NAACP Accuses Trump and Giuliani of Inciting U.S. Capitol Riot in a Federal Lawsuit
It’s been one week since Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson filed a federal lawsuit against former President Donald J. Trump and his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, accusing them of violating a 19th-century statute by conspiring to incite the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday, Feb. 16, in Washington D.C.’s Federal District Court by the NAACP and civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll. Other members of Congress, including Representatives Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), intend to join the litigation as plaintiffs in the coming days and weeks.
Ku Klux Klan Act.
Thompson is chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and a long-serving and the only African American Mississippi Congressperson.
Thompson filed the complaint in his personal capacity. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is representing him in the suit, with the law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll.
“It should surprise nobody that an anti-Klan statute can be used against the white people who attacked the Capitol, because the Klan itself is just the fairly normal white response to losing political power to a multiracial coalition,” wrote
The Nation’s Elie Mystal on February 17.
U. S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)
NAACP President/CEO Derrick Johnson
On Feb. 16, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson and the NAACP filed a lawsuit naming Trump and Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, alleging that they violated an 1871 law by conspiring to incite the violent Jan. 6 insurrection that resulted in the deaths of seven people. The purpose of the coup attempt was to thwart certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
“January 6th was one of the most shameful days in our country’s history, and it was instigated by the president himself. His gleeful support of violent White supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger,” Thompson said in a statement. “It is by the slimmest of luck that the outcome was not deadlier. While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the President accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatan
Fri Feb 19, 2021 The leftist NAACP, which never met a conservative it didn’t consider to be a racist hatemonger, is suing former President Donald Trump using an obscure law that was wielded against the Democratic Party-affiliated terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered blacks and their Republican enemies after the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan Act is an unusual tool to pull from a cobweb-covered chest of old laws nobody knew were still in existence. President Ulysses S. Grant (he’s the guy on the $50 bill, millennials!) used the statute to declare martial law, penalize terrorist organizations, and use military force to suppress the KKK after the Civil War.
401(k) lawsuit update: 2 dismissals, 2 settlements
Abbott Labs and Genentech won dismissals in cases against them, although plaintiffs can refile their complaints. Cerner Corp. and BlackRock have reached settlements in class-action cases against them.
February 19, 2021 3 MINS
Abbott Laboratories this month fended off for the second time a 2020 lawsuit from a retirement plan participant whose account was fraudulently raided of $245,000.
The plaintiff, Heide Bartnett, also sued the plan record keeper, Alight Solutions, which has not succeeded in getting the claims against it tossed.
In early 2019, an identity thief began corresponding with the plan’s customer service center and eventually managed to get the bulk of Bartnett’s 401(k) assets transferred to a brand-new bank account, according to court records. Since then, Bartnett has been able to recoup about $108,000.