The city of Washington, D.C. sued the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Tuesday, alleging that the groups violated the Ku Klux Klan Act and seeking damages stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
This will knock the wind out of their tattered sails.
Good that someone is willing to bring the hammer down on them, since Garland apparently won’t.
Civil suit?!?!? Why not criminal charges??? If those charged had brown or black skin they’d be jailed or dead.
Here’s a related story.
Though the Proud Boys have avoided the national spotlight since the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s presidential defeat, that doesn’t mean the far-right, violent, misogynist militia has gone anywhere. As The Daily Beast has previously reported, the Proud Boys have been showing up at school board meetings across the country, local mask protests, and city council meetings to intimidate small-town proceedings and recruit new members. “The plan of attack if you want to make change is to get involved at the local level,” North Carolina Proud Boy, Jeremy Bertino, told The New York Times. Bertino claims the militia has undergone internal restructuring, with local chapters replacing national oversight.
The alarming development shows that the militia is pursuing a grassroots strategy to push their far-right ideologies in small towns as they prepare for the 2022 midterm elections. Their presence has agitated small towns, with several schoolsforced to cancel classes when local Proud Boys descended on campuses to protest mask rules.
That’s a lot of defendants: 2 organizations, 31 named individuals, and 50 “John and Jane Does”.
The DC AG suing the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys with the funds going to compensate the police for their injuries and mental health support is a clever flip the script move to defund these paramilitary organizations.
Todays New York Times article about the Proud Boys showing up to school board meetings to oppose certain books particularly those that deal with sexual and gender related issues is the height of irony.
700+ have already been indicted, including likely every single defendant in this suit, some of whom (eg. Tarrio) are currently in prison. From TFA:
The suit, which also named 50 unidentified defendants, noted that several of the named defendants have already reached plea deals with the federal government.
Most of them are already facing criminal charges from the DoJ. This is not an either/or situation, more of a both/and one.
I think this is an important development because Trump continues to use the threat of violence and actual violence against both Democratic and Republican office holders as well as election officials who don’t bow down to his lies. Bringing down his militia groups may be a way to tamp that down.
Also having to use provisions of the KKK act in 2021 sort of shows how low we’ve fallen because of Trump and Republicans.
I imagine 5 justices on SCOTUS are thinking, the KKK Act? How’d we not strangle that baby in the cradle already?
Discovery in the civil suit might also turn up a few things that could lead to new criminal charges.
Proof-reader alert:
The defendants named [include] both far-right organizations as well as dozens of their members
“The result of that planning, the January 6th Attack on the Capitol, was not a protest or a rally. It was a coordinated act of domestic terrorism.”
Connecting them to d.t. is paramount.
As @sparrowhawk pointed out above, most, if not all, are already being criminally charged.
But this could mean that after they get their couple of years in jail done, they are still facing paying off a big pile of $$$ – possibly for an extended period of time.
Double whammy.
Also, the bar is lower in many instances. Think O.J.
OT but just toooo funny:
These people all really believe they are living in the world of The Sting, where everyone, Lonnegan, Gondorf, et al. is cheating and it’s just a matter of who’s cheating better (and who’s Lonnegan or Gondorf).
It is alarming and it should be exposed. Placing citizens who are election officials in fear and jeopardy is a highly undemocratic occurrence which has the potential to torpedo our democracy.
This is wholly the outcome of our having a collective bout of stupidity and electing Donald Trump in 2016. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knew from the summer of 2016 that this man had fascist tendencies and the ability to use his assets and demagoguery to highlight those fascist tendencies in others.
The authoritarianism has steadily grown at an alarming rate from the first minute that he appeared in our politics.
It’s fascist terrorism. Let’s start calling it what it is.
Though he was more a catalyst than a source. Bolsonaro, Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán, etc. all predated Trump in growing influence around the globe, but Trump really put things into overdrive in the US (and helped bolster other dictators and wannabes in their home countries).
DC Attorney General Sues Proud Boys And Oath Keepers For Jan. 6 Damages, Citing KKK Act
OK. When will Twice-impeached Lardass Donnie Propecia be prosecuted?