Lawsuits against Donald Trump over the U.S. Capitol riot can move forward, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday, rejecting the former president’s bid to dismiss the cases accusing him of inciting the violent mob on Jan. 6, 2021.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit court knocked down Trump’s sweeping claims that presidential immunity shields him from liability in the lawsuits brought by Democratic lawmakers and police officers. But the three-judge panel said the 2024 Republican presidential primary frontrunner can continue to fight, as the cases proceed, to try to prove that his actions were taken in his official capacity as president.
Trump has said he can’t be sued over the riot that left dozens of police officers injured, arguing that his words during a rally before the storming of the Capitol addressed “matters of public concern” and fall within the scope of absolute presidential immunity.
The decision comes as Trump’s lawyers are arguing he is also immune from prosecution in the separate criminal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith that accuses Trump of illegally plotting to overturn his election loss to President Joe Biden. Smith’s team has signaled that it will make the case at trial that Trump is responsible for the violence at the Capitol and point to Trump’s continued embrace of the Jan. 6 rioters on the campaign trail to argue that he intended for the chaos that day.
Friday’s ruling underscores the challenges facing Trump as he tries to persuade courts, and potentially juries, that the actions he took in the run-up to the riot were part of his official duties as president. The judge presiding over his election subversion criminal trial, Tanya Chutkan, also rejected that claim in an order released Friday night.
While courts have afforded presidents broad immunity for their official acts, the judges made clear that that protection does not cover just any act or speech undertaken by a president. A president running for a second term, for example, is not carrying out the official duties of the presidency when he is speaking at a rally funded by his reelection campaign or attends a private fundraiser, the appeals court said.
“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 in their competing campaigns to attain precisely the same office,” Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote for the court.
But the court said its decision is not necessarily the final word on the issue of presidential immunity, leaving the door open for Trump to keep fighting the issue. And it took pains to note that it was not being asked to evaluate whether Trump was responsible for the riot or should be held to account in court. It also said Trump could still seek to argue that his actions were protected by the First Amendment — a claim he’s also made in his pending criminal case — or covered by other privileges.
“When these cases move forward in the district court, he must be afforded the opportunity to develop his own facts on the immunity question if he desires to show that he took the actions alleged in the complaints in his official capacity as president rather than in his unofficial capacity as a candidate,” the court said.
Georgia’s state Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to approve rules for a new commission to discipline and remove state prosecutors, meaning the commission can’t begin operating.
Some Republicans in Georgia want the new commission to discipline or remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for winning indictments of former President Donald Trump and 18 others.
In an unsigned order, justices said they have “grave doubts” about their ability to regulate the duties of district attorneys beyond the practice of law. They said that because lawmakers hadn’t expressly ordered justices to act, they were refusing to rule one way or the other.
“If district attorneys exercise judicial power, our regulation of the exercise of that power may well be within our inherent power as the head of the Judicial Branch,” justices wrote. “But if district attorneys exercise only executive power, our regulation of the exercise of that power would likely be beyond the scope of our judicial power.”
State Rep. Houston Gaines, an Athens Republican who helped guide the law through the state House earlier this year, said he believed lawmakers could as soon as January remove the requirement for the court to approve the rules, letting the commission begin operating.
“This commission has been years in the making — and now it has its appointees and rules and regulations ready to go,” Gaines wrote in a text. “As soon as the legislature can address this final issue from the court, rogue prosecutors will be held accountable.”
Georgia’s law is one of multiple attempts nationwide by Republicans to control prosecutors they don’t like. Republicans have inveighed against progressive prosecutors after some have brought fewer drug possession cases and sought shorter prison sentences, arguing Democrats are coddling criminals.
Beyond the hurdle of state Supreme Court approval of rules, four district attorneys are suing to overturn the commission, arguing that it unconstitutionally infringes on their power.
A jury awarded more than $1.2 million to Robert De Niro’s former personal assistant Thursday, finding one of his companies responsible for subjecting her to a toxic work environment.
While the jury found De Niro was not personally liable for the abuse, it said his company, Canal Productions, engaged in gender discrimination and retaliation against former assistant Graham Chase Robinson and should make two payments of $632,142 to her.
De Niro, who spent three days at the two-week trial — including two on the witness stand — has been ensnared in dueling lawsuits with Robinson since she quit in April 2019. He was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read aloud Thursday afternoon.
Robinson, 41, smiled as the verdict was being delivered. After the jury left the room, she hugged her lawyers.
Outside the courthouse, she smiled broadly and at other times seemed to be near tears. She did not comment.
Lawyers on both sides claimed victory.
Ivanka Trump didn’t want to testify. But on the stand Wednesday in her father’s civil fraud trial, she took the opportunity to contend the family business has “overdelivered,” even as she kept her distance from financial documents that New York state says were fraudulent.
Former President Donald Trump’s elder daughter capped a major stretch in the lawsuit that could reshape his real estate empire. She followed her father and her brothers Eric and Donald Trump Jr. to the witness stand, and the New York attorney general’s office rested its case after her testimony. The defense gets its turn now.
Ivanka Trump has been in her father’s inner circle in both business and politics, as an executive vice president at the family’s Trump Organization and then as a senior White House adviser. But she testified that she had no role in his personal financial statements, which New York Attorney General Letitia James claims were fraudulently inflated and deceived banks and lenders.
“Those were not things that I was privy to,” beyond having seen “a few documents and correspondence” that referred to them, Ivanka Trump said.
The ex-president and Republican 2024 front-runner denies any wrongdoing. He insisted in court Monday that his financial statements actually greatly underestimated his net worth, that any discrepancies were minor, that a disclaimer absolved him of liability anyway and that “this case is a disgrace.”
In even-tempered testimony that provided a counterpoint to her father’s caustic turn on the stand, Ivanka Trump touched on some of the same notes that the ex-president has hammered inside court and out — portraying the Trump Organization as a successful developer of big-dollar projects that satisfied its lenders.
The Doral golf resort in Florida? A “Herculean” renovation undertaken to refurbish a faded treasure that Donald Trump had visited in childhood, his daughter testified.
The company’s historic Old Post Office building-turned-hotel in Washington? “A labor of love” to turn a dilapidated building into a super-luxury hotel, while navigating approvals from a raft of different government agencies.
Donald Trump was abruptly called to the witness stand and then fined $10,000 on Wednesday after the judge in his civil fraud trial said the former president had violated a gag order. It was the second time in less than a week that Trump was penalized for his out-of-court comments.
Before imposing the latest fine, Judge Arthur Engoron summoned Trump from the defense table to testify about his comment to reporters hours earlier about “a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside” the judge.
Engoron had already ordered all participants in the trial not to comment publicly about his staff. That restriction from Oct. 3 followed a Trump social media post that maligned the judge’s principal law clerk, who sits next to him.
Trump and his lawyers insisted that his comment Wednesday was not about the clerk. They said he was referring to Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who had been testifying.
Engoron said Trump’s claim was “not credible,” noting that he sat closer to the clerk than to Cohen.
“The idea that the statement would refer to the witness,” Engoron said, “doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Five days earlier, Trump had been fined $5,000 after Engoron learned that the offending social media post from early October had lingered on Trump’s campaign website for weeks after being taken down — on the judge’s orders — from Trump’s Truth Social media platform.
Then, on Wednesday, the Republican presidential front-runner complained in a courthouse hallway that Engoron, a Democrat, is “a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”
Under oath on the witness stand, Trump told the judge that the remark was aimed at “you and Cohen.”
But Trump did not conceal his frustration with the clerk. “I think she’s very biased against us. I think we’ve made that clear,” Trump said during his roughly two minutes on the stand.
Three of Trump’s lawyers objected to the $10,000 fine, and they reiterated Trump’s claim that the clerk was partial.
Not long after he was fined and moments after one of his lawyers finished questioning Cohen, Trump stood up and walked out of the courtroom, trailed by his son Eric. Donald Trump has attended the trial voluntarily, and he can leave whenever he likes.
The episodes raise questions about whether Trump can abide by court directives that are aimed at reining in his rhetoric while respecting his free speech rights as he campaigns to return to the White House.
An appeals court in South Carolina is allowing Alex Murdaugh to ask a judge to throw out his murder convictions and life sentence and get a new trial after his lawyers accused the court clerk in his trial of influencing the jury.
The one-paragraph decision Tuesday could open the door for a full hearing where witnesses who would have to testify under oath could include Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill, the jurors who deliberated a few hours after the six-week trial and even Judge Clifton Newman, widely praised for overseeing the case.
A time and place or the scope of the hearing will be determined later. But even if his conviction is overturned, Murdaugh won’t walk out of prison. He pleaded guilty last month to financial crimes for stealing millions of dollars from needy personal injury clients and a settlement for the family of his longtime maid who died in a fall at his home.
Murdaugh is awaiting a judge to hand down a sentence for those crimes that will almost certainly be for years if not decades behind bars.
Murdaugh’s lawyers filed their appeal last month after saying they had heard from three jurors who said Hill told some of them not to trust Murdaugh when he testified in his own defense. They said the court clerk, in charge of helping jurors and ensuring the trial ran efficiently, also had private conversations with the jury foreperson and pressured jurors to come to a quick verdict.
“She asked jurors about their opinions about Mr. Murdaugh’s guilt or innocence. She instructed them not to believe evidence presented in Mr. Murdaugh’s defense, including his own testimony. She lied to the judge to remove a juror she believed might not vote guilty. And she pressured jurors to reach a guilty verdict quickly so she could profit from it,” defense attorneys Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian wrote.
The attorneys called Tuesday’s ruling welcome news. “We intend to proceed expeditiously and will seek a full blown evidentiary hearing,” they said in a statement.
Hill has spoken little publicly about the allegations and her lawyer didn’t respond to a text message Tuesday. But the author who helped her write a self-published book called “Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders” asked people to give Hill the same presumption of innocence they were supposed to give Murdaugh during the trial.
The family of a Black high school student in Texas on Saturday filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state’s governor and attorney general over his ongoing suspension by his school district for his hairstyle.
Darryl George, 17, a junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, has been serving an in-school suspension since Aug. 31 at the Houston-area school. School officials say his dreadlocks fall below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violate the district’s dress code.
George’s mother, Darresha George, and the family’s attorney deny the teenager’s hairstyle violates the dress code, saying his hair is neatly tied in twisted dreadlocks on top of his head.
The lawsuit accuses Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton of failing to enforce the CROWN Act, a new state law outlawing racial discrimination based on hairstyles. Darryl George’s supporters allege the ongoing suspension by the Barbers Hill Independent School District violates the law, which took effect Sept. 1.
The lawsuit alleges Abbott and Paxton, in their official duties, have failed to protect Darryl George’s constitutional rights against discrimination and against violations of his freedom of speech and expression. Darryl George “should be permitted to wear his hair in the manner in which he wears it ... because the so-called neutral grooming policy has no close association with learning or safety and when applied, disproportionately impacts Black males,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed in Houston federal court by Darryl George’s mother, is the latest legal action taken related to the suspension.
On Tuesday, Darresha George and her attorney filed a formal complaint with the Texas Education Agency, alleging Darryl George is being harassed and mistreated by school district officials over his hair and that his in-school suspension is in violation of the CROWN Act.
They allege that during his suspension, Darryl George is forced to sit for eight hours on a stool and that he’s being denied the hot free lunch he’s qualified to receive. The agency is investigating the complaint.
Darresha George said she was recently hospitalized after a series of panic and anxiety attacks brought on from stress related to her son’s suspension.
On Wednesday, the school district filed its own lawsuit in state court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act.
Barbers Hill Superintendent Greg Poole has said he believes the dress code is legal and that it teaches students to conform as a sacrifice benefiting everyone.
The school district said it would not enhance the current punishment against Darryl George while it waits for a ruling on its lawsuit.
The CROWN Act, an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination and bars employers and schools from penalizing people because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including Afros, braids, dreadlocks, twists or Bantu knots. Texas is one of 24 states that have enacted a version of the act.
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