A federal appeals court in Washington said Friday that former President Donald Trump is not currently entitled to immunity from civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
The opinion from the three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allows the cases against Trump to move forward and comes nearly a year after the judges weighed Trump’s claims that he’s entitled to broad immunity from the suits brought by a group of congressional Democrats and veteran Capitol Police officers, who seek civil damages for the harms they alleged to have suffered because of the Capitol attack.
[It’s a unanimous opinion, predicated on what “official duties” include and do not include. They ruled that Trump’s January 6 activities were not official acts of a presidency, but rather campaign events by a candidate, for which immunity does not apply. To rule otherwise, they conclude, would be to disadvantage challengers in an election. “He is acting as office-seeker, not office-holder— no less than are the persons running against him when they take precisely the same actions…
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