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Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s legal troubles can be broken up into two categories: the former president’s criminal cases and his civil cases. The former pose a dramatic threat: The presumptive Republican nominee is currently facing 88 criminal counts across four jurisdictions.
The latter might seem less serious — none of them, for example, would land Trump in prison — but it’d be a mistake to shrug off the significance of civil litigation.
E. Jean Carroll’s case, for example, is a civil suit, as is the case the New York attorney general’s office successfully brought against the Trump Organization. Indeed, civil suits have long been a problem for the former president, as evidenced by the fact that his sham “university” and “charitable foundation” were forced to close their doors.
And then, of course, there are the Jan. 6 civil suits, which, as a New York Times report explained, the Republican is suddenly eager to delay.
Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Tuesday night to pause a group of civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, until after his federal criminal trial connected to the same events was over. The request by the lawyers to pause the civil cases was the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to pit his multiple legal matters against one another in an effort to delay them.
For those who might benefit from a refresher, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, among those who filed lawsuits against Trump were police officers injured during the insurrectionist violence. In fact, multiple cases were filed:
- In March 2021, two Capitol Police officers, James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, sued Trump, claiming he was liable for the injuries they suffered during the riot.
- In August 2021, seven more police officers who were attacked and beaten during the Capitol riot sued the former president.
- In January 2022, three more police officers — including two who aided the evacuation of lawmakers — sued Trump, seeking damages for their physical and emotional injuries.
- In January 2023, the longtime partner of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the Jan. 6 riot, filed a wrongful death civil suit against Trump.
The former president and his defense team have repeatedly tried to claim that Trump has “immunity” from such cases — a defense that was rejected by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in December, and then again earlier this month.
It’s against this backdrop the Republican and his lawyers have now rolled out a new pitch, asking that the civil cases related to Jan. 6 be delayed until after the criminal cases related to Jan. 6 are resolved. As Team Trump no doubt knows, it’s an open question as to whether there will be a criminal trial before Election Day 2024 — it’s quite likely that there will not — so the request is to push off the civil proceedings for quite a while.
Will this latest gambit work? Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.