Earlier this spring, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., largely denied President Donald Trump’s immunity claim in the long-running civil litigation seeking to hold him accountable for Jan. 6. As Trump appeals the immunity ruling, the judge said Thursday that the litigation against the president will stay on hold pending that appeal.
The latest ruling reaffirms that it will be some time before the courts resolve the series of separate but related civil cases the judge previously called “the last vestiges of litigation concerning the events at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
In handing down his latest order, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, noted the litigation involves eight separate cases, six of which name Trump as the only defendant. But in one of the cases that has many other defendants, called Smith v. Trump, which was brought by U.S. Capitol police officers, Mehta declined to halt litigation while Trump appeals. Yet the judge agreed the discovery process can’t go forward against Trump himself in that case while the president pursues his immunity appeal.
Rejecting a total halt to the Smith litigation, Mehta said that would be unfair to the plaintiffs when it comes to any outstanding discovery requests and efforts to collect evidence from third parties. The judge observed that “the events of January 6th are now over five years old” and that there’s “a genuine risk that, with extended delay, witnesses’ memories will fade or witnesses will be unavailable or more difficult to track down. The court cannot say that such prejudice is inevitable, but President Trump has offered no reason to allay the concern.”
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The judge conceded the public has an interest in ensuring Trump’s immunity protections “are not trampled upon before final resolution.” But he said the public “also has an interest in seeing this case of national importance move forward.”
In seeking a total pause of all litigation ahead of Mehta’s ruling, Trump’s lawyers said that even taking “non-Presidential discovery” while he appeals would be “illusory.” They said that any meaningful discovery “would seek to prove the same President-focused issues: what President Trump allegedly knew, intended, or encouraged; what others allegedly did alongside him or at his direction; and whether those alleged acts support liability against him (they do not).”
As for Trump’s civil immunity appeal, that could eventually be decided by the Supreme Court that granted him broad criminal immunity in the federal election interference prosecution, which the Justice Department dropped after he won the 2024 election due to its internal policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
In their civil complaint seeking money damages and other relief, the Smith plaintiffs alleged that Trump and others “deliberately and persistently made and encouraged false claims of election fraud to discredit the outcome of the [2020] election and disingenuously incite outrage among his supporters.” The plaintiffs further alleged that the defendants “encouraged and supported acts of violence, knowing full well that among his supporters were extremist groups and individuals, like PROUD BOYS, who had demonstrated their propensity to the use of violence against those they regarded as critical of TRUMP.”
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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