The case also names as defendants the Republican former president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and groups including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers,extremist organisations that had members charged by the Justice Department with taking part in the siege.
A Trump adviser,Jason Miller,said in a statement on Tuesday local time (Wednesday AEDT) that Trump did not organise the rally that preceded the riot and “did not incite or conspire to incite any violence at the Capitol on January 6th”. A lawyer for Giuliani did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
The suit,filed in federal court in Washington under a Reconstruction-era law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act,comesthree days after Trump was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial that centred on allegations that he incited the riot,in which five people died. That acquittal is likely to open the door to fresh legal scrutiny over Trump’s actions before and during the siege. Additional suits could be brought by other members of Congress or by law enforcement officers injured while responding to the riot.
Even some Republicans who voted to acquit Trump acknowledged that the more proper venue to deal with Trump was in the courts,especially now that he has left the White House and lost certain legal protections that shielded him as president.
The suit traces the drawn-out effort by Trump and Giuliani to cast doubt on the election results even though courts across the country,and state election officials,repeatedly rejected their baseless allegations of fraud. Despite evidence to the contrary,the suit says,the men portrayed the election as stolen while Trump “endorsed rather than discouraged” threats of violence from his angry supporters in the weeks leading up to the assault on the Capitol.
“The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence,” the suit says. “It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully co-ordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the Electoral College.”