Never trust a fucktard who says the law doesn't apply to him...
TRUMP SAYS HE CAN’T BE SUED FOR
VIOLENCE AT HIS RALLIES BECAUSE HE WON THE ELECTION
By Avi Selk
Last year, protesters from a campaign
rally sued Donald Trump — claiming the future president urged his
supporters to assault them.
Now Trump is the president, of course. And
while the lawsuit grinds on, with more accusations added last week,
he claims he won immunity along with the election.
“Mr. Trump is immune from suit because he
is President of the United States,” his lawyers wrote Friday, rebutting a
complaint filed by three protesters who claimed Trump incited a riot against
them at a Louisville event in March 2016.
Trump's team challenged the accusations —
negligence and incitement to riot — on many other grounds, too.
But a federal judge already rejected their
attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out earlier this month.
And in another new filing in the same case,
a Trump supporter accused of assaulting protesters
agreed with the plaintiffs that Trump wanted a riot — while denying he actually
harmed anyone.
Alvin Bamberger, who was
seen in a video pushing a protester through a jeering crowd at
the Louisville convention center, “would not have acted as he did without Trump
and/or the Trump Campaign’s specific urging and inspiration,”
Bamberger's lawyer wrote.
Bamberger denied “shoving … and striking”
anyone, as the lawsuit accuses him of. But he admitted to touching
plaintiff Kashiya Nwanguma, a 21-year-old college student who had gone to the
rally with a protest sign.
And he accepted as true her claims
that Trump's speech “was calculated to incite violence” against the protesters.
“Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign,
Trump and/or the Trump Campaign repeatedly urged people attending Trump
political rallies to remove individuals who were voicing opposition,” reads
Bamberger's filing, which asks that Trump be forced to pay his damages, if he's
found liable.
The Washington Post has chronicled Trump's history of tough talk from
the podium and violent rallies that followed him on his path to the
Republican nomination.
“I'd like to punch him in the face,”
Trump once said of a protester at a rally in Las Vegas, for example.
A week later, when protesters
interrupted Trump in Louisville, the candidate responded with
scattered commands: “Get them out,” “Get him the hell out,” “Don't hurt them.”
“If I say, ‘Don’t hurt them,’ then the
press says, ‘Well, Trump isn’t as tough as he used to be,' " he said at one point.
Somewhere in the midst of this,
a video shows Bamberger, 75, and a man named Matthew Heimbach
jostling Nwanguma — a black woman in a sea of white men.
Shortly after the incident, Bamberger wrote
an apologetic letter to a radio station, recalling the rally as orderly
until “Trump kept saying 'get them out, get them out,' ” and chaos ensued.
Weeks later, Nwanguma and two other
protesters sued Trump, Bamberger and Heimbach.
The latter two had assaulted them, they
claimed. Trump — through his words that day and at previous rallies
— had allegedly ordered them to do so.
Trump's lawyers denied all this and sought
to have the lawsuit tossed out — claiming the candidate had not been talking
to the crowd when he said “get them out.”
Bamberger, who faces a claim of assault and
battery, also sought to have the lawsuit dismissed. But after a federal
judge allowed it to proceed earlier this month, he countered Trump's
claims that the candidate was not responsible for what his supporters did.
“At the Louisville political rally at issue
in this lawsuit, Trump and/or the Trump Campaign urged people attending the
rally to remove the protesters,” Bamberger's lawyers wrote. He “had no prior
intention to act as he did.”
“That is extremely significant,” said Greg
Belzley, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “It is fairly unusual to have a person
who is engaged in violent misconduct ... actually point the finger at the
person and identify the person who caused him to do what he did.”
He laughed out loud when asked about
Trump's claim of presidential immunity, pointing to a 1997 Supreme Court ruling that held President
Bill Clinton could be sued over events that occurred before he took
office.
While the judge has not yet set a timetable
for the expected trial, Belzley said his team would begin
requesting campaign documents and other evidence they hope will show that
Trump knew his words could provoke violence.
And they are preparing to put the
president under oath as the lawsuit moves toward trial.
“The key is going to be his deposition,”
Belzley said, “which we intend to pursue.”
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