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson and the NAACP. The lawsuit alleges that Trump violated a post-Civil War era law aimed at preventing Ku Klux Klan from using violence and intimidation to interfere with the political process.

The law, which was passed in 1871, makes it a crime to use "force, intimidation, or threat" to prevent government officials from upholding the duties of their office.

The lawsuit accuses Trump, along with Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers, of engaging in a "unified plan to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes."

"Defendants Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, through their leadership, acted in concert to spearhead the assault on the Capitol while the angry mob that Defendants Trump and Giuliani incited descended on the Capitol," the lawsuit 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 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."

Democratic Reps. Hank Johnson of Georgia and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey will also be joining the lawsuit as plaintiffs.

"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 the 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."

Photo: Getty Images


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