This could be the last chance to hold Trump accountable until January 6

WASHINGTON – It’s the sound of thousands of fists hitting doors and windows that lawmakers can still hear when they close their eyes and rewind to January 6, 2021.

The terror that coursed through their bodies as rioters (many of them armed) stormed the US Capitol and demanded that Donald Trump remain in power is something they can still draw on. The weight of a single question raging in their minds that day was still fresh: Would they make it out of the building alive?

“These insurgents called to kill [then-Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “They were threatening to kill us all. “I didn’t know if we were going to go out.”

At one point, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said, he opened a “go bag” containing a gas mask.

“I’ve never done that before or since,” he said. “You never think a day like this will come.”

Trump has so far evaded responsibility for the events of January 6, namely accusations that he conspired to intimidate lawmakers from certifying the 2020 election results. His 2024 election victory stopped former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal case against him in its tracks.

But Lee v. Trump, a civil case brought by a group of lawmakers, has survived every attempt Trump has made to bury it. for four years. And soon, the judge presiding over the case will make a critical decision that could be the last chance the country will have to hold Trump accountable in a court of law on January 6.

In a series of exclusive interviews with News themezone, some of the lawmakers who sued Trump spoke about their years-long fight for accountability for one of the most shameful days in American history.

back to the future

Jayapal was recovering from knee surgery on Jan. 6, which limited his mobility as he struggled to safety from rioters who were kicking down doors, breaking windows and shouting threats.

He spent hours inside a room with other lawmakers, including Republicans who refused to wear masks even though COVID-19 was surging at the time. When she got home that night and poured herself a “strong drink,” she said she told her husband they were going to get COVID. Both tested positive days later.

““It was very, very stressful and also caused some long-term impacts of COVID on my husband,” she said. “He had a heart attack that we were pretty sure was caused by that because he’s one of the healthiest guys you’ll ever meet.”

She considers herself lucky not to have been physically attacked. On January 6, more than 140 police officers were attacked by rioters. Five police officers defending the Capitol later died, some of them by suicide. Four people in the crowd died at the scene, including rioter Ashli ​​Babbitt, who was shot by police while climbing through a broken glass door and ignoring multiple orders to leave.

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) was on the third floor of the gallery inside the House, squeezed between narrow rows of seats where reporters often sit to watch the proceedings, listening to a “growing crescendo of speeches that seemed out of order.”

He understood the gravity of the moment when a police officer ordered lawmakers to put on gas masks stored under the gallery seats.

“That crystallized for me the danger we were in,” he said.

Some lawmakers were hyperventilating, Johnson said. He remembered that another colleague was on the floor having a panic attack.

“It was like we were trapped,” he said. “They told us to stay there. All the banging, all the noise was getting louder.”

He was one of the last legislators to leave the chamber. It would take time, he said, to assimilate reality.

“It was like we were under attack, in survival mode and then dealing with the aftermath in a state of shock basically,” he said. “I didn’t want to share what had happened. I just didn’t want to talk. “I was processing it.”

“I started having all kinds of different emotions: anger, sadness, doubts, bad mood… a little bit of depression,” he added. “If you clapped, it would trigger a noise like the one I heard: the banging. It took me several weeks to get back to normal and even now, thinking about it, it really brings up some very deep feelings.”

Nadler was in his nearby office with an employee when the attack began. He could clearly see the rioters from his office and moved to another nearby office that he thought might be safer.

“We cordoned off the doors and kept watching on TV and then we heard what sounded like tapping feet and tons of people walking through the hallway right outside the door,” he said.

He and his staff remained there for several hours.

It would take hours to secure the Capitol and for lawmakers to get back to what they needed to do there: certify the results of the 2020 election. Certification is the last step before a president is inaugurated. It is a crucial event where members of the House and Senate meet to count the Electoral College results received from the states and hear objections. Objections can only be accepted if both the House and Senate agree.

After the chaos of January 6, the long-standing process underpinning certification became less ambiguous with the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. (The law was originally written in 1877.) Deadlines for states to submit election certificates were more clearly enumerated under the revised law, for example, and the vice president’s role in certification, always considered ceremonial, was clarified as a “purely ministerial” role.

Trump’s interpretation of the Electoral Count Act of 1877 was particularly devious. He baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud had tainted the election and insisted that then-Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally stop certification.

“I literally think they were trying to murder democracy at that time.”

Representative Pramila Jayapal

“The states want to vote again. The states were defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people,” Trump said. saying on January 6 from the Ellipse. “And in fact, I just talked to Mike. I said, ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is doing nothing. That takes courage.’ And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen.”

Trump’s stolen election lies had gone on for weeks leading up to January 6th. It was no secret that Trump’s Republican allies in the House and Senate had planned to object when the certification came. Many Republicans spread their plans to object on social media and a A plan was developed in public to present the fake electors as if they were real..

What had been a mostly boring procedural ceremony, a necessary element of the peaceful transfer of power, had become a hot point of contention.

“Without [the certification]they are not free and fair elections,” Jayapal said. “It is the foundation of our democracy. …That’s why, despite everything that happened, we had to go back and certify it that night. Nobody wanted to do it, in the sense that everyone was traumatized and shocked and scared and all that other stuff. But there was never a doubt that if we were given the opportunity, if the insurrectionists were stopped, as ultimately happened, we would have to return right then and there and certify the elections.”

Years after that moment, she said she is still haunted by something from that day.

“[The certification] It almost didn’t happen because those people and Donald Trump almost stopped us from doing the job. “I literally think they were trying to murder democracy at that time,” he said.

A turning point

In February 2021, the Senate acquitted Trump of inciting an insurrection. The lawsuit was filed the next day.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) was the first to file the claim. The NAACP and the law firm Cohen Milstein represented the case. Nadler, Jayapal and Johnson joined the lawsuit in April 2021, along with Democrat Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman (New Jersey), Steve Cohen (Tennessee), Verónica Escobar (Texas), Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Maxine Waters (California) and then-California Representatives Karen Bass, now mayor of Los Angeles, and Barbara Lee, now mayor of Oakland. (Thompson was removed of the lawsuit after becoming chairman of the Jan. 6 committee. With subpoena powers, he found it necessary to avoid “even the appearance of a conflict of interest,” and Lee took over as lead plaintiff.)

Specifically, the demand alleges that It is January 6, 2021, Trump violated 1871 Ku Klux Klan Law whipping people into a frenzy and, with the help of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, intimidated lawmakers from carrying out their duties to certify the 2020 election.

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When he governs in the coming weeks, US District Judge Amit Mehta will decide whether Trump’s conduct around January 6 was in his “official capacity” or whether he operated primarily as a “private” candidate seeking re-election.

A candidate seeking re-election acts in his or her own interest, not in an official capacity. For the purposes of the lawsuit, Trump wants to be seen as an official actor.

His calls for his followers to reject certification, his demands that Pence send certified results “Back to the United States” and his failure to immediately ask the Capitol for help (and instead post campaign-focused messages on social media) are prime examples of “private” and “campaign-seeking” behavior, according to the lawmakers’ lawsuit.

Mehta already ruled in 2022 that some comments Trump made during his speech from the Ellipse, such as telling his followers to “fight like hell,” were No done in an “official” capacity. Trump appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which agreed that Trump’s conduct was likely that of an office seeker, not an official.

It was huge when Mehta refused to dismiss the lawmakers’ civil case, said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

“It was the first time in the history of this country that a court determined that a president was not entitled to immunity for conduct that occurred while he was president,” he said.

The appeals court then ordered Mehta to review more evidence related to the conduct. Trump’s visit on January 6 and definitively decide what happened.

If Mehta discovers that Trump acted as a candidate for office, the president will likely go directly to the appeals court (or go to the Supreme Court) and demand that the case be dismissed or the ruling be overturned.

But it’s unclear how successful that strategy would be this time. The court’s conservative majority has been favorable to Trump, but a major ruling last year could hurt him, Sellers said.

when the judges spoke about presidential immunity In a July 2024 question, Chief Justice John Roberts said presidential conduct fell into three categories: official acts that carried full immunity; official acts that occur within the “outer perimeter” of official functions, requiring at least the “presumption of immunity”; and unofficial acts that are not immune from prosecution.

Roberts said there must be an analysis of the “extensive and interrelated allegations” to decide what conduct is what.

“It is noteworthy that when the issue of presidential immunity came before the Supreme Court, the court cited the ruling in our case on what the standard was for what is considered ‘outside the perimeter’ of the presidency – and therefore private conduct – several times,” Sellers said. “That suggests that the Supreme Court is comfortable with the standard that the Court of Appeals adopted, which is the same standard that we applied before the District Court.”

Jayapal said this moment in the legal fight is important for many reasons, but chief among them: it could enshrine a record of the insurrection.

If Trump faces no consequences, he said, he worries there could be another day like Jan. 6.

Trump has long tried rewrite history on January 6 from his pulpit, but he can’t do it so easily in a court of law.

“I see Trump’s second term already being much worse, and I would say that’s in part because he was allowed to return to office and was never held accountable for trying to steal the 2020 election,” Jayapal said. “He was never held accountable for claiming to be acting in an official capacity when he clearly was not.”

There’s nowhere left to hide

Trump called January 6 a “joke“just a few weeks ago. He continues falsely claimagainst intelligence community assessments and independent inspector general’s findingsthat FBI agents were responsible for stirring up the mob on January 6. In the lawsuit, Trump defended his conduct on Jan. 6 as necessary and normal for a president concerned about what is happening across the government.

One of Trump’s first actions when he returned to the White House was to pardon more than 1,500 defendants on January 6, including those who violently attacked police. Issued pardons and commutations for Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members convicted of organizing a seditious conspiracy to stop the transfer of power.

“Trump tries to rewrite history… but you can’t rewrite history. You can try ‘1984,’ but the truth is the truth.”

– Representative Jerry Nadler

“A lot of these people who were convicted were discharged. People who were serving their sentences. People awaiting trial. People who had pleaded guilty or had served their sentence – they were granted clemency,” Johnson said.

“There are dangerous people released into the streets,” he added.

The pardons made America seem like a “dystopian place to be.” Jayapala said.

Republicans formed a new committee on Jan. 6 this fall, three years after the House Select Committee to Investigate on Jan. 6 issued its report. final report. that report found Triumph was based on “meaningless” fraud claims to advance his lie that the 2020 elections were stolen from him, pressured state and local election officials saying the election was “corrupt,” delayed his response to send aid to the Capitol, and more.

According to the committee’s final report, Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 left Pentagon officials so uncomfortable that they told investigators they were reluctant to deploy the military to quell the mob because they feared Trump would issue an “unlawful order” to use the troops for his own coup attempt.

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“Trump is trying to rewrite history… but you can’t rewrite history,” Nadler said. “You can try ‘1984,’ but the truth is the truth.”

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, told News themezone that this litigation has always been about ensuring that “guardrails” exist against tyrannical power and protecting the peaceful transfer of power.

“When people violate those barriers, we must move beyond partisanship and political alignments and really focus on [the question of] what kind of society and nation we want to be,” he said.

“Nations grow and societies prosper when we learn from history, good and bad, rather than trying to redefine it,” he added. “What we are seeing with this administration and Congress is that they are trying to redefine history even though Americans across the country, from all walks of life, witnessed with their own eyes what was happening at the Capitol. And what was happening was an insurrection.”

Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, he said, are a “textbook” example of what the Ku Klux Klan Act was created to do: stop heavy-handed use against those tasked with defending a democracy.

Since the wave of rioters bearing Trump’s name on flags and signs stormed the Capitol, political violence and extremism have been on the rise across the United States.

Reuters found that political violence had increased by at least 200 cases since the assault on the Capitol in 2021. Anti-government extremism has also increased, with government officials being attacked more frequently. A report from the University of Maryland found that the percentage of violent events targeting government officials and facilities more than doubled in the first half of 2025 compared to that period in 2024.

Among many other things, an Arizona state legislator publicly called for Jayapal be hanged in September.

Lawmakers argue that a perfect storm is brewing: increased political polarization, a lack of trust in the justice system and rules that the president ignores or abuses.

But lawmakers have been playing the long game. Very long game.

Johnson said he is “more confident today” that democracy can survive Trump.

The “monster will be put back in the box,” he said.