The judge presiding over Jan. 6 civil litigation against Donald Trump once again found that one of his tweets from that day in 2021 deserves immunity.
In the tweet, Trump said his vice president at the time, Mike Pence, “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
Previously, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta largely denied Trump’s immunity claims. The president is appealing that loss. In the meantime, plaintiffs asked the Obama-appointed judge in Washington to reconsider the partial ruling against them regarding that tweet.
In their reconsideration motion, they said the record showed that Trump wasn’t acting in an official capacity when he sent the tweet at 2:24 p.m. that day, a message they said “targeted Pence and egged on rioters.” They said that the president presented “zero facts indicating he was acting in his official capacity at 2:24 p.m.,” and that the tweet wasn’t a presidential action but rather “the activity of an office seeker.”
Pence was presiding over the joint session of Congress to certify Joe Biden’s win against Trump in the 2020 election — a certification that rioters sought to upend on Trump’s behalf as he falsely claimed the election was stolen from him. When he returned to the White House in 2025, Trump granted blanket clemency to people charged for their actions that day, including people who assaulted law enforcement. The president himself has avoided criminal liability due in part to the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling.
This civil litigation stems from eight consolidated cases with plaintiffs including U.S. Capitol police officers.
Rejecting the reconsideration motion on Wednesday, Mehta was unpersuaded that he should change course on this particular social media post. “It is at least a reasonable construction of the 2:24 p.m. tweet that it was an official act,” the judge wrote.
He noted that a “coordinate branch of the federal government was under attack” and it fell to Trump “to decide how the Executive Branch would respond.” Faced with that situation, the judge said the president “could have used persuasion or force, or both, to put down the riot. But he chose instead to remain idle and, eventually, post the 2:24 p.m. tweet.”
And though that tweet “arguably poured gasoline on the fire,” the judge said the fact that (according to the plaintiffs) it “exacerbated the crisis is no less an official act than if he had exercised the powers of the presidency to quell the riot.”
The judge said the plaintiffs can appeal his latest ruling to the federal appeals court in Washington, where the rest of the appeal is pending, so that all of the litigation can be resolved together. His ruling therefore won’t necessarily be the final word on whether the tweet can be used against Trump in this civil litigation.
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