The Dictatorship
Jan. 6 rioters received pardons from Trump, but that didn’t make civil suits go away
In the only 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the Republican was asked whether he had any regrets about the Jan. 6 attack. It was a good question, which he struggled to answer before eventually declaring: “Nobody on the other side was killed.”
This was offensive for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the Republican’s description of law enforcement officers as “the other side.” But just as notable was the fact that Trump was wrong: Some of the officers who defended the U.S. Capitol from the rioters acting in Trump’s name took their own lives in the aftermath of the insurrectionist violence.
The rioters who were held legally accountable for their crimes, including those convicted of violent felonies, received presidential pardons from Trump on the first day of his second term. But while the Republican could shield the rioters from criminal accountability, he couldn’t stop civil litigation. The Associated Press reported on a federal jury this week awarding $500,000 to the widow and estate of a police officer who took his own life after Jan. 6.
The eight-member jury ordered that man, 69-year-old chiropractor David Walls-Kaufman, to pay $380,000 in punitive damages and $60,000 in compensatory damages to Erin Smith for assaulting her husband, Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith, inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They awarded an additional $60,000 to compensate Jeffrey Smith’s estate for his pain and suffering.
The defendant, who served a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to a Capitol riot-related misdemeanor in January 2023, didn’t deny participating in Jan. 6, but he claimed that Smith was assaulted by one of his fellow rioters. The jury, who saw video evidence from the officer’s body camera, disagreed and held him liable.
The case might be appealed, or it might be settled. Either way, the jury’s verdict served as a timely reminder: Trump’s pardons didn’t apply to civil cases.
Indeed, let’s also not forget that the president himself, while in office, also can’t be held legally accountable for alleged crimes, but he, too, is facing Jan. 6 civil lawsuits filed by several officers who were injured by his rabid followers. Indeed, Trump’s Justice Department has predictably rallied to his defense and tried to have the president removed from the cases in which he’s the defendant. (Those civil cases have been consolidated and are pending before U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta.)
To be sure, even if Trump were to lose the civil suits, there would be no criminal consequences, but they could prove to be politically embarrassing and financially costly. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”