Donald Trump’s status as president at the time does not protect him from facing civil lawsuits connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol from lawmakers and members of the Capitol Police, a Washington appeals court said Friday.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling to allow lawsuits to proceed under the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 law from the wake of the Civil War that bans any conspiracy to prevent members of Congress from discharging the duties of their office.
The lawsuits allege that Trump, while he was still president, helped spark the attack by holding a rally and urging his supporters to “fight like hell” before they stormed the Capitol in a violent attack that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in the country’s history.
