The largest civil rights organization of the black population in the US sued former President Donald Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and two white supremacist groups for their responsibility in the assault on the Capitol last January 6.

The lawsuit is an attempt to hold Trump accountable for what happened after his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, and was filed in federal court in Washington by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP, en English) and by Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson.
“Now that the Senate has failed to hold the former president to account, we must use the full weight of the legal system to do so,” attorney Joe Sellers, also implicated in the lawsuit through the law firm, said in a statement. specialized in civil rights Cohen, Milstein, Sellers and Toll.
The lawsuit alleges that Trump and Giuliani, in collaboration with the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, “conspired to incite a gathering crowd (in Washington) to march on and into the United States Capitol.”
By spurring that assault in order to prevent Congress from certifying the presidential election result that day, Trump, Giuliani and those two far-right groups violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the plaintiffs argue.
That law was passed 15 years after the end of America’s civil war (1861-1865) to protect both African Americans freed from slavery and congressional lawmakers from the violence of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan ( KKK).
The lawsuit, which more Democratic congressmen are expected to join in the coming days, alleges that the assault was the culmination of a coordinated plan to undermine the electoral process and prevent hundreds of thousands of legal votes from being counted, cast in many cases by black Americans in key states.
“January 6 was one of the most shameful days in our country’s history, and it was instigated by the president himself. His jovial support of violent white supremacists sparked an attack on Capitol Hill that seriously endangered my lives and those of my colleagues.” said Congressman Thompson in a statement.
The plaintiffs included in their petition the statements of the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who this Saturday voted in favor of acquitting Trump in impeachment but argued that he should be held accountable before the Justice, and not in the Senate, for an attack for which he is “practically and morally responsible.”
“He (Trump) hasn’t gotten rid of anything yet. We have a criminal system in this country, we have a civil system. And no former president is immune to either,” McConnell said Saturday in a speech to the Senate floor. 

Categorized in:

Latest