WASHINGTON (AP) – Donald Trump acquitted in his second impeachment trial it may not be the last word on whether he is to blame for the Capitol’s deadly riot. The next step for the former president could be the courts.
Now, as a private citizen, Trump is stripped of the protection of legal responsibility given to him by the presidency. This change in status is something that even Republicans who voted Saturday to acquit of inciting the Jan. 6 attack insist on urging Americans to move on from the ouster.
“President Trump remains responsible for everything he did while in office, as a normal citizen, unless the statute of limitations has been met,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said of Kentucky, after this vote. He insisted that the courts were a more appropriate place to hold Trump accountable than a trial in the Senate.
“It still didn’t come out with anything,” McConnell said. “However”.
The insurrection at the Capitol, in which five people died, is just one of the legal cases that overshadowed Trump in the months following his removal from office. He also faces legal exposure in Georgia for an alleged campaign of pressure against state election officials and in Manhattan about cash payments and commercial offers.
But Trump’s guilt under the law for inciting riots is by no means clear. The standard is high in court decisions dating back 50 years. Trump could also be sued for casualties, although he has some constitutional protections, including whether he acted as president. These cases would be reduced to their intent.
Legal scholars say that a proper criminal investigation takes time and that there are at least five years to prescribe the case to file a federal case. New tests appear every day.
“They’re too early in their investigation to find out,” said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “They’ve arrested 200 people, they’re chasing hundreds more. All of these people could be potential witnesses because some have said Trump made me do it.”
What is not known, he said, is what Trump was doing during the time of the riot, and that could be the key. The dismissal did not give many answers. But federal investigators in a criminal investigation have far more power to force evidence through grand jury citations.
“It’s not an easy case, but that’s just what we know now and that can change,” Levenson said.
The legal question is whether Trump or any of the speakers at the rally near the White House that preceded the assault on the Capitol incited violence and whether they knew his words would have that effect. This is the rule the Supreme Court set in its 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader.
Trump urged the crowd on Jan. 6 to march on the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to affirm Joe Biden’s presidential election, even Trump promised he would go with his supporters, though in the end he did not. . “You will never reclaim our country with weakness,” Trump said.
He had also spent weeks waking up supporters about their increasingly combative language and false election claims urging them to “stop the theft”.
Trump’s dismissal lawyers said he did nothing illegal. Trump, in a statement after the acquittal, admitted no wrongdoing.
Federal prosecutors have said they are looking at all angles of the assault on the Capitol and whether the violence had been incited. Columbia District Attorney General Karl Racine has said district prosecutors are studying whether to prosecute Trump under local law that criminalizes statements that motivate violence.
“Let it be known that the attorney general has a potential charge that he can use,” Racine told MSNBC last month. The indictment would be a felony with a maximum sentence of six months in prison.
Trump’s top lawyer in the White House repeatedly warned Trump on Jan. 6 that he could be held accountable. This message was sent in part to urge Trump to condemn the violence that took place on his behalf and to acknowledge that he would step down on January 20, when Biden was inaugurated. He left the White House that day.
Since then, many of those accused of the riots say they acted directly on Trump’s orders. Some offered to testify. A phone call between Trump and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy arose during the impeachment trial in which McCarthy, while the riots stormed the Capitol, begged Trump to overturn the crowd. Trump responded, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
The McCarthy call is significant because it could point to Trump’s intention, mood, and knowledge of the actions of the riots.
Judicial cases that try to prove incitement often run into the first amendment. In recent years, federal judges have taken a hard line against the riot law. The Virginia Federal Court of Appeals reduced the Anti-Riot Act, to a maximum sentence of five years in prison, because it swept away a constitutionally protected speech. The court found invalid parts of the law encompassing speech that tends to “encourage” or “promote” a riot, as well as speech that “urged” others to revolt or that involved the mere defense of violence.
The same court upheld the convictions of two members of a white supremacist group who admitted to punching and kicking protesters during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Federal prosecutors may decide not to file charges, and if Trump were charged in any of the many other separate investigations, federal prosecutors could decide that justice would be done elsewhere.
Atlanta prosecutors have recently opened a criminal investigation in Trump’s attempts to undo his election loss in Georgia, including a Jan. 2 phone call urging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse the Biden narrow victory.
And Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., is in the midst of an 18-month grand jury jury investigation focused in part on payments with money paid to women on behalf of Trump and whether Trump or his businesses manipulated the value of the assets, inflating them in some cases and minimizing them in others: to obtain favorable loan conditions and tax benefits.
North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who voted to vote along with McConnell and 41 other Republicans, argued that because Trump is no longer in office, removal is not the right way to ask. you tell him.
“Ultimate accountability is through our criminal justice system where political passions are checked and a legal process is called for due to the constitution. No president is above the law nor is he immune from prosecution, and that includes former President Trump. “
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Associated Press writers Jim Mustian and Michael R. Sisak in New York and Mark Sherman contributed to this report.
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Follow Colleen Long on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ctlong1