Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and the NAACP are suing former President Donald Trump and his longtime ally Rudy Giuliani for allegedly conspiring with a pair of hate groups to storm the U.S. Capitol and block the Electoral College count in January. And they’re using a 150-year-old law as the basis of the suit.
Thompson and the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, allege in the suit, obtained by NBC News, that Trump, Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers used “intimidation, harassment, and threats,” to stop the vote count and caused the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in the process. This, they said, violated the
Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
The statute was first passed following the Civil War to combat KKK violence and allow Black people to take action against hate groups who use “force, intimidation, or threat” to prevent leaders from doing the duties of their office, Levin explained. Particularly,
it prohibits people from using violence and conspiracies to keep Congress members from doing their jobs. The law was passed at a time when the KKK was openly, violently terrorizing Black people and Congress members while seeking to block Reconstruction-era reforms for Black people in the South.
Joseph Sellers, a partner at the civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, the firm representing the plaintiffs, said the "statute is tailor-made to the situation here."
“I’ve been practicing civil rights law for 40 years, the choice to invoke [this act] fit so well with the circumstances that occurred. It's reminiscent of tactics that the Ku Klux Klan engaged in," Sellers said. "This is part of the law in our country, it provides real relief, and it’s exactly the kind of statute needed to address this problem. Part of this suit is intended to focus the public’s attention on the fact that this did cause members of Congress harm. And that harm is compensable under our laws. This suit is the quintessential effort to ensure that the rule of law is followed.”
The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and asks a judge to rule that Trump, Giuliani and the hate groups’ actions violated federal law. Although there’s no evidence of an actual meeting between Trump, Giuliani and the groups, experts say
utilizing the law as a civil suit — rather than criminal — is a “good strategy” because the burden of proving a conspiracy was stoked is low.
“
Congressman Thompson only has to establish that his contentions are correct more likely than not,” Levin said. “In other words, a slight tip of that scale of justice in his favor is significantly less of a burden relating to the evidence of what one would have to prove in a criminal trial.”