A federal judge said President Donald Trump can be sued in connection with civil claims alleging his Jan. 6, 2021, rally remarks helped incite an attack on the U.S. Capitol, even as the judge preserved immunity for some official conduct during that day. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled Tuesday that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech delivered at the Ellipse near the White House shortly before the Capitol siege began “plausibly” amounts to incitement that is not protected by the First Amendment.
Mehta’s decision addressed what parts of Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 are shielded from suit by presidential immunity and what parts are not. The judge said Trump is not protected from liability for much of his Jan. 6 conduct, including the Ellipse speech and many of his social media posts from that day, while distinguishing other actions as official acts.
In his ruling, Mehta wrote that “President Trump has not shown that the Speech reasonably can be understood as falling within the outer perimeter of his Presidential duties,” concluding that “the content of the Ellipse Speech confirms that it is not covered by official-acts immunity.” Mehta added that he was not making a final pronouncement on immunity for any particular act, and said the defense could be reasserted at trial under a more demanding standard of proof.
The decision sets up further proceedings in one of the last unresolved civil cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack, with the prospect of a civil trial in the same courthouse where Trump faced criminal charges. The ruling comes amid an appeals process that had already upheld the judge’s earlier approach to immunity questions, and Trump’s legal team said in a statement that Trump was acting within his official duties and that presidents enjoy “absolute immunity from civil and criminal claims for acts in their singular role.”
The civil claims concern Trump’s speech to supporters before the mob disrupted the joint session of Congress certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory over Trump. The AP reported that Trump closed out the rally speech by saying, “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s lawyers argued that his actions on Jan. 6 met the threshold for presidential immunity.
The plaintiffs’ legal position was that Trump could not show he was acting entirely in his official capacity rather than as an office-seeking private individual, and they also argued that the Supreme Court has held that office-seeking conduct falls outside presidential immunity. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi who led the House Homeland Security Committee at the time, sued Trump and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, along with members of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, extremist groups that were named in the litigation.
More Democratic members of Congress later joined the case, which was consolidated with claims by law enforcement officers who guarded the Capitol. The plaintiffs’ legal team includes attorneys from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Damon Hewitt, the group’s president and executive director, praised Mehta’s ruling in a statement as a “monumental victory for the rule of law,” saying it affirmed “that no one, including the president of the United States, is above it.”
Hewitt also said the court recognized that Trump’s actions leading to the Jan. 6 insurrection fell outside the scope of presidential duties, framing the decision as “an important step toward accountability for the violent attack on the Capitol and our democracy.” The AP reported that the civil claims survived Trump’s sweeping clemency at the start of his second term, when he pardoned, commuted sentences and ordered dismissal of more than 1,500 criminal cases tied to the Capitol siege, during which more than 100 police officers were injured while defending the Capitol from rioters.
The judge’s ruling also reflected an earlier legal history in the same case. Mehta had refused to dismiss claims against Trump in a February 2022 ruling, finding Trump not entitled to presidential immunity from claims brought by Democratic members of Congress and law enforcement officers and concluding at that stage that Trump’s rally words “plausibly” amounted to incitement not protected by the First Amendment. The case returned to Mehta after an appeals court upheld his 2022 decision, and he said Tuesday that his latest immunity ruling applies a more “rigorous” legal standard at the later stage.
Mehta said Tuesday that Trump remains free to reassert official-acts immunity at trial, but the burden would remain with Trump and would be subject to a higher standard of proof. At issue, the AP reported, was the line between Trump’s speech and social media conduct—which Mehta said plausibly fall outside official-acts immunity—and official actions on Jan. 6, including remarks from the Rose Garden and interactions with Justice Department officials, which Mehta said could not be the basis for civil liability in that posture.